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Remarkably Bright Creatures audiobook vs book: which should you choose?

The story follows a night cleaner at an aquarium, whose son was lost at sea thirty years ago, and an octopus counting his days in captivity. A second narrator reads only the octopus.

Read vs Listen·Verdict last reviewed 23 October 2026·5 min read

Short answer: for the Remarkably Bright Creatures audiobook vs book choice, we say listen on Audible (65% confidence, leaning). The UK audiobook is read by Marin Ireland, with Michael Urie as Marcellus the octopus, and runs 11 hours 16 minutes, unabridged. Print shows the day count at the start of each of Marcellus’s chapters, and we could not confirm whether the audiobook reads it aloud. AudioFile praised the recording, and nothing confirmed favours print.

Confidence 65%, which puts it in the leaning 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

Remarkably Bright Creatures is Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel, published by Ecco in the US on 3 May 2022 and by Bloomsbury in the UK on 26 May 2022, at 368 pages. It won the 2023 McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize, and The Hollywood Reporter has put its sales at more than two million copies.

Tova Sullivan, a widow, cleans an aquarium on the night shift, where Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, takes an interest in her. Her son Erik vanished at sea more than thirty years earlier, and what happened to him is the mystery the book turns on. The human chapters are told in the third person, present tense; Marcellus narrates his own, shorter chapters in the first person.

A Netflix film followed on 8 May 2026, directed by Olivia Newman, with Sally Field as Tova and Alfred Molina as the voice of Marcellus.

The case for reading it

The case for print here is small, and it rests on how Marcellus’s chapters look. Each opens with a running count of his captivity, starting “Day 1,299 of My Captivity”, and a reader sees that number climb at a glance. We could not confirm whether the recording reads those headings out.

Otherwise print has little to add. Kirkus describes the tone as “light and often warmly humorous” rather than writing to slow down for, the cast is small and the backstory comes through the characters' memories rather than a second timeline. Readers who like to sit with a book about grief at their own pace may still prefer print, but nothing in the structure needs it.

The case for listening to it

The recording does more than a single narrator could. Audible US credits it as “Read by Marin Ireland with Michael Urie as the voice of Marcellus”: Ireland reads every human character, and Urie reads only the octopus. When the book switches to Marcellus’s first-person chapters, the narrator changes too. Ireland won the 2020 Audie Award for Best Female Narrator for a different book, Nothing to See Here; Urie is known on screen for Ugly Betty and Shrinking.

The story is also easy to follow on audio: one mystery, a small cast and chapters told in order. Listeners rate it 4.8 from 70,293 ratings on Audible US and 4.7 from 2,302 on Audible UK, as of October 2026.

Get the audiobook11h 16m, read by Marin Ireland and Michael Urie

Listen on Audible

The audiobook in detail

Bloomsbury’s UK edition was released on 26 May 2022 and runs 11 hours 16 minutes, unabridged: about 7 hours 31 minutes at 1.5x and 5 hours 38 minutes at 2x. The US edition, from Ecco/HarperAudio, came out on 3 May 2022 with the same narrators and length, and the UK listing carries a ©2022 HarperCollins Publishers credit. Whether the two listings are a single recording is not confirmed, so we scored the UK edition and show the US one beside it.

We found no other English recording; a Spanish edition, Criaturas luminosas, exists. The recording was a 2023 Audie Award finalist for Audiobook of the Year, and AudioFile called it “a fanciful and enjoyable listening experience”. A shortlisting is not a win, and the Audies are a US award we could not tie to the UK listing, so we do not count it for the edition we scored. In the Netflix film, Marcellus is voiced by Alfred Molina; on the audiobook he is Michael Urie.

Who should ignore this verdict

Readers who want to watch Marcellus’s day count climb at the head of each of his chapters, or who would rather set their own pace through a book about grief: print is the safer choice. And anyone who has seen the Netflix film expecting Alfred Molina’s Marcellus will find a different actor here.

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