AudioBooksReview

Sherlock Holmes: Four Intriguing Mysteries

read by Robert Hardy

in progress

* * * *

Buy Sherlock Holmes: Four Intriguing Mysteries

The Ultimate Shakespeare

performed by Dorothy Tutin, Christopher Plummer, et al.

in progress

* * *

Buy The Ultimate Shakespeare

How to Land an A330 Airbus by James May

read by James May

* * *

Buy How to Land an A330 Airbus

Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

read by James Wilby

Poet Siegfried Sassoon enjoyed a remarkable success when Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man was first published (anonymously) in 1928, and it has remained in print ever since. Don't be put off by the title: Memoirs is about a fox-hunting man and his country pursuits, including point-to-point races as well as a bit of the chase: fox-hunting is just a small part of the whole. Non-hunting readers will find much in which to delight as they relish the sheer power of the prose.

The barely concealed autobiography brims full with comic characters and the awkward humour of growing up, especially for a relative outsider making his way through layers of class and the status quo in the English home counties before the First World War. The protagonist George Sherston's first riding lesson and the incomparable flower-show cricket match typify this bucolic paean celebrating the author's idyllic Edwardian childhood in the English countryside of a bygone era. The cricket match, played on the village green in Siegfried Sassoon's native village of Matfield, is still an annual fixture between George Sherston's XI and Matfield Cricket Club.

James Wilby adopts just the right voice and accent, and is absolutely splendid. Let's hope CSA Word persuade him to record the sequels to Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress.

* * * * *

Buy Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

read by Miranda July

Audacious, provocative, and breathtakingly read by the author, this tour de force justly won plaudits and not a little envy from all sides when it appeared in book form in 2007. Now the performance artist has recorded these short stories in a beautifully packaged audiobook that just screams out to be owned. It is a work of art in itself - another piece of magic from Heavy Entertainment. Pink and black script on canary yellow on the outside, the five CDs are minimalist yellow on pink in all-pink sleeves on the inside.

Bur Miranda July is not just packaging - the prose is deft, slightly off-beat, tantalisingly funny, sad and complex. From the couple who get work as film extras and slowly realise the emptiness of their romance as they mime to each other across a table, while the filming goes on around them, to the factory worker seduced by his work mate as he gradually realises the man's sister he has been invited to meet doesn't in fact exist.

Dreams and reality figure large, as does the despair of the human condition: 'Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about. And I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.'

These pieces fascinate, linger and resonate.

Exceptional.

* * * * *

Buy No One Belongs Here More Than You

The Innocent Man by John Grisham

read by Dennis Boutsikaris

John Grisham has sustained the phenomenal talent he displayed with his early novels, which brought lawyers back into the crime novel genre in a way that hadn't been so successful since Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books of the 1930s and 40s.

The Innocent Man is Grisham's first work of non-fiction, but his skills of description, characterization and narrative pace are all put to use in this dramatic reconstruction of small town injustice in Grisham's natural heartland, the American Deep South.

Grisham's major fault is his enthusiasm for baseball - a sport that is totally incomprehensible to most of the world and in which most readers have absolutley no interest: his non-US publishers should pass on this information. If you get past the sport, however, within The Innocent Man will be found one of the most gripping and disturbing tales of legal incompetence, court prejudice, investigative unfairness and judicial inhumanity. The book brings to mind David Rose's searing Violation - the recent exposé of America's corrupt legal process used as a tool of racial oppression.

In The Innocent Man, the rape and murder in 1982 of a 21-year-old cocktail waitress are pinned, after five years, on a former minor-league baseball player named Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case is built on the unquestioned testimony of convicts and interested parties. Fritz is found guilty and given a life sentence; Williamson sent to death row.

If this is justice American style, just think again about the post 9/11 laws that give the United States power to extradite British citizens to face trial in US courts without the need to show just cause.

An audiobook it is difficult to stop listening to, given dramatic tension and pace by the incomparable Dennis Boutsikaris.

* * * *

Buy The Innocent Man

The Disappeared by M. R. Hall

read by Fenella Woolgar

This is the second outing for Coroner for the Severn Vale, Jenny Cooper, whose divorce and nervous breakdown are still troubling her - and affecting her personal life and the way she conducts her career.

In The Disappeared, two young students, Nazim Jamal and Rafi Hassan, vanish without trace in the middle of their studies at Bristol University. Some of their course had involved working with or with access to radioactive materials. The men were under surveillance by the security service, so the police act on the belief that the students left the country in order to learn 'terrorist' skills in Pakistan.

Seven years after her student son goes missing, Cooper is approached by the distraught mother of one of the 'disappeared'. She wants him declared dead so that the Coroner will open an investigation in his 'death'.

The responsibilities of a Coroner are accompanied by the investigative duties of the police, with some of the same powers. The police themselves, however, are not willing to cooperate. Faced by official obstruction and opposition, Cooper seeks the aid, at first reluctantly, of a struck-off lawyer, whose career is abruptly halted when he begins to step on the toes of the police. Pressure from the powers-that-be intensifies, and a code of silence is placed on the inquest. As Cooper works around her personal problems together with those imposed on her by the immutable and the unaccountable bullies of the UK security services, some murky and conflicting truths emerge, bringing to light the Coroner's particular demons.

