AudioBooksReview

Sherlock Holmes: Four Intriguing Mysteries

2010-11-08T17:04:00.002Z

read by Robert Hardy

in progress

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The Ultimate Shakespeare

2010-11-08T16:59:00.002Z

performed by Dorothy Tutin, Christopher Plummer, et al.

in progress

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How to Land an A330 Airbus by James May

2010-11-08T16:54:00.002Z

read by James May

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Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

2010-11-08T16:47:00.008Z

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.

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No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

2010-11-08T16:39:00.005Z

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

2010-10-13T22:55:00.003+01:00

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.

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Buy The Innocent Man

The Disappeared by M. R. Hall

2010-10-13T22:53:00.014+01:00

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.

* * * *

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The Kill Zone by Chris Ryan

2010-10-13T16:33:00.009+01:00

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.

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

2010-09-12T23:22:00.014+01:00

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.

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© copyright 2010 AudioBooksReview. All rights reserved.

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My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

2010-08-13T14:49:00.008+01:00

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.

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Buy My Family and Other Animals

Anger Management for Beginners by Giles Coren

2010-08-13T14:40:00.004+01:00

read by Giles Coren

in progress ...

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

2010-08-13T13:56:00.004+01:00

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

2010-08-13T13:48:00.008+01:00

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.

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Buy Sum from the Afterlives

The Burning Wire by Jeffery Deaver

2010-08-13T10:54:00.006+01:00

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.

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Buy The Burning Wire

Bad Boy by Peter Robinson

2010-08-13T10:41:00.007+01:00

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.

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Buy Bad Boy

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

2010-08-11T22:47:00.012+01:00

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.

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Buy Kim

The Good Companions by J. B. Priestley

2010-08-11T22:35:00.019+01:00

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.

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© 2010 AudioBooksReview
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The Inimitable Jeeves (vol. 2) by P. G. Wodehouse

2010-08-11T22:29:00.012+01:00

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.

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Buy The Inimitable Jeeves (vol. 2)

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

2010-08-11T17:13:00.010+01:00

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.

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Buy Very Good, Jeeves (vol. 1)

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

2010-07-14T16:54:00.010+01:00

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.

* * * *

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The Dealer and the Dead by Gerald Seymour

2010-07-14T16:43:00.008+01:00

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.

* * * *

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

2010-07-14T16:42:00.012+01:00

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

2010-07-14T16:26:00.007+01:00

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.

* * *

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Theodore Boone by John Grisham

2010-06-11T18:18:00.019+01:00

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

2010-06-09T14:23:00.007+01:00

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.

* * * * *

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One Day by David Nicholls

2010-03-23T11:27:00.005Z

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

2010-03-04T15:01:00.004Z

read by Julian Rhind-Tutt

to come

* * * *

Buy The Infinities

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

2010-03-02T22:13:00.008Z

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

2010-02-21T17:34:00.013Z

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

2010-01-28T15:17:00.005Z

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

2009-12-15T09:47:00.030Z

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

2009-12-13T17:02:00.007Z

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

2009-12-13T16:35:00.002Z

read by Richard Dawkins

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

2009-12-13T16:34:00.002Z

read by Richard Dawkins

Short Stories, Vintage Collection, vol. 5

2009-12-13T16:32:00.002Z

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

From Shakespeare with Love by William Shakespeare

2009-12-13T16:31:00.002Z

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

Service with a Smile by P. G. Wodehouse

2009-12-13T16:29:00.008Z

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

2009-12-13T16:27:00.010Z

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

2009-11-30T20:14:00.001Z

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

Tracks of My Years by Ken Bruce

2009-11-29T15:45:00.103Z

read by Ken Bruce

Ken Bruce made his name hosting one of the most popular shows on 'the most listened-to radio station in the United Kingdom', Radio 2 (once known as The Light Programme and now much more akin to its younger brother Radio 1).

Tracks of My Years makes for great listening, even if you are not an aficionado of Radio 2 and know nothing of its internal politics. Bruce's journey in broadcasting is fascinating and will intrigue anyone who values the power and strength of radio. His first, unsuccessful interview at the BBC in Glasgow, his unhappy apprenticeship as an accountant (who now, it is rumoured, actually run the BBC) and a more lucrative job in the newly arrived car hire business eventually allowed Ken Bruce to start in hospital radio and finally enter the hallowed portals of BBC Scotland as a humble continuity announcer. A lot of it was luck and being in the right place, etc. But, clearly, talent will out, and Ken's career was a gradual progression up the spiral staircase of ambition.

On-air and off-air calamities and shenanigans are charmingly recounted. Radio and television have always been full of larger-than-life characters and personalities, and Ken has met all of them in his time. Most of the big names of broadcasting in the 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond pop in and out of this autobiography. The drinking is Roman in its excesses. Ken's four marriages illustrate the other hazards to innocent bystanders.

Some of Ken's comments on Radio 2's recent habit of giving the airways to personalities rather than professional broadcasters are abridged from the audiobook: 'Loud, larger-than-life performances work in clubs and theatres, but not on radio. Managements have lost their gifts as talent-spotters and are too content to rely on a proven public profile to garner an audience. There are very few young broadcasters coming up in the way I did, being allowed to do a music programme with no format.' Management would do well to heed Ken's comments, or radio will cease to do what radio broadcasting does best - and what Ken Bruce does best - foster and keep a loyal and entertained constituency over a lifetime. And, despite recent rumours in the press, let's hope Radio 2 will still find time for Ken Bruce and his like before radio becomes television without the pictures.

* * *

Buy Tracks of My Years

The Blaze of Obscurity. Unreliable Memoirs volume V: The TV Years by Clive James

2009-11-29T15:43:00.004Z

read by Clive James

Listening to this peerless volume of reminisces, one realises just how much broadcasting has declined in the last ten years since Clive James was writing and fronting mainstream television.

He appears effortlessly articulate, in a way that current broadcasters are not. Even the BBC allows people on the air who think 'media' and 'criteria' are singular nouns, and who abuse English as if it did not matter. These young graduates, most of them from Oxford and Cambridge, simply cannot read and write. James, on the other hand, Australian through and through, is clearly a man for whom the written and broadcast word really are important, and his sometimes derided contributions to the medium of television are sorely missed. Such writing and broadcasting are now unfashionable and unwanted. Think of today's highest-paid television 'personalities'. Listen to how they speak and to what they talk about; then listen to five minutes of Clive James. It is a different country - and today's output is no matter for congratulation and admiration: Clive James cares about what he writes about and the way he writes. Today's broadcasters, and those who consume what they produce, could learn a great deal from him.

This fifth volume of memoirs charts the end of James's television career and includes some telling observations on colleagues and bosses, including the elusive Alan Yentob, the agendist John Burt and the facilitating Michael Grade. It really was 'The Golden Age of Television' and we will never see the like of Clive James again, combining wit with wisdom and succeeding so brilliantly. It must have been a wonderful time to be in television, especially if you had the support of those in charge. The mass audiences he achieved are the stuff now only of dreams. There was so much of the world to explore and to film in those days: small wonder that Clive James's 'Postcards' were so popular and successful. He was the first to bring to the British small screen the masochism of Japanese game shows, the seductive delights of Copocabana and the solipsisms of New York. Nowadays, cheap flights and cheaper television have given everyone the opportunity not only to go and look but to take part in the world's absurdities.

We are lucky still to be able to sample Clive James the reflective commentator, the poet and the lover of women. His website remains a source of tremendous pleasure, and his new weekly Radio 4 spot reminds us just what an inimitable mind and voice we have been lucky enough to share over the years.

Wonderful.

* * * *

Buy The Blaze of Obscurity

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

2009-11-23T21:33:00.008Z

read by Martin Jarvis

Dickens's A Christmas Carol is a true annual: I can't imagine many people taking this short moral tale from the shelves at any time other than Christmas.

One might think the tale has been abused to death - in cartoons, feature films, television adaptations, musicals, even with extraneous characters appended (Mr Magoo's Christmas Carol - if anyone can remember quite who Mr Magoo was), and so on. But the story rarely fails to get its simple message across. Perhaps it should be required reading for all the bankers this Christmas before they pocket their ill- (or, more accurately, un-) earned bonuses.

This Christmas, the CGI-animated film - in 3D - of A Christmas Carol, directed by Robert Zemeckis, with the voice of Jim Carrey, is in the cinemas. Martin Jarvis's reading is released to coincide with the film. Zemeckis has produced one of the most stunning pieces of motion pictures in the history of the cinema, following the story and original illustrations with utmost taste and artistic brilliance: a surprising and refreshing example of the new Disney. Returning from the cinema, it was a great pleasure to hear Martin Jarvis reading the story in this 2-CD package. Dickens' descriptions and dialogue are masterly, and Martin Jarvis has the perfect repertoire of voices for Dickens and for A Christmas Carol in particular.

The enduring popularity of the tale is fully vindicated in this gloriously spirited (no pun intended) production.

* * * *

Buy A Christmas Carol

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (volume 3)

2009-11-23T21:16:00.006Z

read by Edward Hardwicke

As is well documented, Conan Doyle grew tired of his creation Sherlock Holmes: but his readers did not, and Holmes was brought out of retirement, if not raised from the dead by his spiritualism-endorsing creator, on more than one occasion. The audiobook enthusiast will not, I believe, tire of hearing these brilliant and entertaining puzzles being read by that most sympathetic of Watsons, Edward Hardwicke. One can think of no better narrator then he, particularly following his superlative portrayal of the detective's long-suffering companion and chronicler in the peerless Granada television series.

