Abroad

I’ve listened to a *lot* of travel memoirs, and *Abroad* stands out because it’s the first one that made me genuinely *uncomfortable*—in the best way. Sara Tyler doesn’t just recount her expat misadventures; she forces you to squirm in her shoes. The chapter where she details her first business meeting in Seoul—complete with a humiliating mispronunciation of her own name—had me cringing so hard I paused the audiobook to text a friend, *“Why do we do this to ourselves?”* That’s the magic of Tyler’s writing: it’s so specific it feels universal. Jacob Tucker’s performance is a masterclass in understated comedy. He delivers Tyler’s one-liners (*“I didn’t just move abroad; I moved into a parallel universe where ATMs judge me”*) with the perfect deadpan timing, but where he really shines is in the quieter moments—the exhausted sigh after a failed apartment hunt, the brittle laugh when she’s pretending everything’s fine. My only critique? The production occasionally suffers from uneven audio levels; a few segments sound like they were recorded in a tin can, which jarringly pulls you out of the story. And while I appreciate the lack of a tidy resolution, the abrupt ending left me wanting just *one* more scene—maybe a postscript on how (or if) Tyler ever reconciled with the country that both broke and remade her. Still, this is the rare audiobook that’ll have you laughing, groaning, and furiously Googling *“how to move abroad without imploding”*—sometimes all at once.