Bristol and South Wales provide the backdrop for this first-rate procedural, which combines the pace of a taut thriller with the fascinating psychological portrait of a woman battling a tortured past.

Gripping.

* * * *

Buy The Disappeared

The Kill Zone by Chris Ryan

read by Rupert Degas

A sustained and blistering actioner from one of the best thriller writers working in the genre today. Chris Ryan's heroes are SAS: fearlessly professional, courageously independent, and unstintingly loyal to crown and country.

In The Kill Zone Ryan gives us Muslim fundamentalist extremists and a plot to detonate a 'dirty' bomb in a major western city. At the same time, heat-seeking, plane-downing rockets go missing. Add our Third Afghan War Hero's former lover (a Serious Crimes Officer in Northern Ireland), their missing daughter, a bogus humanitarian charity ambassador, and white slavery. Send both War Hero and Irish Surveillance Expert to Mogadishu, against everyone else's advice. And stand well back.

Not even the President of the United States is safe if Jack Harker is not permitted to do his stuff. And to do it his way.

It is interesting charting the villains in English thriller writing from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. The Iron Curtain, of course, is no more. Now, the ideologically contrary, the insurgent, the enemy are all 'terrorists'. It might be as well to bring to mind George Orwell's words in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable.

Perfect for a long drive, the pace and suspense of this excellent yarn, brilliantly read by Rupert Degas, are guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your driving seat.

* * * *

Buy The Kill Zone

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

read by Saul Reichlin

Stieg Larsson’s premature death has left the literary world pondering on the legacy of his three novels about the tattooed girl and the disputed almost-completed fourth. The novels have sold in phenomenal numbers and been translated into countless languages. The three feature films, in Swedish, have justly garnered praise and awards, and are highly recommended. It is with great dismay that we learn that Hollywood has decided to ‘remake’ so precipitately a series of films so brilliantly executed by Yellow Bird, who were the production team behind both the Swedish television and BBC television Walander series. Sadly, Americans won’t read subtitles and won’t go to films without indigenous actors.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first of the ‘Millennium’ novels - so named after the campaigning political journal reeling from a libel action brought by billionaire Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström: venal, corrupt, and ruthless. Campaigning journalist Mikael Blomkvist refuses to reveal his sources and is sentenced to three months in prison. He is offered a freelance assignment by an elderly businessman who, to reassure himself of Blomkvist’s bona fides, commissions a comprehensive investigation into his personal and professional history. The research is undertaken by Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous anti-heroine. Salander’s skills are learned through self-survival, and comprise state-of-the-art hacking expertise and surveillance and anti-surveillance techniques. At 25, Salander is still a ward of court, having been in institutional care since her youth, when she attempted to kill her father, soaking him with petrol and setting him on fire. (Her failure to finish him then has serious consequences for her in the subsequent novels.)

Salander is asocial, paranoid and highly suspicious of men. Gradually and grudgingly she nevertheless comes to trust Blomkvist, whom she assists in his investigation into a missing girl and whose life she saves in a particularly sadistic dénouement.

Perhaps overlong in its winding up, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an undeniable tour de force, and refreshingly different. It has certainly provoked passion and debate with its graphic and shocking twists, rarely placating the listener with a pretence of normalcy. The English translation is seamless and the reading by Saul Reichlin faultless.

One thoroughly rewarding audiobook.

* * * * *
© copyright 2010 AudioBooksReview. All rights reserved.

Buy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

read by Hugh Bonneville

A minor classic and a great read, My Family and Other Animals established Durrell's writing career and outlined the boyhood obsessions that dominated his life and determined his career path - from animal collector to naturalist to zookeeper to conservationist.

The book is semi-autobiographical, and concerns itself with five years of Gerald Durrell's life from the age of ten. The setting on the island of Corfu is exotic, the family eccentric and their lives hectic. It is very much the English abroad between the world wars, decades before they routinely holidayed in the Greek Islands.

Gerald and his older siblings - Lawrence (Larry), whose later writing had a more literary bent (The Alexandria Quartet), the firearms enthusiast Leslie, and food-obsessed sister Margo - together with their widowed mother, fill the pages with enormous good humour, as does the teeming animal life which Gerald collects, including tortoise Achilles, pigeon Quasimodo, owl Ulysses, gull Alecko, and the multifarious spiders and insects. Taxi-driver Spiro champions and protects the naive and demanding newcomers to the island and their frequent and frequently tiresome visitors from the homeland.

This is the English middle and upper classes at their most harmless and amusing and it is small wonder that Durrell's writings have attracted the silver and television screens and of course the radio. Durrell's own descriptions, however, are best, and Hugh Bonneville give a spiritedreading of the original novel.

The interview with Durrell's widow Lee and the enclosed book of photographs make this a recording to keep and the whole package makes a fine gift. Let's hope the several sequels soon also get the CSA treatment.