To have these tales (including, The Red-Headed League, Silver Blaze, and A Scandal in Bohemia) read in their entirety demonstrates just what a remarkable writer Conan Doyle at his best really is, and makes one want to try some of his many other creations, which have not fared so successfully as the lodger of 221B Baker Street.

Recordings to be enjoyed again and again.

* * * * *

Buy The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (volume 3)

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

2009-11-23T21:05:00.007Z

read by Rupert Graves

Wilde's literary conceit is well known - the painting in the attic taking on the care-worn characteristics of a dissolute, immoral and criminal life, leaving the man to retain his gilded, youthful, innocent beauty. It is the stuff of ancient and classical myths, and has much to say to a modern generation obsessed by celebrity, shallow glamour and delaying the aging process.

The writing is mannered and not Wilde's most literary. He revised the rather short work for book publication and removed many of the overt references to his own homosexuality. One wonders just how much Dorian is what Wilde himself would have liked to have been. He certainly defied convention and followed a self-destructive existence. Wilde was no Dorian when it came to looks and physique. Perhaps he was searching throughout his life for the missing painting and for the painter to find grace and beauty in him.

Although The Picture of Dorian Gray lends itself to dramatisation and film - and has been adapted several times for both stage and screen (the latest feature film providing the artwork for the present packaging) - attempts to illustrate the degredation of the painting seem inevitably to disappoint. All the gaudy decadence and cruelty of the characters and events of the book may be conjured up by skilful art directors and extravagant wardrobe specialists, but it is only in the reader's own imagination that the horror in the locked room can be successfully and truly realised. Which is why this reading is so outstanding and why Wilde's book will for ever remain in print.

CSA have once again cast their narrator with great skill and judgement. Who better to read Wilde than Rupert Graves? As if effortlessly, Graves affects all the langorousness and excess, all the selfishness and sadism, and all the residing self-loathing. He is one of our finest actors and one of the most eloquent.

Quite brilliant

* * * * *

Buy The Picture of Dorian Gray

Animal Farm by George Orwell

2009-11-23T20:56:00.004Z

read by Simon Callow

This audiobook is unreservedly recommended for all ages - for those who have read the book before, but also for the young, who might misunderstand the premise of the 'Fairy Story', or who simply find the process of reading a chore. Animal Farm is often taught at GCSE, but not all students take English Literature in addition to English Language, so one cannot assume all the young have been introduced to this modern classic.

Animal Farm needs no complex explication. It succeeds on its own through its unassailable logic and simple morality. Its truths are self-evident to both the trusting young and the cynical old, and the seeming inevitability of the narrative delivers the kind of political punch that, in the sixty-five years since its original publication, has made Animal Farm such a feared script of repressive regimes the world over. With Russian attempts, it is said, now to rehabilitate Stalin, perhaps the Russian translation should be reprinted and distributed to the young in the former Soviet Republics.

CSA are to be congratulated in entrusting Animal Farm to Simon Callow. Callow is a breathtakingly talented and stimulating reader. His nuances could not be bettered, expertly imparting, as he does, all the subtle insinuation of Orwell's various levels of irony. A knighthood is surely long overdue; so perhaps he has been offered one and turned it down. His ongoing biography of Orson Welles is masterly, his screen acting and master classes are unrivalled. There is so much literature and biography I, for one, would love to hear him read.

Inspiring and revelatory.

* * * * *

Buy Animal Farm

The Queen Mother: The Official Biography by William Shawcross

2009-11-23T20:25:00.015Z

read by William Shawcross and Sophie Roberts

At something in excess of 1,100 pages, this 'official biography' holds few surprises and is, inevitably, far from the 'revelatory royal biography' its publishers proclaim. So, an abridged audiobook version of William Shawcross's labour of duty, if not of love, is definitely to be welcomed.

The problem with an official biography is that the writer is under an obligation to pen more a celebration than a thorough-going analysis. That will have to wait until some of the principals are themselves no more - the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles, perhaps. One feels that, for example, more can be revealed concerning the Duke and Duchess of Windsor - the true feelings, perhaps, of the other royals to this unhappy episode. For a more-modern generation, the Queen Mother's close relationship with Princess Diana could reveal some unwelcome truths, although we are led to believe that all their correspondence was destroyed by or on the advice of the Queen Mother's second daughter, the late Princess Margaret.

The life of the former Elizabeth Bowes Lyon certainly spans some of the most interesting recent history of the erstwhile British Empire and of the rest of the world. The Queen Mother's place was centre stage in the dismantlement of Empire, which followed quite naturally from the disastrous world wars for which she would never forgive the German people. But the Queen Mother's one hundred years saw such a seismic shift in the political, social and educational make-up of the world that the social historian is going to find this account so much more interesting than the constitutional historian.

There is always something to be gained from having an author read his or her own work. And William Shawcross reads the ten hours of this recording with a reverent, slightly monotonous delivery, employing some startlingly un-English pronunciations ('harrassment' and 'aristocrat', for example), which, it might be imagined, would have horrified the Queen Mother. Perhaps these were insisted upon for the American market.

Sophie Roberts, on the other hand, is unimpeachable.

Full of poignant memories for those who lived through just a little or even most of the Queen Mother's life, and a great way to get through this baggy monster.

* * *

Buy Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: The Official Biography

Nineteen Eighty-four, by George Orwell

2009-10-11T14:28:00.006+01:00

read by Philip Glenister

First published, amazingly, sixty years ago and pinpointing a date that itself has passed some twenty-five years, Nineteen Eighty-four is arguably the most prescient and terrifying novel of the twentieth century.

Written, Orwell explained, 'directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism', Nineteen Eighty-four might well be a set book for GCSE and A-level English Literature students, but its analysis of political and social futures should be a warning to us all and required reading alongside Naomi Wolf's The End of America.

Television's abuse of the term 'Big Brother' is a misfortune; thinking that Orwell's predictions are no longer of relevance will be a disaster. O'Brien's description of the future should reverberate in the collective consciousness: 'There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face ... for ever.'

Winston Smith is Orwell's Everyman and in what can be taken as a conventional love story Orwell warns post-Second World War readers of how society might well disintegrate into hate, propaganda, surveillance and control.

Perhaps it already has.

Nineteen Eighty-four is a masterpiece of English writing and the words viscerate on the page. But, read with the compelling skill and gravitas of Philip Glenister, we are transfixed by Orwell's brilliance.

Priceless.

* * * *

Buy Nineteen Eighty-four

Even Money, by Dick Francis and Felix Francis

2009-10-11T14:20:00.008+01:00

read by Martin Jarvis

Dick Francis' success is justly earned: few writers can so surely be depended on for that well-crafted, well-researched, gripping and entertaining journey that is the crime novelist's art. The sporting milieu is well-trodden, but never dull, and I'm sure Francis has introduced many a new racegoer to the sport through his novels, even though horseracing seems to be full of the most untrustworthy individuals with whom you could ever have the misfortune to become entangled.

Even Money is no exception. Bookmaker Ned Talbot's world is thoroughly turned upside down when a man approaches him while he is taking bets at Royal Ascot and introduces himself as his father - a father he had been told all his life had died in a car crash when he was a baby. In characteristic Dick Francis style, murder is followed by threats which are followed by nasty goings on and a carefully planned and executed escape route. But I don't need to go into any more detail because if you have ever enjoyed a Dick Francis yarn you are going to enjoy this new one equally as much, if not more.

One theme, however, that of father and son, makes one reflect on the father-son joint authorship of Even Money -Felix Francis sharing authorship with his father. Parent-children relationships are a constant thread in Dick Francis' novels, providing great material for plots and perhaps also reflecting the author's more private feelings.

If you have never listened to a reading or dramatisation of a Dick Francis novel then you will be in for a great four hours. He truly is a rewarding writer to have read aloud. And who better to read to you than Martin Jarvis, who brilliantly voices all the nuances of class and regional variation of the numerous characters of the racing world.

Be sure to master the subtleties of betting odds before the off.

* * * *

Buy Even Money

Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse

2009-08-24T09:35:00.018+01:00

read by Martin Jarvis

George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay 'In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse' that 'Wodehouse's real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious: their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges the social gap by addressing everyone as "Comrade".'

Psmith has perhaps been overlooked in favour of Wodehouse's most famous creations Jeeves and Bertram Wooster, whose antics have been so brilliantly potrayed on the small screen but which truly come alive in readings such as CSA Word's excellent Right Ho, Jeeves, with the perfect modulations of Martin Jarvis at the helm.

Whether Orwell is right about how 'nice' Wodehouse's upper classes are portrayed is open to discussion. This listener is beginning to find the misogyny and recklessness of young Bertram rather cruel, and is even wondering whether Wodehouse, far from being under the thrall of the right, as some claim his broadcasts from German-occupied France during the Second World War demonstrate he was, is in fact Marxist by inclination.

Regardless, let it be said that Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, Tuppy Glossop, Aunt Dahlia and the very first celebrity chef, Anatole, will bring a smile to even the gloomiest listener. This 4-CD set will be played time and time again and will never fail to amuse.

Quite simply, brilliant.

