Read vs Listen: The Hotel Avocado

A pigeon narrates part of this book, and it is not even the strangest thing about how it was recorded.

Confidence 80%, which puts it in the clear band. Bands run from close call at 50 to 64, through leaning at 65 to 79 and clear at 80 to 94, up to clear cut at 95 and above.

What this book actually is

The Hotel Avocado is Bob Mortimer's second Gary Thorn novel, following on from The Satsuma Complex, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction in 2023. It picks up not long after that book ends, moving the action from south-east London to Brighton, and keeps the same loose, digressive comic-crime register that made the first book a hit. It was published in hardback by Simon & Schuster in August 2024 and in paperback in May 2025.

The story is told across chapters that shift between several first-person narrators, chiefly Gary himself, his girlfriend Emily, and a character called Grace. The opening chapter belongs to an unidentified voice, later revealed to be Gary's friend and agent Kevin, who deliberately starts the story near its end before handing over to Gary, a small meta-narrative flourish. As in the first book, which used a talking squirrel, at least one chapter here is narrated by a talking pigeon, including a closing chapter in which the pigeon ties off loose ends.

The case for reading it

Two things push towards print, and both are real. The cast of narrators is genuinely large to hold in your head, Gary, Emily, Grace, Kevin and a pigeon among them, and several reader reviews note that the shifting perspectives introduce some repetition, with events occasionally retold from a different character's point of view. On the page, that repetition is at least something you can skim past if you spot it coming. The other case for print is the prose itself. Mortimer's absurdist "Bobisms," his invented similes and deadpan asides, are the kind of sentences some readers will want to stop and reread, which is easier to do with a page in front of you than with narration moving on regardless.

The case for listening to it

Three things push the other way, and together they outweigh the case for print. First, Bob Mortimer narrates his own chapters as Gary, confirmed directly by his own social media post about recording the book with Paul Whitehouse and Sally Phillips. Second, that multi-narrator structure which could be confusing on the page becomes an asset in the ears: because Mortimer, Phillips, Whitehouse and Maisey each voice separate characters, the switch between perspectives is signalled by a change in voice rather than by a chapter heading you might skim past. Reviewers who listened specifically flag that this works well. Third, the comedy itself is built for performance. Mortimer's timing, his digressions and asides, and the general deadpan absurdity of the writing are exactly the sort of humour that rides on delivery, not just on the words in isolation.

The audiobook in detail

The production is multi-narrator rather than a single reader doing voices, and it is not a fully dramatised production with sound effects either, it sits somewhere between the two, with each principal character voiced by a different named performer across chapters. Bob Mortimer takes Gary's sections, Sally Phillips returns as Emily having voiced the character in the first book's audio too, and Paul Whitehouse and Julie Maisey cover other principal characters. It runs 9 hours 15 minutes, published by Simon & Schuster Audio UK in 2024, the same year as the hardback. No formal audio awards or bestseller-chart recognition for this specific title were confirmed in research for this page, though the book sits within a series that has already won major recognition in print. Nothing in the source material points to anything lost by choosing audio over the page, no maps, footnotes, illustrations or printed formatting tricks were identified for this book.

Who should ignore this verdict

Readers who specifically want to underline or reread Mortimer's stranger sentences, the kind of invented similes and absurdist asides that reward a second look, may still prefer the page despite everything above. The same goes for anyone who finds a shifting cast of narrators genuinely hard to track regardless of format, since the repetition some reviewers noted in the structure exists in both editions, it is simply flagged by a chapter heading in one and by a change of voice in the other.

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