* * * *

Buy My Family and Other Animals

Anger Management for Beginners by Giles Coren

read by Giles Coren

in progress ...

Buy Anger Management for Beginners

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

read by Tim Pigott-Smith and Paula Wilcox

in progress ...

Buy The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Sum: (Forty) Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

read by Gillian Anderson, Emily Blunt, Nick Cave, et al.

Great cast and some truly memorable stories, based around reflections from beyond the grave. The title, however, tempts the cruel critic to quip that this creation is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. And there is some truth in this assessment, even after the reader realises that the sum in Sum probably refers to 'Cogito ergo sum' - 'I think therefore I am.'

'Dazzling' it really is not; but entertaining, clever, thought-provoking, sometimes poignant and occasionally humorous it certainly is - aided by the exceptional cast and the relative brevity of most of the contributions. It can also be pretentious, solipsistic and banal.

It has had a tsunami of praise heaped on it, been translated into all the world's most used languages, turned into an opera and a ballet, and who knows what else?

Cannot be ignored, as they say. So try it for yourself and make up your own mind. It could change your lives.

* * *

Buy Sum from the Afterlives

The Burning Wire by Jeffery Deaver

read by Kerry Shale

Electrifying - literally - as a madman taps into Manhattan's power grid and vapourises his victims.

This is a welcome return for Lincoln Rhyme, Deaver's renowned quadriplegic criminologist, who is also following up leads on an assassin who goes by the name of the Watchmaker and who on the loose in Mexico City. Aided by his partner, field-agent Amelia Sachs, there is no let-up as Rhyme uses his prodigious intellect to turn the tables on the perps.

Deaver is writing the next official James Bond novel, and studying his style and pace, it is easy to see why Flemings' literary executors entrusted this enviable task to such a master of intrigue and suspense.

Kerry Shales' gravelly delivery does Rhyme more than justice and, though perhaps a little brief for such a difficult investigation, The Burning Wire will not disappoint.

* * *

Buy The Burning Wire

Bad Boy by Peter Robinson

read by Neil Pearson

A powerful and gripping return for Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks as his own daughter takes up with the 'bad boy' of the title, who turns out to be not only bad, but mad, and dangerous to cross.

Peter Robinson’s crime thrillers are in a class of their own and if you haven't ever tried an Inspector Banks story you will be in for an absorbing four hours that will make you eager to seek out more of these small masterpieces of the policier genre.

Banks is in the United States on holiday when a woman asks for him in person at the Eastvale police station duty desk. Annie Cabbot, Banks' colleague takes over and learns that the woman has found a loaded gun in her daughter Erin's bedroom. Erin’s best friend and roommate is the DCI’s daughter, Tracy, who was last seen trying to warn the owner of the gun, a man to whom she is unwisely attracted.

Mixing the personal and the professional, Banks has to find a way to stay one step ahead of his prey, knowing that his daughter's life hangs in the balance.

Brilliantly read by Neil Pearson, Bad Boy keeps you on the edge of your proverbial seat and is an absorbing listen.

First rate drama.

* * * *

Buy Bad Boy

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

read by Sanjeev Bhaskar

If you buy only one audiobook this year, Kim should be top of your list. Kipling may be slightly out of fashion, but Kim is a masterpiece that you will acknowledge right from the start. And it only gets better. Kingsley Amis, quoted on the box of this CSA recording, wrote about Kim: ‘Not only the finest story about India ... but one of the greatest novels in the language’.

Set between the Second and Third Afghan Wars, in around the 1890s, Kim is a picaresque novel concerning the remarkable life of the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and Freemason and a poor white mother who have both died in poverty. He lives a precarious existence in India under British rule, begging and running small errands on the streets of Lahore. His keen intelligence, his linguistic gifts, and his ability to fade into any surroundings make him a perfect spy in the Great Game, as the English and Russian War is known. His personal quest for his father’s heritage and his friend the aged Tibetan Lama’s search to free himself from the Wheel of Things by finding the legendary ‘River of the Arrow’ merge into one of the most captivating and absorbing stories in the English canon.

Intrigue, espionage, adventure, clashes of faiths, religions and cultures, and post-Mutiny politics all combine into an auditory delight, brought alive by the astonishing skill and verve of Sanjeev Bhaskar, the reader. Bhaskar’s performance will certainly get my vote in this year’s audiobook awards.

Stupendous.

* * * * *

Buy Kim

The Good Companions by J. B. Priestley

read by Rodney Bewes

This inter-war comic novel is an entertaining piece of social history and is certainly due for a recessionary revival. The outstanding aspect of the present recording is the brilliant reading by Rodney Bewes, who showcases his extraordinary talent for voices and accents. A feature of Priestley’s prose is his use of dialect, and both Yorkshireman Jess Oakroyd and the American travelling banjo player and prestigidateur Morton Mitcham give Bewes great opportunities to show his strengths. The music, too, is wonderfully catchy and you will find yourself whistling it for days.