* * * *

Buy Right Ho, Jeeves

Claudius the God by Robert Graves

2009-07-15T12:17:00.004+01:00

read by Derek Jacobi

Epic drama from the celebrated mythographer Robert Graves, Claudius the God draws on classical sources to recreate the lost autobiography of Claudius, fourth emperor of Rome, whose rule spanned from 41 to 54 AD. A sequel to the equally dramatic and surprisingly human I, Clauduis, Claudius the God covers Cluadius' life as he is reluctantly pronounced emperor of the Roman Empire and then a 'god'.

Placating the army following his nephew Caligula's disastrous actions and overseeing the invasion of Britain provide some of the central episodes to Claudius's life as emperor. His reputedly nymphomaniac wife Messalina becomes one of his many distractions, as does his friendship with King Herod, beset by the most horrible diseases and their symptoms. The writing is timeless and there is much to savour.

This great and ever-popular book can be enjoyed on its own just as much as it can as a sequel to I, Claudius (also available from CSA Word), brought alive by the commanding authority of Derek Jacobi, who one simply accepts as the voice of this great and troubled leader.

A modern classic.

* * * *

Buy Claudius the God

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence

2009-06-16T11:00:00.008+01:00

read by Emilia Fox

The novel, paperback publication of which, arguably, was in part responsible for the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, is today perhaps more of sociological than literary significance. It is difficult to divorce one's response to the novel without Mervyn Griffith-Jones, QC's astonishing question to the jury in the 1960 Old Bailey prosecution of Penguin Books for obscenity ringing in your ears: 'Is this the kind of book you would wish your wife or servants to read?'.

However, it is essential to bear in mind that Lady Chatterley's Lover was written and first published (in Italy) in 1928 and so should be read with the First World War and the 1926 Miners' Lockout thundering in one's consciousness. The work is outstandingly modern and brave, and Lawrence's intentions serious and important. Not only are social and marital conventions questioned, but raised also - possibly for the first time in English literature - are issues related to childlessness and disability. Class and language are foremost concerns, with Mellors speaking his local dialect as well as introducing Old English-derived 'four-letter' words never uttered in 'polite' society, much less written down.

An assuredly moral and compassionate work, Lady Chatterley's Lover is a masterpiece of literary fiction, bowlderized and debased by what has been published in its wake. So much so, that the novel is victim to parody and mockery, bastardized by pulp 'romantic' and 'chicklit' scribblings.

Emilia Fox's reading is faultless - giving beautiful, serene and confident voice to Lawrence's poetic and idealistic vision of emotional fulfilment.

An audiobook classic.

* * * *

Buy Lady Chatterley's Lover

Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth

2009-06-16T09:42:00.027+01:00

read by Anne Reid

This really is the farewell to London's East End and the start of the East London we know today. Anyone growing up or moving to twenty-first century East London would be shocked and horrified by what was accepted as the norm only sixty years before: illiteracy, poverty and sickness; crowded, barely lit and insanitary housing, with child and maternal mortality of present-day third-world proportions.

Jennifer Worth's recollections of her time working as a midwife with the Nonnatus House nuns is an outstanding series for Orion Audiobooks, beautifully read by the splendid Anne Reid - evocative, haunting, gladdening and reassuring. Full of humour and anecdote, these tales of true working-class characters are at the same time entertaining and thought-provoking - the back-street abortionists with their ineffective concoction for 'digestive problems'; the identical twins who share a husband; the enormous ship's woman who provides sexual services for the crew - including the captain, her father, whose baby she is delivered of in the close confines of her ship's cabin. With the ongoing histories of the nuns and of her fellow night sisters, Farewell to the East End is a fitting and moving end to the author's work in the rapidly transforming landscape and amongst the fast-changing lives of those whose domain is this part of the capital.

I hope we will hear of Jennifer Worth's life as a musician and music teacher - the career she took up on leaving midwifery. It is guaranteed to work its charms.

Exceptional.

* * * *

Buy Farewell to the East End

The Inimitable Jeeves, vol. 1 by P. G. Wodehouse

2009-05-12T13:48:00.008+01:00

read by Martin Jarvis

Martin Jarvis has the superlative ability to individualise Wodehouse's bizarre cast of characters with consummate skill and humour. Three and half hours in the company of Jeeves, Wooster, Bingo Little, Aunt Agatha, et al. - as well as the inimitable Jarvis - is pretty hard to beat. The Inimitable Jeeves will not disappoint.

In spite of the arguably contentious attitude to class and status depicted in these short stories, there is little to offend and much to entertain. Bingo Little's infatuation with Mabel, a waitress in a tea-and-bun shop (significantly some fifty yards east of the Ritz Hotel), and then Bingo's socialisation of his uncle, Mortimer Little, through reading him the novels of Rosie M. Banks, in which 'marriage with young persons of an inferior social status is held up as both feasible and admirable', is just the start to this wonderful, incomparable set of short stories which is guaranteed to be listened to time after time.

Wodehouse brightens up the dullest day and lightens the heaviest heart. So give yourself a tonic by listening to this comedy classic.

* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy The Inimitable Jeeves, vol. 1

Black & Blue by Ian Rankin

2009-05-12T13:44:00.003+01:00

read by James Macpherson

Darker and larger in scale, Black & Blue is one of Ian Rankin's greatest and richest novels, featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus, read with all the nuance and drama that James Macpherson can muster.

Rebus has four cases on his plate - hunting down the sadistic 'Johnny Bible,' a copy-cat serial killer of the real killer dubbed 'Bible John', who raped and murdered women he met at the Barrowlands Dancehall in the 1960s, and who was never caught. Rebus is also under pressure from an internal inquiry led by a man he has accused of taking bribes from Glasgow's 'Mr Big'. Even worse, TV journalists are poking about into Rebus's past over an alleged miscarriage of justice.

With his personal life in a mess, Rebus travels the length and breadth of Scotland - Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Shetland and the North Sea - risking his own safety with an investigation into a suspicious death of an oil-rig worker and contacting the ruthless underworld career criminal Big Ger Cafferty, a vicious character Rebus has locked horns with several times in the past. With leads relating to the supply of drugs from mainland Scotland to the oil-rigs, and the accusation of police corruption in an old murder case which implicates Rebus and his former mentor Lawson Geddes, Black & Blue is complex, unsettling and very very good. Truly a contemporary crime classic.

* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

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Agatha Raisin: The Curious Curate and The Buried Treasure by M. C. Beaton

2009-05-12T13:39:00.003+01:00

full cast recording, with Penelope Keith

Perhaps reversing the trend for aristocratic and patrician detectives, M. C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin's background is decidedly plebian: Agatha was born in a tower block 'slum' in Birmingham to unemployed and dipsomaniac, shoplifting parents, living on benefits.

Raisin drinks and smokes, but her self-determination forged her a lucrative career in PR and, having retreated to 'a quiet Cotswold village', falls into detecting by happy accident. This feisty, glorious character is superbly brought to life through the incomparable voice of Penelope Keith, supported by a host of excellent BBC drama regulars. In this boxed set of two one-hour dramas, Raisin is up against murder and mayhem - as well as duck racing, morris dancing, treasure hunts and secret libraries - but, as ever, more than anything, seeking romance.

Life-affirming and entertaining, if you haven't tried Agatha Raisin, this is thoroughly recommended.

* * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy The Curious Curate and The Buried Treasure

Paul Temple and the Front Page Men by Francis Durbridge

2009-05-12T13:35:00.005+01:00

read by Anthony Head

Familiar to listeners to BBC radio from the excellent dramatisations prefaced by Vivian Ellis's vivid and memorable theme 'Coronation Scot', Paul Temple needs little introduction. Francis Durbridge's detective was developed for the wireless and broadcasts started in the late 1930s, continuing right up to the 1960 and then revived in the early twenty-first century.

The decidedly patrician crime novelist cum amateur detective and his impossibly supportive and attractive wife Steve is for ever being called on by Scotland Yard to help solve damnably puzzling crimes. And, of course, he always triumphs where the police simply can't make any headway. Although there are always elements of class conflict in the stories, Durbridge is only carrying on in the traditions of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and even Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (who mentions that his ancestors were 'country squires').

Anthony Head is the perfect reader of the Temple stories and they make a thoroughly entertaining listen. With more than a little self-satire, 'The Front Page Men' is the title of a detective novel from an pseudonynmous author Andra Fortune. Thefts and kidnappings, then murders, are marked by a card left at the scene of the crime inscribed with the words 'The Front Page Men'. When Steve disappears, Temple knows he is up against a dastardly and dangerous opponent.

Great fun.

* * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy Paul Temple and the Front Page Men

Wise Children by Angela Carter

2009-05-11T23:33:00.008+01:00

read by Eileen Atkins

Angela Carter's last novel, Wise Children is a wickedly camp delight and a veritable masterpiece. The 'wise children' of the title (two of them, at least) are twin chorus girls, Dora and Nora Chance, and the story is an account of the mockingly bizarre theatrical dynasty of which they are a part. At the age of 75, they recount their own and their progenitors' weird and wonderous lives.

The novel is full of surreal and real individuals, and centres on fatherhood and paternal neglect, and the consequences thereof. Dora and Nora's 'illegitimate' lechery is both a delight and a horror and there is an underlying sadness in the midst of the satire. Based, one might speculate, on several grandees of the English stage and their extensive progeny- on both sides of the blanket - the novel combines Shakespeare with vaudeville, the circus and carnival, with telling asides at television and celebrity.

