Roadside Picnic cover art

Roadside Picnic

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Roadside Picnic

By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
Narrated by: Robert Forster
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.
Classics Dystopian First Contact Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Scary

Listeners also enjoyed...

Monday Starts on Saturday cover art
Solaris cover art
The Solar War cover art
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn cover art
Blood Meridian cover art
The Road cover art
2001 cover art
The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft cover art
Hyperion cover art
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe cover art
The Mote in God's Eye cover art
Blade Runner cover art
A Canticle for Leibowitz cover art
No Country for Old Men cover art
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) cover art
Star Maker cover art
All stars
Most relevant
The book was amazing. Narrator was also really good! If you love the STALKER game series and want to know more, this is the book for you. It can be confusing at times, but at the end it pays off. Think about the name of the book ;)

Great book, hits like a ton of bricks.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

A classic piece of Russian sf with cynicism posing as realism and characters who exhaust their own selfishness and fear to find something more

The gritty road to wisdom?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Great reading, increadible characterisation. I didn’t realize how much I liked this version of Red until I watched STALKER, and I couldn’t get over Red not being this same character, with this same voice.

I regularly think about the zone, and the possibility of becoming just a stop, just a roadside picnic, for any others out there. If you like a mystical, slow burn sci-fi with a rumble of philosophy beneath, do yourself a favor…

Impressively read, a classic for a reason

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Boldly and succinctly transported into another world without unnecessary filling in of back story, and beautifuly read too.

I can honestly say that I was taken by every word!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Listened to the whole thing in pretty much one sitting. Great times to be had.

the silkiest reading voice

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

See more reviews