This is the time of strict class and social divisions within English society, and upper-middle-class spinster Elizabeth Trant and Cambridge-educated teacher cum composer Inigo Jollifant are rubbing shoulders with the unspeakable and the unmarriageable in the form of a troupe of touring theatrical players. Originally known as the Dinky Doos, these vaudevillians are refinanced and renamed by Miss Trant as The Good Companions. Miss Trant's relatives think she has lost her mind or been kidnapped or duped and are concerned that she is losing all her money to a band of gypsies.

Naturally, hearts are stirred and broken, dreams inspired and lost, and hopes raised and dashed. After a sabotaged performance, the troupe disbands: one of the actors, Jerry, marries Lady Partlit, a fan; actress Susie and pianist Inigo become successful and famous in London; Miss Trant finds a husband; Oakroyd emigrates to Canada to join his daughter and her husband, and the other performers carry on with their life on the road.

As a glimpse of how things used to be before Angry Young Men took over the stage, The Good Companions will remain a special piece of English writing, and there is no better way to enjoy it than in this tremendous recording, which will itself become a classic.

* * * *
© 2010 AudioBooksReview
Buy The Good Companions

The Inimitable Jeeves (vol. 2) by P. G. Wodehouse

read by Martin Jarvis

The second volume of Wodehouse's The Inimitable Jeeves continues with Bingo Little and his romantic tussles. Bertie and Bingo had been chums since their boyhoods and the old egg features famously in the Wooster chronicles (he also can be found in some of Wodehouse's Drones Club short stories, including Eggs, Beans and Crumpets and Nothing Serious).

The Inimitable Jeeves stories 'The Great Sermon Handicap' and 'The Purity of the Turf' are concerned with wagering on bizarre ideas such as the length of vicars' sermons and the results of church fete egg and spoon races. Vicars are mainstays of Wodehousian humour: with good reason, as vicaring gave something for feckless Oxonian younger sons to do.

In the early 1920s, English life for Plum (as Wodehouse was known) still saw the pre-war social order calmly continuing for ever. The revolting proletariat held no fears for him. And this is perhaps why Jeeves and Wooster still appeal: a Shakespearian Lord of Misrule undermining the status quo in an acceptable way and the satire of the valet always having the upper hand so gentle as not to unsettle.

Prelapsarian nirvana. As one of Wodehouse's more progressive vicars might put it.

* * * *

Buy The Inimitable Jeeves (vol. 2)

Very Good, Jeeves (vol. 1) by P. G. Wodehouse

read by Martin Jarvis

And Very Good indeed this is. Some of the best of Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories were published in Strand Magazine and then collected in book form at a later date. Very Good, Jeeves - the book - was first published in 1930, and eighty years have not diminished them one jot.

This first volume of the unabridged CSA recordings of the collection is full of Wodehouse's inimitable and unforgettable inventiveness, characterisation and storytelling. Admittably, Bertie truly is a silly ass, who speaks before he thinks, has been educated beyond his intelligence, shows questionable taste (in girlfriends, attire, vases, and songs), and demonstrates no specific aims in life: few redeeeming feature, in fact (and is it just the Eton and Oxford connections that make one think of our current prime minister?). Just why Jeeves wastes his time with Wooster is a matter for profound debate, perhaps ...

But not just yet - not before having savoured and relished Martin Jarvis's incomparable reading of: 'Jeeves and the Impending Doom'; 'The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy'; 'Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit'; 'Jeeves and the Song of Songs'; 'Episode of the Dog McIntosh'; and 'The Spot of Art'.

Perfection.

* * * *

Buy Very Good, Jeeves (vol. 1)

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

read by Dick Hill

Scandanavian crime writing has seen a resurgence over the last three or four years. Henning Mankell is just one of a host of talented and rewarding writers who do exceptionally well in English translation. The social and political undercurrents in Swedish society since the proto-fascism of the thirties and forties and the more liberal nod to social planning of the sixties and after have left ingrained divisions, fomented no little by immigration, privation and the damage of an unequal society. The climate, the isolation and the insularity of the country are, it would appear, a breeding ground for criminality.

The BBC’s Police Inspector Kurt Wallander series has justifiably won plaudits and awards. Kenneth Branagh brings maturity and nuance to the part, helped by a peerless ensemble and a matchless metropolitan and rural backdrop. Worth the licence fee on its own, let’s hope the six further episodes announced will get the green light.

Faceless Killers is archetypal Mankell and archetypal Wallander. On a remote farm, an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death and his wife left to strangle herself from the cord wrapped around her neck and looped around a fitting on the ceiling. Her final words are reported as containing the term ‘foreign’ and a police leak gives local neo-nazis a reason to harass and threaten a nearby refugee camp.

Wallander, deserted by his wife, is drinking instead of sleeping. And there seem to be no trails and no real clues to this apparently motiveless act. The farmer’s horses had been fed: perhaps this means something. Only the inspired reasoning of a bright young bank clerk finally leads to the dramatic dénouement.

Spare, chilling, bleak, Dick Hill’s perfect reading of a faultless translation makes this a rare treat indeed, and inspired this listener to seek out more.

Outstanding.