The centrepiece of the drama is the 100th birthday party of Sir Melchior Hazard - the greatest Shakespearian actor of his generation - a birthday he shares with the Bard himself but also with his twin brother Peregrine Hazard and Dora and Nora - the daughters Sir Melchior has never acknowledged. Twins abound, as do the themes of song and dance - and incest. There is never a dull moment, especially in the hands of the incomparable Eileen Atkins, who expertly brings all the marvellous characters, twists and turns to gaudy life. Quite simply, a modern classic.

What a joy it is to dance and sing.

* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy Wise Children

The Essential Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2009-05-11T19:24:00.006+01:00

read by David Timson, Tim Pigott-Smith, Crawford Logan, Rupert Degas, et al.

This a treasure trove and Naxos have to be congratulated for assembling such a rewarding choice of material and such a wonderful cast of actors to illustrate Conan Doyle's life and works - which, as the listener will discover, extends far beyond Holmes, Watson and Baker Street.

Conan Doyle's amost picaresque early life indicates just how random can be the course of a person's life. Always a raconteur and storyteller, Conan Doyle's might have been knighted as a Harley Street eye specialist and not as the multimillionaire writer he became, had his particular choice of medical specialism ever found a paying clientele. We are so fortunate it did not.

David Timson expertly reads The Adventure of the Speckled Band, apparently one of Conan Doyle's own favourite Sherlock Holmes stories - and surely as intriguing, inventive, and satisfying today as it was the day it was first published, and Carl Rigg builds great tension into the equally enthralling short stories Lot No. 249, about an Egyptian mummy, and The Sealed Room, about, well, a sealed room, containing a dark and tragic secret. Rupert Degas and Glen McCready bring us Brigadier Gerard and Professor Challenger from his neglected adventure and historical novels.

More fascinating still are Conan Doyle's spiritual and psychic interests, including the affair of the Cottingley Fairies - something worth investigating on the Internet, if you have never seen these remarkable photographs.

With a number of recordings of Conan Doyle's own voice, The Essential Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a truly wonderful package and comes highly recomended for all lovers of the literary, historical, and the bizarre.

* * * * *

Buy The Essential Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

2009-05-11T15:00:00.006+01:00

read by Jeremy Northam

Based (it is claimed) on Graham Greene's experiences as a spy working for MI6, this satirical romance is a gem - and this CSA Word recording, brilliantly narrated by the excellent Jeremy Northam, is all the better for being 'complete and unabridged'.

Opening with a blast of Cuban jazz, Northam has the wonderfully entertaining skill of characterizing the protagonists with just the right accent, tone, and delivery - from the vague Hawthorne to the venal Captain Segura, the petulant Milly to the tortured Hasselbacher. The story has its own momentum, leading the unworldly James Wormold headlong into an unstoppable maelstrom with international consequences - with uncanny prescience of the Cuban missile crisis.

If you haven't read the book (or seen Carol Reed's feature film) Our Man in Havana is going to delight and entertain. A wonderful seven hours.

* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy Our Man in Havana

My Secret Diary by Jacqueline Wilson

2009-05-11T14:20:00.004+01:00

read by Jacqueline Wilson

Adored and fêted by many a teenaged girl, this is Jacqueline Wilson’s account of her own schooldays and adolescence, growing up in Kingston upon Thames, south-west of London, in the 1960s.

What her young fans will make of it is difficult to imagine (and she does seem to have them in mind as she charts her own growing pains, ambitions and discoveries), but for older readers and listeners, this account of strict single-sex schools, austere homes and holidays, and unemancipated lifestyles will strike some painful memories.

Thoroughly entertaining, Jacqueline Wilson’s ambitions to write are clear right from the start - and we are never allowed to forget them. Her thirst for literature is thoroughly documented and displayed, although it is a shame that she rightly relates her admiration for Nabokov whilst at the same time telling her young readers to steer well clear of anything so corrupt as Lolita: as if she is afraid that championing such a masterpiece might get her into trouble, and that although she was mature enough to understand the novel’s subtle message, today’s youth would only confuse irony with pornography.

A great listen, and an honest insight into the mind of our greatest living children’s author.

* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy My Secret Diary

Say Goodbye by Lisa Gardner

2009-05-11T14:14:00.003+01:00

read by Ann Marie Lee and Lincoln Hoppe

Not for the fainthearted, Lisa Gardner has written a compelling and profoundly disturbing serial killer fiction, which is as unpleasant and entertaining as they come. Superbly characterized and horribly convincing, this is not the sort of novel you will want to put down or will be able easily to forget, dealing as it does with psychopathic cruelty and base abuse of children - and the consequences thereof.

Stunningly narrated by Ann Marie Lee and Lincoln Hoppe, Say Goodbye demonstrates Gardner’s deft talent for dialogue and her gifted expertise in creating and sustaining tension and narrative momentum. With so many similar tales unfolding nightly in multitudinous investigative television series - most of the best from the US - this novel shows how the written (and spoken) word can convey so much force and power.

Not an easy listen - but a rewarding one - and one that will stay with you for a long time.

Highly recommended.

* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy Say Goodbye

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, vol. 2, by Arthur Conan Doyle

2009-02-04T10:37:00.004Z

read by Edward Hardwicke

Magazines, books, films, television and radio have for more than 100 years brought us faces, voices, locations and atmosphere that many instinctively associate with Conan Doyle's famous detective - from Paget's somewhat posed portraits in the Strand Magazine to Jeremy Brett's brilliant, increasingly distrait 1984-94 Granada television series. Guinness World Records cites Holmes as the 'most-portrayed' character in film and television, with over seventy actors playing the part in some 200 productions in all parts of the globe.

But, the absolute joy of this CSA audiobook is that we hear Conan Doyle's own words - unabridged -and can treasure the conversations between Holmes and Watson, the wonderful dialogue, descriptions, plottings, and the complete 'world' produced by this master craftsman. Doyle may very well have tired of Holmes and desired to be associated with other things, but that does nothing to undermine the sheer brilliance of his story-telling - and it is the story-telling that displaces utterly all the dramatisations and adaptations which have plundered the tales themselves.

Edward Hardwicke's readings are unmatched in their brilliance. He really is a consummate narrator - and perhaps the definitive Watson (the supposed chronicler, of course, of Holmes' exploits). This is more than a delight. This is an absolute revelation to those of us who have not read the original stories. I cannot think of anyone better than Edward Hardwicke to read the stories - unabridged - in their entirety. For this listener, Holmes is more alive than ever - and more appreciated. I sincerely hope the rest of the canon may be given the Hardwicke treatment. He has the gravitas, a niggling cynicism but the refined acclamation which are Watsons' hallmarks - and the readings are endlessly entertaining.

Perfection.
* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, volume 2

Dewey by Vicki Myron

2009-01-26T14:42:00.013Z

read by Suzanne Toren

The face on the cover says it all, really - the knowing, serious intelligence emanating from the orangey red cat photographed against a backdrop of books.

Dewey - cat and book (and soon to be motion picture) has captured the imagination of the world and put Spencer, Iowa firmly on that world’s map - the story and the character drawing visitors, well-wishers, journalists, film-makers and cat lovers from all over the globe. Google ‘Dewey’ and you will see exactly the phenomenon of this wonderful creature.

Of course, Dewey isn’t the true subject of this audiobook - it is the author and librarian Vicki Myron and how a cat transforms her life, the lives of her daughter, her colleagues and all the naysayers and spoilsports of Spencer, Iowa. Absorbing, heart-warming, moving, life-affirming - and not only for animal lovers or even book lovers - Dewey is social history, recording in microcosm the changing economic, public, community, recreational and even architectural tastes of small-town USA.

Mesmerizingly read by Suzanne Toren, Dewey is a delight for all ages and highly suitable for shortening even the longest of journeys. Dewey will stay in your imagination for life.

* * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy Dewey

Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P. G. Wodehouse

2009-01-22T12:45:00.007Z

read by Martin Jarvis

You have to reach for Roget to do justice to Wodehouse. 'Joyful' or 'joyous' simply won't do. Try: ‘amusement’, ‘animation’, ‘bliss’, ‘charm’, ‘cheer’, ‘comfort’, ‘delectation’, ‘delight’, ‘diversion’, ‘ecstasy’, ‘elation’, ‘exultation’, ‘exulting’, ‘felicity’, ‘festivity’, ‘frolic’, ‘fruition’, ‘gaiety’, ‘gem’, ‘gladness’, ‘glee’, ‘good humour’, ‘gratification’, ‘hilarity’, ‘humor’, ‘indulgence’, ‘jewel’, ‘jubilance’, ‘liveliness’, ‘luxury’, ‘merriment’, ‘mirth’, ‘pride’, ‘rapture’, ‘ravishment’, ‘refreshment’, ‘regalement’, ‘rejoicing’, ‘revelry’, ‘satisfaction’, ‘solace’, ‘sport’, ‘transport’, ‘treasure’, ‘treat’, ‘wonder’. They are all here in spades.

Wodehouse seems to have that rather patrician knack of finding the most trivial thing of inestimable interest and of spinning out a jaunt into the country for more than a chapter or two. There is no denying - Lord Emsworth's precious pigs have kept the somewhat batty amongst us amused for years. And Martin Jarvis has it all down to a T (if that is the right tea, tee or T in question).

