Hear the stories behind the drama

The acting line-up for ‘The Big Short’, one of January’s biggest movie releases, offers a clue to the film’s ambition. Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt star in a financial thriller adapted from the 2010 non-fiction bestseller ‘The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine’. The book’s author, journalist Michael Lewis, is to financial non-fiction what John Grisham is to legal novels. His breakthrough hit ‘Liar’s Poker’ exposed 1980s Wall Street greed and, not surprisingly, the credit bubble of the 2000s offered rich pickings for ‘The Big Short’.

TIME OUT RECOMMENDS For the audiobook, Lewis himself brings together the complicated threads of this real-life drama, to engaging effect. If ‘The Big Short’ whets your appetite, here are four more great stories to enjoy.

Actor Dylan Baker narrates the unabridged audiobook of Michael Lewis’s tragicomic romp across post-crash Europe. Lewis has a rare ability to make high finance comprehensible and entertaining, whilst remaining honest and intelligent. Here he looks at the impact of the financial crisis on the world beyond America.

Award-winning narrator Scott Brick reads Michael Lewis’s examination of the secrets of sporting and financial success in major league baseball. He tells the story of the lowly Oakland Athletics, who overturned conventional sporting wisdom when their new methods of analysing the game helped them compete with big-money teams like the Yankees. Adapted for a 2011 film starring Brad Pitt, Lewis’s account is full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected.

Now that high tech has taken hold of high finance, Lewis has turned his gaze on the new rulers of big money, the high-frequency traders. In the audiobook of this 2014 publication, hear how the world's shares are now traded by computer code, and how one group of ingenious oddballs and misfits declared war on the unscrupulous traders – including big Wall Street firms – who manipuate the markets and rip off their customers in the blink of an eye.

Already a critically acclaimed movie highlight for 2016, ‘Spotlight’ follows the true story of how the Boston Globe’s year-long newspaper investigation into abuse in the Catholic Church revealed decades of cover-up at the highest levels of the religious, legal and civil establishment.

TIME OUT RECOMMENDS Here are four titles, including the story that inspired ‘Spotlight’, worth exploring in depth with Audible, where brilliant narrators bring these remarkable accounts to life.

Actor Ron McLarty takes us on a joyride through a blur of reality and fiction in Hunter S Thompson’s brilliantly written critique of American consumerism. In Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race, Raoul Duke (gonzo journalist Thompson) and his attorney ‘Dr Gonzo’ are diverted by a drug-fuelled, surreal quest for the American Dream.