* * * *

Buy Faceless Killers

The Dealer and the Dead by Gerald Seymour

read by Tim Bentinck

Raw and mesmerising, Gerald Seymour's The Dealer and the Dead feels much more like reportage than fiction. This is conflict at its most brutal and unsentimental.

The protagonist, British arms dealer Harvey Gillott, is targeted eighteen years after the fact for failing to deliver, as promised and paid for, weapons ordered by a Croatian village near Vukovar whose people had tried to make a last-ditch fight against the advancing Serbs. When the promised arms failed to be delivered, the village was overrun, the men of the village brutally murdered and the women violated. But when a body is unearthed in a field near the village, the name of the man who had betrayed them is finally revealed, and the villagers raise the money to hire a hit man for a simple revenge.

Spanning west and eastern Europe, and with a superb cast of characters, ranging from the London assassin to the smooth and psychopathic British Secret Intelligence Service officer, to the bereft, still-mourning Croatian villagers, The Dealer and the Dead is a breathtaking story which keeps you gripped right until the denouement.

Superbly narrated by Tim Bentinck, a gifted and familiar voice, this is an audiobook you won't regret acquiring.

* * * *

Buy The Dealer and the Dead

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

read by Ian Holm

Like much classic literature, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is much more referred to than read, despite being available in every public library, literary anthology and open source ebook download.

But this quality of gothic tale is best heard read aloud, preferably performed by a true thespian who can imbue every syllable with menace and hint of meaning. And Ian Holm cannot be bettered. This is a brilliantly atmospheric and spine-chilling narration, conveying all the moody psychology of the dual personality that is Jekyll-Hyde (here with the Scots pronunciation 'Jaykul').

Anticipating Freud's idea that the unconscious mind's thoughts and desires drive the behaviour of the conscious mind, Stevenson is probably reflecting Romans 7: 18-20: 'For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.'

Written, by all accounts, in a creative frenzy of just a few days and revised in as few weeks, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was an instant and long-running success, quickly inspiring stage performances and then film, radio and television adaptations. The CSA Word production is complete and unabridged - and this story has, if anything, become even more terrifying and cautionary after almost 125 years in an age when mind-altering drugs are freely available, when indulgence and excess are celebrated rather than reviled and criminality tolerated and glamorized.

* * * * *

Buy The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

read by Mark Bramhall

The critical reception of Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martel's follow-up to his Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi - has been almost unanimously negative and often vitriolic. Whether this is a reaction to his winning the Booker in the first place or to the somewhat solipsistic subject-matter of this second novel is debatable.

Martel's prose is frequently sententious and pretentious, his metaphorical world childishly transparent, misleadingly transluscent or irritatingly opaque. At times it appears that he wants us to know everything he has ever read. He borrows and parodies. But Martel is neither an Angela Carter, re-examining childhood narratives, nor a Joyce, understanding afresh fictional contexts. Anyone familiar with Waiting for Godot will find shameful the Beckett in Beatrice and Virgil.

A few set pieces, none the less - the description of the pear and the twelve concluding moral 'games' - are important and profound pieces of English. But the thinly concealed holocaust metaphor 'A 20th-Century Shirt', and the seemingly inevitable revelation of the playwright-manqué taxidermist as an ageing war-criminal, make this an uneven and a less than satisfying piece. It is difficult to decide whether Martel is being self-mocking, satirical or ironically deconstructivist. What is not in doubt is that Martel is a writer who should not be dismissed. Perhaps fifty years from now he will join the canon of the great writers of the twenty-first century.

The unabridged reading, by Mark Bramhall, is without doubt a masterpiece of the audiobook art. He invests so much character and fullness to the protagonists that the novel succeeds often where the words in print seem to fail. This is a book which cannot be ignored and the audiobook once again invests an arguably lesser work with greater worth.

* * *

Buy Beatrice and Virgil

Theodore Boone by John Grisham

read by Richard Thomas

John Grisham rarely fails. He has that masterly storyteller's skill, somewhat like Somerset Maugham's, of drawing the reader inexorably into first, the characters, then the surroundings, then the situation - the plot effortlessly unwinding. One is mesmerised and hooked. And Richard Thomas enfuses the reading with just the right amount of dramatic tension.

Thoedore Boone is thirteen years old and the son of lawyer parents in small-town America. Naturally, he lives, breathes and talks the law, and hangs around the courts which are situated adjacent to his school, his home and his parents' office. Dad is a property lawyer, Mum a family lawyer.

Theo doles out free legal advice to his school friends and to their parents. And he's good: finding charges, cases and precedents by logging on to his parents' law firm's online legal databases. He also has friends at court, including amongst the judges, and when a big murder trial hits town he uses his connections to get seats for the opening day for his teacher and fellow students in his constitution class at school.

The case itself may be too 'open and shut', and Theo's discovery of a key witness a little too convenient, but those things don't detract from a brilliantly entertaining yarn and some highly sustainable characters.

If I were a television producer I would already have acquired the rights and started to cast young Theo.

* * * * *

Buy Theodore Boone

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

read by Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman's gospel harmony The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ gives us a refreshing reinterpretation of the life of Christ by proposing that the young and naive Mary, seduced by a suitor in the guise of a divine messenger, gives birth not simply to the Messiah but to twins: Jesus, and a younger brother, Christ.