Here is yet another occasion for mistaken identities, misplaced romance, misapprehended intentions - all the usual Wodehousian opportunities for laughter and tears, disappointment and success, smiles and gloom - ending, as ever, in prelapsarian joy and humour.

Wodehouse has his critics, and admittedly some of his books are better than the rest, but Uncle Fred will keep you amused even as your neighbours' son's cricket ball lands unceremoniously in the potting shed and your aunt destroys all the plumbing after washing her smalls in the sink in the guest's bathroom.

Hard to beat.
* * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy Uncle Fred in the Springtime

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

2009-01-22T12:17:00.006Z

read by Meera Syal

Forster seems to stay in fashion despite his arguably outdated preoccupations with class, manners, sexuality, mysticism and, in the case of A Passage to India, colonialism and independence.

There is a misogyny in A Passage to India which is transmuted into depressed (not exactly repressed) homosexuality in his other books and even deliberately suffused in Howards Ends - perhaps his greatest work. But A Passage to India is so much more than the excellent film with Nigel Havers and Art Malik and it is the prose which makes this such a fine piece - not simply the characters and the story - which are arguably rather trivial, despite the seriousness of the situation and of its consequences.

The Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis described A Passage to India as 'a classic of the liberal spirit', and his preoccupations in this important and quintessentially English novel are liberal - socially and politically. However, what brings this novel alive, stimulates one's enthusiasm and makes one reach for the next disk, is not so much the unravelling plot and the predictions of what will befall the former colony, so much as the outstanding reading by Meera Syal, who brings such depth, understanding, delicacy and plausibility as to make the whole novel enthralling, fresh and alive - an outstanding performance which has done so much to bring me, for one, back to Forster. I hope she will find the time to give many more novels her sensitivity, dramatic intelligence and wondrous talent for characterisation.

A brilliant success.

* * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy A Passage to India

The Barchester Chronicles by Anthony Trollope

2009-01-19T10:04:00.003Z

Full BBC Cast Recording

The BBC - both radio and television - has performed an inestimable service for Trollope by adapting a selection of his novels for broadcast. His seemingly innumerable books are now - more or less - back in print, and his reputation is enjoying a much-deserved favourable reassessment. Trollope was exceedingly prolific, and some say he tended towards the repetitious. But, if you ever find the time and inclination to immerse yourself in Trollope's oeuvre, you will be much rewarded, educated and entertained.

Trollope's literary talents tended towards characterisation and social setting, and his familiarity with ecclesiastical life pushed him to describes that quintessentially English institution, the Church of England. None the less, he knew how to portray women and their foibles, and those considered representative of the fairer sex are central if not predominant to his literary corpus.

This fully dramatised BBC radio collection is peerless and precious. Who other than BBC radio drama would assemble such a distinguished and talented ensemble to enact a literary gem such as this. Even the American theatre of the air humbles into shallow insignificance against the unparalleled and incomparable brilliance and talent of the BBC's radio drama company.

Barchester Chronicles is worth the licence fee on its own. At once and the same time serious, moving, thought-provoking, heart-warming, amusing, laugh-inducing, smile-promoting, ironic (if not parodying) and anticipating slapstick. Pure entertainment which will repay listening time after time.

This is radio at its very best: sheer joy from start to finish. And long may it continue.

* * * * *
© 2009 AudioBooksReview

Buy The Barchester Chronicles

As You Do by Richard Hammond

2008-12-18T20:17:00.008Z

read by Richard Hammond
After establishing his lads' mag credentials with a bit of rudery and crudity (which may put off the more sensitive listener), 'the hamster' from BBC television's Top Gear demonstrates that he really can produce some wonderfully entertaining and absorbing accounts of his rather reckless life (typified, it goes without saying, by his much-publicised near-death accident of, was it only, last year).

Supposedly much fancied by his female (and equally much envied by his male) fans, Richard Hammond lives a rather charmed existence, heavily subsidised by the BBC licence payer, which allows him to visit exotic locations, throw himself into (carefully managed) dangerous situations and locales, and carry on the sort of carefree life his wage-slave followers can only dream about.

The tales recounted in this audiobook are made many many times more interesting by being narrated by the author, who has an exceptionally infectious delivery that is charming yet vulnerable. You suffer all the indignities and fears he recounts with sympathy, understanding and admiration. And, yes, you end up wishing that he could be a mate of yours in your local.

This is an audiobook delight, and I can't wait for the next instalment. Hammond is a natural storyteller, a natural broadcaster, a national treasure. And long may he entertain.

* * * *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy As You Do

Just After Sunset by Stephen King

2008-12-18T20:11:00.007Z

read by Stephen King
Stephen King's phenomenal book sales and Hollywood deals might put off the more literary-inclined reader. But this collection of short stories should do more than enough to persuade of the sheer brilliance of this writer. Poe is clearly a respected antecedent, but Shelley, Stoker and Wyndham are King's true inspirations. And Huxley, too. What we have here are brilliantly entertaining and disturbingly memorable characters, situations, developments, milieux. Who could ever forget a cat which escapes on a car journey, the distant vision of an explosion in New York, figures in a lonely field, the body of a girl in the trunk of a Mercedes?

King's skills are many, and only the completely narcissitic critic will try to accuse him of being derivative or unoriginal. What he does is to imagine the worst possible situations in the most ordinary ways. His characterisations and descriptions are simply phenomenal.

As a reader or listener you are just swept up by the detail or nuance. And everything you hear draws you deeper into the narrative. 9/11 is a recurring presence in these stories, as is the apparently casual violence of the contemporary American way of life. But the strongest attraction of the collection is King's depiction of the sheer ordinariness of life and how the smallest thing can tilt the universe, thrusting one into the path of forces barely suspected to exist.

One for fans, without question. But also one for all those who have never before read this true genius of American culture. You will certainly be rewarded (... in heaven or in hell).

* * * * *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy Just After Sunset

A Double Dose of Horrid Henry by Francesca Simon

2008-12-18T20:00:00.010Z

read by Miranda Richardson

Seasonal warnings for anyone with a pre-teenage boy or girl: A Double Dose of Horrid Henry is a strong splurge of characteristic 'Horrid' situations and consequences.

Christmas at the Horrids is an excruciating and disturbing affair, and undeniably more acceptable fare for an eight-year-old than for his or her parents (or guardians, etc.). Your hardy reviewer found CD 1 almost a little too much to take!

Suffice it to say, nonetheless, that this is without doubt classic Horrid - produced with all the talented brilliance that the audiobook people can muster - from the abridgment and narration to the musical arrangements and sound effects (especially the sound effects).

If you can't persuade your children to settle down with a book. Or they tell you they are too old to be read to. Set the CD or DVD player to Horrid Henry's Yuletide exploits and you might have a few hours of peace and ... quiet.

A Double Dose of Horrid Henry is right back on form.

In a word (not a Horridesque kind of word) - inimitable.

* * * *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy A Double Dose of Horrid Henry

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

2008-11-16T17:51:00.022Z

Full-cast BBC dramatisation

A darker, maturer, sophisticated novel, Crooked House entitles Agatha Christie rightly, I believe, to the much over-used title 'Queen of Crime'. Originally published in 1949, this book was reported to be one of Christie's own favourites of her predigious output.

The morally corrupt Leonides family, headed by wealthy entrepreneur Aristide Leonides, is sent into turmoil at his death at the age of 85. He has been murdered, of course. And has recently changed his will. The prospective heirs - all suspects - rattle around in the eponymous crooked house.

With Brenda Leonides, Aristide's much younger second wife allegedly having an affair with Laurence Brown, the conscientious objector /private tutor to her children Eustace and Josephine; Aristide's unmarried sister-in-law, the repressed and embittered Edith de Haviland; failed businessman Roger, the eldest son from Aristide's first marriage, and his austere scientist wife Clemency; not to mention Roger's younger brother Philip, and his 'modestly successful' actress wife Magda, there are plenty of possible suspects. Sixteen-year-old Eustace and his unprepossesing detective-story-obsessed twelve-year-old sister Josephine are at the Jamesian Innocents vortex.

The children's nanny dies after drinking a digitalis-laced cup of cocoa that had apparently been intended for Josephine. Then, Edith invites Josephine to come out with her in her car for an ice cream soda, only to drive off a cliff.

The stuff, perhaps, of comedy. But not in Christie's hands. With an excellent cast including Rory Kinnear and Anna Maxwell Martin, this is radio drama at its very best and demonstrates just why Agatha Christie is still packing them in in London's West End, still getting viewers in the millions for television dramatisations, still selling palette loads of paperbacks and still prompting radio producers to commission adaptations.

Peerless.

* * * * *

© 2008 AudioBooksReview

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Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

2008-11-16T17:47:00.011Z

read by Nathaniel Parker, Emilia Fox and Tobias Menzies

Written by Evelyn Waugh at a time when he desperately needed money and when his marriage had collapsed, Vile Bodies is sometimes considered too spontaneous and episodic and so lacking narrative continuity. But this is where its genius lies. You genuinely have the feeling that 'all that succession and repetition of massed humanity. All those vile bodies' repulsed and attracted simultaneously , that all that indulgence was for real, but that there could be no other way of telling of such goings on.

Satire is a loaded die, and Waugh seems to go in and out of fashion. However, there is so much to enjoy and to understand in this biting condemnation of a society that has gone out of control and is about to face an even greater fall from grace. An end of an era portrait of decadence and moral decay but narrated with constantly amusing inventiveness, Vile Bodies is one of Waugh's masterpieces.

This CSA Word adaptation could not be bettered. Waugh's quickfire repartee and soulful pathos are brilliantly recreated by this group of talented performers. If you have only ever tried Waugh's Brideshead, you are in for a shock and a delight. If you once read Vile Bodies, you will savour and relish anew the wonderful prose which can move you to tears of humour and loathing.

* * * * *

© 2008 AudioBooksReview

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Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls by Meg Cabot

2008-11-16T17:45:00.011Z

read by Teresa Gallagher

If you are Allie's age, life is full of rules - some of them you are made to follow by your parents, or your grandparents, or your friends, or your school. But some of them are the ones you make up for yourself and try to follow for yourself. And, course, the best rule of all is that 'if you say it enough times in your head it will COME TRUE (sometimes)'.

For Allie, everything is new - new house, new school, new friends, new kitten (maybe!). And new rules too! Like, 'the less your little brother knows about your business the better off you are'. Especially when your little brother decides to go to your brand new school, walking in with you ... wearing HIS PIRATE COSTUME!

Life can be tough for a new girl. But sometimes everything isn't what is seems to be at first. And sometimes not everyone is what they seem to be at first. So, another rule is, not to make up your mind until you have had time to make up you mind.

I thought you'd get it.

Meg Cabot is a genius, and so is Teresa Gallagher. And if this doesn't keep your daughter quiet for a few hours, then nothing will.

* * * *

© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

2008-11-16T16:18:00.014Z

read by Jeremy Northam

The sleeve may carry a still from the current feature film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's now classic novel of gilded youth, but this is the real thing - a wonderful reading (skilfully abridged) of some peerless patrician prose.

Waugh is enjoying a deserved reassessment; his place in the literary canon belatedly becoming confirmed. Ever popular, Waugh was for a long time considered a lesser writer than, say, Anthony Powell - his Catholicism and his perceived racism obscuring his satire.

Brideshead Revisited was brilliantly adapted for television almost thirty years ago and echoes of its soundtrack haunt this audio book presentation. But it is Waugh's prose which survives. His ability to describe and characterise can be appreciated only by reading the book or listening to this adaptation. And Jeremy Northam is the perfect narrator for Waugh, bringing all the characters to life and enfusing the scenes and situations with grandeur, emotion and atmosphere. This is a perfect choice for a long car, train or airplane journey: revisit a loved book or treat yourself afresh to a quintessentially English masterpiece.

So much better than any of the television or movie adaptations. A genuine classic.

* * * *

© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy Brideshead Revisited

The Black Book by Ian Rankin

2008-11-16T15:04:00.010Z

read by James Macpherson

A classic Inspector Rebus story with a rare introduction by the author telling of his inspiration in the form of a trip across the United States after he won the prestigious Chandler-Fulbright award. A diner the family visited on the trip was the source of the Elvis Presley restaurant featured in The Black Book. But the rest of the book is totally Rankin - pure malt scots.

Rebus is in a dark mood here. Thrown out by his girlfriend, reluctantly forced to share his flat with his convicted drug-felon brother and the students he is supposed to be renting to, a police colleague is mugged and Rebus starts to decipher the coded entries in the man's little black book. Rebus uncovers the brutal string of consequences that had lead, in a long-forgotten case, to a hotel fire and the discovery of the charred remains of a man who had been dead before the fire started. Rebus's brother ends up hanging for his life from a bridge, and terror stalks the darkest streets off the Royal Mile. The Inspector even buys himself a firearm for his own protection.

Read by a master of the art, James Macpherson.

Noir at its finest

* * * * *

© 2008 AudioBooksReview

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Tyrant by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

2008-11-13T15:45:00.011Z

read by Derek Jacobi

If you like your protagonists fearless, mean and uncompromising, look no further.

Dionysius is the fourth-century Carthaginian tyrant of this audiobook's title and Manfredi's skills make us realise just how universal and timeless human characteristics are. Little has changed - just the languages, states, superpowers. Thirst for power, ambition, cruelty, resourcefulness, the instinct for revenge, and even the need for romantic love all drive this fascinating man, and his story of conquest and subjugation grabs the imagination from first to last. Don't let the historical period deter you: Dionysius and his ilk are amongst us now.

If you haven't read or heard anything by Valerio Massimo Manfredi before, then you are in for a real treat. Derek Jacobi is a superb reader and the subject-matter of Tyrant suits his commanding patrician tone perfectly.

Matchless.

* * * * *

© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy Tyrant

A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré

2008-10-08T14:36:00.018+01:00

read by John le Carré

There are no moral absolutes in the spy trade. Indeed, morality of any kind, like the law in action, seems to depend from whose perspective matters are viewed - perceived perpetrator or perceived victim. In A Most Wanted Man—a grim and characteristically depressing novel—le Carré introduces a predictable cast of 'moral-less' characters: bankers, lawyers, government servants and zealots (religious and political), this time sweeping up Western paranoia and ‘extraordinary rendition’, fundamentalism and jihad.

Hamburg, of course, is where much of the 9/11 plot was cooked up (if we believe the official version). So Hamburg is the perfect setting for this twenty-first-century parable, combining the cold war of so many of le Carré’s earlier masterpieces with the new ‘war on terrorism’ used to justify any violation of international law or international convention by ‘the coalition of the willing’ and its lackeys.

Expertly deft at keeping the reader guessing, le Carré writes exceptionally fine audiobook material. And to have these stories read by le Carré himself is revelatory—introducing nuance to words and phrases which might on first reading be passed by in the race into the inevitable abyss of denouement.

Brilliant and outstanding.

* * * * *

© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy A Most Wanted Man

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

2008-10-05T16:42:00.009+01:00

read by John le Carré

There is a wistful sadness in all of le Carré's novels - a yearning for might have been and a brooding pessimism in anticipation of what might yet be. Quintessentially English (not really British), characters in le Carré are distant, hiding behind barely concealed grimaces imposed by class, pretension, envy, bitterness, dread of the faux pas - any hint that will reveal you for what you really are rather than what you pretend to be.

George Smiley represents the downtrodden butler, serving a distasteful and ungrateful master, struggling pointlessly to maintain the status quo in a world overtaken by even more ruthless and cruel foes. Smiley vainly attempts to tent all the animals in the Circus, but they stubbornly refuse to be brought to heel. Spy stories they may appear to be, but le Carré's novels are much, much more - profound morality tales exploring and explaining post-war social and political life and culture, and essential reading for anyone with an interest in politics, domestic and international, past and present.

Read by the author, you will want to hear all his works in the audiobook format - even if you have read them before, or seen the acclaimed BBC television adaptations.

Faultless.

* * * * *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré

2008-10-05T15:38:00.007+01:00

read by John le Carré

Worth buying alone for le Carré's introduction in which he gives his recollections of East-West relations at the end of and after the Second World War. A Small Town in Germany captures all the insecurity, paranoia and fear of the 'cold war', of spies and of divided or misplaced loyalties. Le Carré's patrician reading, with his interjection of Russian or German, has the icy determination of the professional interrogator and the cold, doomed sadness of the betrayed and betrayer.

This feels like the real thing - and le Carré's career as a 'British Foreign Servant' makes you believe that his books are more history than fiction. No James Bond nonsense here, a 'Junior Something' in the British Embassy in Bonn - a man with something of an unchecked past - goes missing at the same time as do forty-three Confidential files, just as student unrest and neo-Nazis start to resurface on the German streets. London sends in Alan Turner, ruthless and efficient, to find out what is really going on.

Breathtakingly brilliant.

* * * * *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy A Small Town in Germany

Doors Open by Ian Rankin

2008-10-05T11:40:00.006+01:00

read by James Macpherson

Rankin's Edinburgh is more than a backdrop to his novels. And here it becomes a brooding character influencing all that happens to the disparate bunch of crooks and thugs in this shaggy dog's tale of a heist gone wrong.

Humour mixes with sadistic violence in Doors Open, set in the rarefied milieux of fine art and snooker-club gangsters. Just who is cheating whom and how in this intricate and many-layered plot, peopled by a broad range of characters from a quasi-Marxist academic, a brilliant art student copyist whose trademark is hard to spot anachronistic additions, a career criminal and his bodyguards - one of whom is a police grass, a European 'debt-collector' by the name of 'Hate', a computer tycoon and a bent banker?

James Macpherson's reading is faultless and adds so much to a brilliant tale.

Listen and savour.

* * * * *

Buy Doors Open

The Two Minute Rule by Robert Crais

2008-10-04T17:02:00.010+01:00

read by Christopher Graybill

Robert Crais has a justly deserved reputation not only for great characterisation and plotting but for literary style. With masses of crime fiction being written and consumed in the twenty-first century, Crais is up there with the greats of the current and the classics of the twentieth century. He will be read long after some of his better-known contemporaries are gathering dust on library shelves.

The Two Minute Rule is an absorbing and addictive story of an ex-con, out of jail after serving time for bank robbery, coming to terms with his policeman son's recent death. His suspicions are aroused concerning the exact details of the death - especially the role of his son's police colleagues in the incident. Who can he trust? Who will trust him?

Read with great skill by Christopher Graybill - a master of the audiobook art, this is one audiobook that will have you going back for more.

Outstanding.