This conceit gives Pullman the opportunity of deconstructing the contradictions of the gospels and presenting a modest Jesus, who is the son of God, and his more complicated, jealous, and manipulative alter ego, Christ. Thus, miracles are seen either as real miracles - gifts from God - or more rational explanations of human characteristics (such as the feeding of the 5,000 being achieved by persuading the crowds to look in their bags and pockets for scraps of food they may have brought themselves and share them with their fellows).

Jesus really is 'a good man', whereas Christ is more showman than 'scoundrel'. But Christ's actions are misunderstood and it is he who betrays his brother and makes sure the crucifixion goes according to plan. As Jesus and Christ are identical twins, Jesus' resurrection is easily achieved. And Christ sorts out the gospel accounts by keeping notes on his brother's words for a mysterious stranger, whose identity is for the reader to determine.

Beautifully packaged, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is entertaining, thought-provoking, and sure to be controversial.

* * * * *

Buy The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

One Day by David Nicholls

read by Julian Rhind-Tutt

One Day has all the hallmarks of genuine confession and regret. It records with wit and verisimilitude the tragicomic relationship between ill-matched friends/lovers Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, who first meet on 15 July 1988, the last day as students in Edinburgh, and it charts their lives on that same Saint Swithin's day as they grow apart and grow up. Emma makes her working-class, northern English journey just as Dexter succeeds in his middle-class, Cotswolds shallowness.

The book is an entertaining if saddening collision of optimistic yearning and inevitable disappointment. Emma measures out her life in coffee spoons as a waitress in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Kentish Town before giving up to become a teacher (with the added indignities of adultery with the head). Ever loyal to Dexter, in desperation, she marries the ridiculous Ian. Never loyal to Emma, Dexter finds a job in television and lives the stereotypical cocaine-fuelled hedonisitc life of the transient presenter.

If it wasn't all quite so sad, humour might predominate. But, I suspect that readers of a certain generation will identify too closely with one or other of the protagonists to find the work entirely comfortable listening. Emma's late success as an author of teenage fiction is, inevitably, short-lived. But One Day makes me look forward to David Nicholls' next few books. One day he is going to write a masterpiece.

Already achieving great acclaim when broadcast by BBC Radio Four, One Day is wonderfully read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, who seems to have been very busy in the front of the microphone recently. And so good it is to have great actors reading great books. What better way is there to pass the time?

* * * *

Buy One Day

The Infinities by John Banville

read by Julian Rhind-Tutt

to come

* * * *

Buy The Infinities

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

read by Jeremy Northam

Part journalism, part polemic, Down and Out in Paris and London is a justly admired tour de force of social observation—a poignant portrait of the lives of the poor in the two capital cities between the World Wars.

The book is full of characters of copious nationalities (brilliantly brought to life by Jeremy Northam) and it records their picaresque lives and bizarre anecdotes: the Russian waiter Boris, ever optimistic; Italian waiter Valenti, with his tales of extravagant feasts and hilarious short-lived devotion to Sainte Eloise; Charlie, ‘one of the local curiosities’, a youth of family and education who had run away from home; the tramp Paddy, whose ‘ignorance was limitless and appalling’; disabled pavement-artist and amateur astronomer Bozo, whose succession of misfortunes would have destroyed a lesser man.

The ubiquitous filth, the relentless squalor, the disgusting smells, the persistent bugs, the diseased and disfigured bodies, and the unspeakably unsanitary habits of the hotel workers and tramps make for queasy reading. You will hesitate before entering a restaurant and before again eating anything prepared for you out of sight. Down and Out in Paris and London is a deeply shocking work and although it can be argued that Orwell underwent the pains, privations, and indignities largely in order to ‘gather material’ it is highly likely that the tuberculosis responsible for his premature death at the age of 46 was contracted during the period described in this his first book.

Orwell’s closing remarks sum up the hard lessons of Down and Out in Paris and London: ‘At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning’.

* * * * *

Buy Down and Out in Paris and London

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

read by Alex Jennings

John Wyndham's skills and achievements seem to have been only grudgingly acknowledged by writers of science fiction following in his groundbreaking footsteps. Brian Aldiss, for example, described a genre of science fiction in which society is destroyed save for small groups of survivors who go on to eke out a changed, but fairly comfortable, existence. He called the genre ‘the cosy catastrophe’ and earmarked The Day of the Triffids as one such example.

But Triffids is certainly not ‘cosy’. It is a deadly serious warning, chillingly credible and, as ever with Wyndham, startlingly prescient.

Published in 1951, the genetic engineering of plant species and weapons-bearing satellites were far in the future: the role of DNA in heredity was confirmed only in 1952 and the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched from the Soviet Union in 1957. Moreover, at the beginning of the 1950s, oil for petroleum and diesel was deemed plentiful. Only in 1956 did Shell geologist Marion King Hubbert predict that US domestic oil production would peak in 1970. Hubbert was derided and vilified, and his warnings were dismissed by politicians and by the oil industry. Only now are botanists and biologists desperately seeking out and testing all manner of plants that might be harvested for ‘bio-fuel’, just as triffid oil is plundered in Wyndham’s book.

There has been so much technological change since Wyndham was writing that we may find the occasional anachronisms in this story, set in, for us, the not so distant past, mildly amusing (the stocks of coal at railway stations or the continuing existence of the Soviet Union), but his predictions are poignant and uncanny. And, after all, human nature has not changed, although social values have. Bill Masen, the narrator, is a 50s hero through and through, and Josella Playton’s racy early years make her of a different mettle from her post-Second World War sisters, but she settles down to domestic type perhaps just a little too easily for a modern readership. Beadley, Coker and Torrence make entertaining and recognizable characters, with their nefarious schemes, methods and practices. Miss Durrant is someone who is still heard on radio phone-ins and found corresponding with newspaper editors today, proselytizing her particular radical form of Christianity.

If you have never read The Day of the Triffids, or know it only through film or television adaptations, do not hesitate to buy this excellent CSA Word recording, brilliantly narrated by Alex Jennings. Jennings carries all the characters with consummate skill. The incidental music also is especially well chosen.

A triumph: thought-provoking audio entertainment at its best.

* * * *

Buy The Day of the Triffids

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

read by Alyssa Bresnahan

This disturbing and compelling novel was a surprise success when it was published in 2002—generally well reviewed and climbing and sticking to the best seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. It is not an easy read, nor an easy listen, and was probably never intended as such: it deals with the rape and murder of a teenaged girl, Susie Salmon, in a small town in the United States, and records the consequences of the girl's death for her mother and father and siblings, and its effects on the wider community.

Susie gives the account from heaven, where she witnesses everything, interacts at arm's length with those left behind—including her killer—and, in almost the final scene, swaps corporeality with her best friend so that she can make love to the boy who, years before, had had a crush on her and was the first and last boy she kissed.

Susie remains a child as her brother and sister grow up, slowly and inevitably pushing her to the back of their minds as they get on with their lives on earth. In the aftermath of the trauma, Susie's mother and father separate, her father unwilling and unable to put her from his mind, gradually convinced of and obsessed by his belief in the guilt of their neighbour Mr Harvey—stereotypical child molester and child murderer, who gets away with his revolting crime and goes on to abuse and murder again as Susie observes from heaven.

Mr Harvey's death in the closing pages, felled by an icicle, has dramatic irony, but overall Sebold's style is unpretentious and unexceptional, the tone unvaried and the mood unrelenting. The novel, none the less, lingers in the mind and haunts the reader for days. The Lovely Bones is not literary fiction but neither is it pulp fiction - something half way, perhaps - and succeeds through its central premiss of a knowingness and an existence in an omniscient nontheistic heaven for those who have passed on. The novel's psychology and philosophy are undemanding and unchallenging, so perhaps it is The Lovely Bones' reassuring answers which have led to its undoubted success as a novel and will ensure its success as a feature film.

Presenting the unabridged text is exactly right because the passing of the years is signified in the slow accumulation of the chapters. Alyssa Bresnahan's reading is masterful—she is resonant and moving and conveys a quiet, brooding and overwhelming atmosphere of grief.

* * * *

Buy The Lovely Bones

Under the Dome by Stephen King

read by Raul Esparza

The 'dome' is an invisible barrier which suddenly one day descends upon
Chester's Mill, a small American town, entombing its inhabitants in a pressure cooker of crime, venality, and greed: all the brutishness of fundamentalism and capitalism, and the United States in microcosm.

The main protagonist is Dale Barbara, a former soldier who has returned from the war in Iraq with a troubled conscience. Working as cook in the local diner, Barbara attracts the scorn and hatred of all the town's bullies - principally 'Big Jim', the town's political chief, his psychopath son Junior and Junior's deadbeat friends.

Attempts to breach the wall through bunker-buster bombs fail and, as the temperature inside the dome increases, all the town's petty and not so petty differences run riot. Electricity has been cut off from the start; then food, petrol and the propane for the 'jennies' start to run out or are requisitioned. People start to disappear. The Bible, naturally, contains all the explanations and solutions required.

'Big Jim' uses the situation for his own political and criminal ends; Barbara and Julia Shumway, editor of the local paper, form a resistance, Hummer vs Prius. Bush's indifference to global issues meets Obama's inability to persuade an ignorant and pigheaded majority. Chaos ensues. Promised land and Waste Land. And, in a startling denouement, the trapped survivors beg for redemption and for their way of life from unbelieving aliens. As flies to wanton boys are we to 'the leatherheads'.

King's ability to pick a grotesque theme and then to build tension and character is unrivalled in contemporary popular fiction. With over 24 hours of audio, this listener was gripped throughout - a tribute to reader Raul Esparza's bravura performance: measured and compelling. A genuine tour de force and highly recommended.
* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy Under the Dome

Race to the Pole by James Cracknell and Ben Fogle

read by James Cracknell and Ben Fogle

'Men wanted for hazardous journey'.