* * * * *

Buy The Two Minute Rule

A Giant Slice of Horrid Henry by Francesca Simon

2008-08-30T15:20:00.005+01:00

read by Miranda Richardson

The commonest comments on the audiobooks that pass through the AudioBooksReview office concern packaging: there is no standard case for CD audiobooks; for one thing, they vary from a single disk to twelve or more, with unabridged recordings. The hard clear plastic jewel cases adapted from music CDs invariably crack during shipping, hinges break off once they are opened and their sharp corners scratch anything they are put down on. The taller DVD boxes that have been adopted by some American audiobook publishers are an improvement, especially when the disks they contain are recorded as MP3s, which vastly reduces the number of disks required. Orion, publishers of A Giant Slice of Horrid Henry seem to be making progress - with tougher plastic cases (with rounded corners) and a single spindle. A Giant Slice of Horrid Henry, has its own, special packaging, however - and the audiobook is worth having for the packaging alone: thick board binding, individual card sleeves for the CDs, wonderful colours and illustrations - a real joy to possess and a perfect gift.

The stories are dangerously entertaining. Horrid Henry, if you don't know him, could be thought of as William Brown's younger but very twenty-first-century brother. Need I say more?

The music by Peter Rinne and Dik Cadbury is inspired, and there is no one better suited to read these stories than the incomparable Miranda Richardson. Definitely not to be reserved for children or for parents: I can't think of anyone who couldn't enjoy Henry and his exploits. A triumph all round.

* * * * *

Buy A Giant Slice of Horrid Henry

The Mayor of Casterbridge SmartPass Study Guide

2008-08-30T14:43:00.005+01:00

full cast drama and analysis

If you are studying Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge for any kind of examination, the first thing you need to do (this should go without saying) is read and re-read the text in a modern, preferably annotated, scholarly edition. But no £15 (or less, if you look) will be better spent than buying a copy of the SmartPass audio education study guide. A private tutor is going to charge twice this amount for an hour-long session, but the SmartPass CDs you can listen to for as little or as long as you have time for - and then over and over again. The packaging tough and well designed, and should see you through the year.

Combined with a stirring and memorable dramatisation of many of the key scenes from the novel is a detailed introduction to its themes - fate, love, ambition, morality, tragedy, social issues, sex and gender, class, the consequences of mechanisation on social mobility and class. And much, much more. Add some advice on essay-writing and coursework, on using quotations and preparing for exams, and this is an invaluable study aid - authoritative, challenging and unpatronising. If only all teachers were as good ...

Buy it. It may be the best investment you have made in your education to date.

* * * * *

Buy The Mayor of Casterbridge SmartPass Study Guide

The Unopened Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by John Taylor

2008-08-30T12:39:00.010+01:00

full cast recording, with Simon Callow and Nicky Henson

I feel sure that modern writers come to Holmes with a high degree of trepidation, given the intricate knowledge and tenacity to detail of full-blooded Holmsian aficionados, who would sniff out an error or anachronism at the turn of a page. And there is but the finest line between homage and parodie. John Taylor manages, to my ear, to replicate expertly the tone and cadences of Conan Doyle's creations, and these six full-cast productions are very, very pleasing.

Curiously, there is something eerily familiar about all six tales in The Unopened Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. They borrow, ever so slightly, from some of the better-known cases recorded by Dr Watson: there are echoes of more-famous situations and villains in the stories - indeed in the very titles of the cases dramatised: The Wandering Corpse, The Horror in Hanging Wood, The Paddington Witch, The Phantom Organ, The Devil's Tunnel and The Battersea Worm.

Simon Callow makes a wonderfully refined Holmes and Nicky Henson's Watson is the perfect foil - inspired casting. It is such a pleasure to have actors of their calibre and intelligence in popular entertainment like this. Needless to say, the supporting cast are all equally outstanding and illustrate just how valuable is the radio drama output from the BBC. Very little television these days truly matches the sustained judement and talent shown by the writers, producers and actors who contribute to radio programmes.

If you missed it when first broadcast, buy it now - you won't regret it for an instant.

* * * * *

Buy The Unopened Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

The Spear by James Herbert

2008-08-30T11:42:00.008+01:00

read by Sean Barrett

Take one long-dead Nazi leader, a bit of Wagnerian guff concerning Longinus' spear, and an unconvincing collection of Mossad and UK spooks, and you have a rather tiresome mélange of cliché and melodrama. One has to wonder what the editor was doing stetting irritating mistakes like 'rising to a crescendo', but perhaps we underestimate at our peril the unholy power of a resurrected Führer.

Sean Barrett does his level best to inject gravitas and tension into a ridiculous plot, and what are four hours if they vanquish a dastardly plot to impose Nazi rule on an unsuspecting world ...

*

Buy The Spear

Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey

2008-08-29T22:14:00.013+01:00

read by Trevor White and Lorelei King

For Raymond Chandler, 1940s Los Angeles was a big hard-boiled city 'with no more personality than a paper cup'. James Frey dissects the same big hard-boiled city sixty years on through a relentless depiction of the hopes and shattered dreams of the many and various who move to the sprawling and diverse metropolis - a mesmerising and moving microcosm of the human condition.

Bringing to life (and to death) a selection of the multitude drawn to the city of angels, Frey populates his book with the lonely, the egotistical, the depraved and the lost in what for many is an illustration of the decay that prefigures the decline and fall of a once-great empire - the United States of America.

Trevor White and Lorelei King share the narration in a stunningly brilliant example of the art of audiobook performance, chorusing the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the characters in the novel.

Bright Shiny Morning is one of the outstanding publications of the year and will be top of my list for an audiobook award.

* * * * *

Buy Bright Shiny Morning

Bunter Does his Best by Frank Richards

2008-08-29T16:48:00.017+01:00

read by Martin Jarvis

The social milieu of Billy Bunter is now so distant from the experience of the majority of today's readers that perhaps precious few will identify with Billy and his cronies, or with their escapades. Moreover, the hallowed corridors of many of England's public schools echo today with the dissonant gabbling of GIRLS - crikey! And, more often than not, not jolly hockeysticks sorts of girls at that. So, even twenty-first-century Bunters are going to find Greyfriars an odd kind of place - full of bizarrely named coves up to all sorts of puerile japes - and definitely not the kinds of things they would find themselves doing at all.

None the less, young Jarvis is simply masterful in his depiction of boys, beaks and masters, and puts on a thrashingly good show. Three cheers for Martin Jarvis.

The curiously asexual world of Frank Richards and his schoolboy creations makes entertaining listening - and will bring back, no doubt, for many, memories of old (some of them painful and in groups of six). The audience for Bunter must be, I guess, the grandfathers and perhaps even the fathers of today's schoolchildren, but I wonder whether the Fat Owl of the Remove is going to enjoy the same popularity as his more middle-class brothers William Brown and the Outlaws. And whatever happened to Jennings?

* * *

Buy Bunter Does his Best

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

2008-08-29T15:47:00.010+01:00

read by Emilia Fox

Emilia Fox brings great depth and passion to Dodi Smith's wonderful tale of growing up and first love. Most people who read I Capture the Castle become lifelong devotees and proselytisers of a book which is difficult to forget. Peopled by a beautifully drawn cast of characters, the book is curiously both a period piece and somehow timeless. The universal emotions depicted combined with the undeniably exotic setting make it so.

Cassandra Mortmain and her singular family - writer father, artist's model stepmother, pulchritudinous older sister, gifted younger brother, and her admirers - family servant Stephen and the rich new owners of the eponymous castle, Simon and Neil Cotton - weave an unforgettable story, as recorded by the seventeen-year-old journal writer.

Often mistakenly classified as a novel for teen aged girls, I Capture the Castle will entrance all but the hard-bitten listener and would make a welcome gift for audiobook aficionados of all ages and either gender.

Quite brilliant!

* * * * *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy I Capture the Castle

Farther Afield by Miss Read

2008-08-18T09:49:00.005+01:00

read by Carole Boyd

Farther Afield continues the charming bucolic saga of country life, as seen through the eyes of spinster and social commentator Miss Read.

Peopled by the characters of Miss Read's earlier Fairacre novels, this time some of the problems of everyday life are potentially more serious than before and Miss Read starts to question the solitary life of the spinster - indeed, to contemplate the larger question of life itself.

Prevented from undertaking the more usual school holiday tasks by an unfortunate fall down her cottage stairs, Miss Read is persuaded by Amy, her friend from university days, to take a holiday in Crete, where she uses her time to contemplate the marriage not only of Amy and her errant husband but the romances of the other friends who come to take tea with her in her Fairacre cottage.

* *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy Farther Afield

The Whole Truth by David Baldacci

2008-08-18T09:29:00.002+01:00

read by Alex Jennings

So near to the truth as to be not entirely comfortable listening, The Whole Truth is a tour de force from start to finish. With recent events in Georgia resonating in one's head, David Baldacci's prescience is stunning and commands attention right from the opening minute.

Baldacci makes James Bond seem like a fairy-tale character and his exploits public school romance for cosy fireside entertainment. The Whole Truth is the real thing - terrifying, brutal, relentless and all too believable. The protagonist, Shaw, is an agent who attempts to keep the world safe in the face of despots, malevolent capitalists and political psychopaths. His life is not his own and yet he yearns for well-earned retirement and the intimacy of marriage. But, once a spy always a spy.