Six three-man teams, racing to reach the South Pole in temperatures as low as minus 40. James Cracknell, Ben Fogle and Ed Coats beat the Norwegians to conquering Antarctica, almost a century after Amundsen and Scott.

The race itself is of course a thundering adventure, but it is the preparations, the training, the set-backs, the personal dramas which make this an epic story in many ways. The sheer emotions of the individual stories - Fogle's tropical disease, leishmaniasis, treated with chemotherapy and a three-week hospital stay, the loss of Fogle and Marina's baby, team-mate actor Jonny Lee Miller's replacement, the temperamental, physical and psychological differences amongst the crew and their support teams. All make for a brilliant and spellbinding seven hours of great audio - Cracknell and Fogle taking it in turns to relate the fraught, sometimes funny, but ultimately triumphant tale of Man's determination to win against the greatest odds.

Cracklingly good.

* * * *
© 2010 AudioBooksReview
Buy Race to the Pole

The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

read by Richard Dawkins

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

read by Richard Dawkins

Short Stories, Vintage Collection, vol. 5

read by Stephen Fry, Kerry Shade, Nicky Henson, and many more

From Shakespeare with Love by William Shakespeare

read by David Tennant, Juliet Stevenson, Anton Lesser and Alex Jennings

Service with a Smile by P. G. Wodehouse

read by Martin Jarvis

Uncle Fred's swansong, Service with a Smile, is a delightful piece of nonsense that will certainly raise a smile - and keep you smiling for a good long time.

Myra Schoonmaker, American millionaire James Schoonmaker's daughter, is at Blandings along with the Duke of Dunstable at the same time as a group of Church Lads are staying under canvas in the castle grounds. Her plan to wed the former pugilist, now curate, 'Bill' Bailey is thwarted by Lord Emsworth's sister Connie and encouraged by Pongo Twistleton's Uncle Fred.

With severed tent ropes, pignapping, departing butlers, multiple engagements, compromising photographs, blackmailing sound recordings and a putative empire built on onion soup, Uncle Fred's services to one and all provide more than a smile - indeed, he makes all things right in the Wodehousian world.

Martin Jarvis carries it all off once again with the consummate ease of the great entertainer he is.

A joy.

* * * *

© 2010 AudioBooksReview
Buy Service with a Smile

Point Blanc by Anthony Horowitz

read by Oliver Chris

Point Blanc is a rollercoaster trip.

Schoolboy MI6 operative Alex Rider breezes through situations which would test the mettle of even the country's most experienced spies. Drug peddlars, public school shotgun show-offs, a stupid and careless horsey teenaged girl provide adrenalin-packed episodes, even before Alex confronts megalomaniac Afrikaner clonemeisters at an exclusive Swiss school for the wayward sons of the rich and powerful.

Anthony Horowitz's storytelling skills need no introduction. His novels are inventive, entertaining and thought-provoking and his television work is peerless. The Alex Rider series is a wonderful introduction to fiction for reluctant readers and has something that can be enjoyed by all - the very young, the teenager, the adult. And he has inspired many young writers to try their hands at fiction.

Horowitz is working on a screenplay for Point Blanc and it is sure to be a huge success.

Reader Oliver Chris has just the right youthful delivery. Rider is fourteen, but in many ways he is ageless, and Chris gives us all the guts and daring that Rider has in spades - along with his modesty and caution. The perfect voice for Alex.

Don't hesitate. You won't be disappointed.

* * * * *
© 2010 AudioBooksReview
Buy Point Blanc

Think Yourself British by Al Murray

read by Al Murray

Full of the wisdom and wit of Britain's favourite pub landlord, Think Yourself British is a wonderful introduction to the author's guiding principle of 'Helping Yourself'.

This is, ideally, a Christmas postprandial indulgence: one for those, perhaps, of a somewhat laddish persuasion. Doubtless some of the pub landlord's own amber nectar will enhance its surprises and delights.

Complete with soothing, quasi-hypnotic melodic introductions, Helping Yourself is very much in the style of American self-help tapes (now, of course, downloads for the iPod). If I were the Commissioning Editor of publisher Hodder & Stoughton's long-running Teach Yourself imprint, I would recommend cutting any reprints for the foreseeable future as Mr Murray covers a veritable encyclopaedia of wisdom in his Helping Yourself series.

Following a brief but essential biographical sketch, your not so humble host shares with us his insights into, amongst many other things, psychiatry, medicine, dating, warfare (and the vexed question of the naming of wars), eating, exercise and well-being. His answer to debt is to burn down the pub and claim the insurance, as many times as possible, collecting life insurance on the way. This can be slightly risky since you have to attend your own funeral in disguise and your widow might already have pocketed the insurance and planned to open a hostelry with her French teacher.

Just for good measure, Al provides an invaluable guide to mirth, and is very edifying on American terms and phrases.

The strapline to Helping Yourself is that 'low expectations lead to success'. Very sage.

Sure to be a success.

* * *

Buy Think Yourself British

Buy all your audiobooks from AudioBooksReview.co.uk

New Audiobooks