Too complicated to summarise in a review, The Whole Truth is just great writing, skilfully abridged by Kati and Julian Nicholl, and brilliantly narrated by Alex Jennings.

This will not disappoint.

* * * *

Buy The Whole Truth

The Point of Rescue by Sophie Hannah

2008-08-17T23:47:00.006+01:00

read by Charlotte Strevens (unabridged)

A bizarre and baffling set of coincidences and a series of untruths turn into a complicated and chilling story of deceit, obsession and murder.

Desperate for a break from her busy life, Sally uses a work trip that falls through as an excuse to have some time to herself, letting her husband and children believe she is working in Italy. Instead, she books into a local hotel and spends an intimate week with a man she meets in the bar. He tells her his name is Mark Bretherick, that he is married with two children and that he lives not far from where she does. Her nightmare begins when she hears on the news that Mark Bretherick and his family have been found dead - only the Bretherick on the television news isn't the same man she had spent the week with. All the other details of the man's family are identical. To save her marriage and family, Sally has to carry on as before. She can tell no one; even when she starts to believe her own life may be threatened because of what she knows.

Part police investigation, part confessional, The Point of Rescue presents a disturbing picture of the pressures of family life from the perspectives of both women and men - mothers and fathers. It highlights the vulnerability of people in relationships and reminds us of the darknesses which often remain hidden by the facade of the happy family.

Not for the squeamish.

* * *

Buy The Point of Rescue

William the Pirate by Richmal Crompton

2008-08-08T10:03:00.010+01:00

read by Martin Jarvis (unabridged)

Richmal Crompton's prose richly justifies unabridged reading - and although the splendid quarter-hour BBC broadcasts deliver satisfying summaries of the beginnings, middles and ends of these exceptional tales, only the complete texts can do justice to the complex moral and social parables that are the William stories - and to the subtleties of characterisation they contain.

Martin Jarvis expertly conveys all the intricate wit and instinctive wisdom portrayed by William and the outlaws, together with the foibles and solipsisms of William's parents and siblings and the vast cast of relatives, domestics, teachers, shopkeepers, visitors and others - including the incomparable Bott family. Jarvis gives to each his or her particular nuances and individuality.

These are stories that can be listened to time and time again and will delight all ages. Let us hope that the whole of Crompton's works will receive this treatment - and that the books will always stay in print.

* * * * *

Buy William the Pirate

A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter

2008-08-08T09:42:00.005+01:00

read by Dana Ivey

Set in the claustrophobic locale of a small-town American college campus, A Faint Cold Fear amply reflects its chilling title. The deaths are brutal and cruel, but the personalities of the characters involved are equally disturbing - particularly that of former-police detective Lena Adams, who is working through her recent damaged past by taking employment as a security guard on the campus. Add a college head who is keen to avoid bad publicity, at all costs, and medical examiner Sara Linton and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver find that things aren't going to work out quite the way they may have wanted.

Expertly read by award-winning actor Dana Ivey, A Faint Cold Fear will keep you guessing right to the end ... and long afterwards.

* * * *

Buy A Faint Cold Fear

J is for Judgment by Sue Grafton

2008-08-08T08:58:00.008+01:00

read by Lorelei King

Kinsey Millhone is without doubt one of the great fictional private eyes; Grafton's prose contains elements of some of the best-known hardboiled pulp sleuths, including Chandler's Philip Marlowe.

J is for Judgment doesn't disappoint; in fact, the case is one Marlowe himself might have accepted - flying down to Mexico on the trail of a man who was supposed to have died five years previously, abandoning his family, including a wayward son and bitter wife. The story satisfyingly contains all the unexpected twists of a seasoned writer of this genre and, like Grafton's illustrious progenitors, is firmly rooted in the dark recesses of domestic and family tragedy.

Mesmerisingly read by the wonderful Lorelei King, J is for Judgment is an audiobook to savour and to return to.

A classic.

* * * * *

Buy J is for Judgment

All the Colours of Darkness, by Peter Robinson

2008-08-07T19:09:00.002+01:00

read by Neil Pearson

Full of atmosphere, dramatic twists and unexpected turns, All the Colours sees a welcome return for DCI Alan Banks in another classicly crafted Robinson drama. Darker than some of Robinson's other novels, and with a mass of disturbing undercurrents, this is a triumph of the novel-writing and the audiobook arts. Something to relish and to recommend.

Neil Pearson cannot be bettered as a crime audiobook narrator and he brings all his great talent to this superb British policier.

* * * *

Buy All the Colours of Darkness

Macbeth: SmartPass Study Guide

2008-07-23T22:47:00.007+01:00

full cast, with commentary

Macbeth has always been an attractive play for examiners and producers, combining as it does the full sweep of martial drama, personal tragedy, the supernatural and (in one scene at least) comedy. The scenes are relatively short and the soliloquies brief, and Shakespeare's language is charged with clear double meanings and dramatic irony right from the opening lines. Macbeth is also full of Shakespeare's phrases that have become a part of everyday speech and the play contains some of the Bards most memorable images, such as Lady Macbeth sleepwalking and the three weird sisters.

SmartPass provides a full cast recording of Macbeth which you can listen to either uninterrupted or scene by scene, introduced by a discussion of the action, an explanation of difficult language, and commentary on Shakespeare's dramatic art.

As an introduction to and a revision aid for the study of Macbeth, I can think of no better medium than this CD, including, as it does, the full text of the play and of the commentary, which you can read on a computer, or print out. Putting all this material on a single disk, with the audio tracks as MP3s, is a coup (and I hope other audiobook publishers will follow suit).

It would be wrong to believe that this publication provides everything needed to pass an exam. The commentary is good in so far as it goes, and I predict that one or two points will be endlessly reproduced in exam answers, much to the irritation of examiners (such as the references to 'child abuse'), but if SmartPass can give students the confidence to search deeper into individual texts (and I think it will), then let us hope more titles will soon be produced.

Highly recommended.

* * * *

Buy Macbeth: SmartPass Study Guide

Sepulchre by Kate Mosse

2008-07-12T20:02:00.005+01:00

read by Lorelei King

Contemporary gothic from the bestselling author of Labyrinth, Sepulchre flits between nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century France and revolves around a young academic researching a biography of Debussy and delving into her own mysterious origins.

Finding passing love of her own, Meredith Marin uncovers a tale of ancient demons, possession, tragic love affairs and modern-day murder, centred on a ruined Visigoth sepulchre and intriguingly prefigured in a unique set of tarot cards.

Hauntingly read by the incomparable Lorelei King, Sepulchre is certain to tantalise and haunt you, for the accompanying music as much as for the tireless prose.

* * *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview

Buy Sepulchre

Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais

2008-07-11T13:33:00.011+01:00

read by James Daniels

Anyone wondering what had happened to the hardboiled Los Angeles private detective, the putative heirs to Philip Marlowe, will find reassurance and solace in the writings of Robert Crais and his private investigators Elvis Cole and Joe Pike.

Chasing Darkness is gripping from the opening minutes and builds with considerable skill and élan. In short, this is a masterpiece of the policier genre and, indeed, a masterpiece of contemporary fiction. Crais' prose is brimming with invention and short on cliché. He is one of the most literary of crime writers working today - a characteristic which makes Chandler's novels worth rereading and which is sadly lacking in so many bestsellers. Characterisation and locations are vivid and distinctive, and the plot is complex yet coherent, with more than a few unpredictable twists.

Crais' television and screenwriting credentials are clear in this brilliant audiobook, which will not disappoint; and James Daniels' reading is a bravura performance contributing considerably to a truly outstanding production.

Award-winning stuff.

* * * * * *

Buy Chasing Darkness

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

2008-07-11T11:56:00.002+01:00

read by Harriet Walter

to come

Fortunes of War by Olivia Manning

2008-07-11T11:55:00.009+01:00

read by Emilia Fox

Although Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson grace the sleeve of this recording, and both their television dramatisation and the recently broadcast BBC Radio 4 adaptation are mentioned on the packaging, this is in fact a skilfully abridged reading of Olivia Manning's original text.

And what a triumph it is. Emilia Fox is an excellent reader (I look forward to hearing her read Lady Chatterley's Lover). She performs Harriet Pringle and Sophie to perfection, and her Yakimoff is quite brilliant.

Manning's fascinating and diverse cast of characters do make good television and radio, but her style and adventure (and sadness) are best served by her own prose and dialogue. I sincerely hope that Emilia Fox will record the other parts of this haunting trilogy, which I have long loved. Fortunes of War is without doubt a modern literary classic and this reading does it considerable justice.

Thoroughly recommended.

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A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières

2008-07-11T11:53:00.008+01:00

read by Sian Thomas and Jeff Rawle

Louis de Bernières bittersweet love story makes the perfect audiobook, comprising as it does the reminiscences of a pair of star-crossed would-be lovers. Set in a deftly described condemned houseshare in 1970s London, the protagonists Chris and Roza are an unlikely couple, drawn together by circumstance and circumstances, who explore each other's loneliness and temporarily protect each other from life's desolation.

Possibly a political fable as much as a narrative on narrative, A Partisan's Daughter will reward many a retelling. There is so much more in the implications of what is spoken and what is left unspoken than one gathers on first hearing. Sian Thomas and Jeff Rawle are exemplary in the two roles.

This unabridged audiobook will keep you intrigued for many an hour, and the characters will linger in your memory for ever.

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Buy A Partisan's Daughter