Audio Books
Listenable literature recommended by Lucy Lethbridge
Audible, the company that produces a vast range (200,000 and rising) of superb digital audiobooks, has a gift subscription that might be just the thing for a lover of talking books. All you need is to be a member of Amazon. Gift subscriptions cost £23.99 (three months), £47.99 (six months) and £69.99 for a year. And you don’t get only books for that – there are also spoken versions of magazines and newspapers (www. audible.co.uk).
New Audible talkies are Dan Stevens (Matthew in Downton
Abbey no less) reading Love from Boy: Roald Dahl’s Letters to his Mother and, as a gift for the Libdem-inclined, Nick Clegg’s memoir Politics: Between the Extremes read by N Clegg himself. There is also a short story by Agatha Christie, The Witness for the Prosecution, read by her grandson Matthew Prichard.
Anyone interested in Game of Thrones – but not quite sure they can bear to watch it on a screen – might enjoy the Audible unabridged reading of Book One of a
A Song of Ice and Fire from George RR Martin’s epic series of novels, read by Roy Dotrice.
For those who still prefer to slide a disc into a machine, there is still an array of possibilities. It can be annoying to buy a CD (or several) and find that the novel is, in fact, abridged. The Whole Story therefore commissions audiobooks that are triumphantly in their original state (www. wholestoryaudiobooks.co.uk). Up-and-coming this autumn is its eight-disc version of Before the War by Fay Weldon – narrated by Julian Clary. It is a tale of a plain but intelligent woman in the 1920s. Also on the list and about the inter-war years is Barbara Taylor Bradford’s The Cavendon
Luck, about a great house
and its fortunes and family after the First World War; it’s read by Anna Bentinck and rolls in at 14 CDS and over sixteen hours of listening.
For Tolkien enthusiasts, Harpercollins has issued in audio format a little-known fairytale by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Smith of Wootton Major is read by Derek Jacobi (who has also read Leaf by
Niggle by Tolkien in the same series). It’s only downloadable – but a snip at £1.99 (www.harpercollins.co.uk).
For anyone who has had to endure long car journeys with children, there is Are We Nearly There Yet? This collection of ten CDS of stories for children – read by luminaries such as Stephen Mangan and David Tennant – includes sure-fire winners such as Chris Riddell’s The Emperor
of Absurdia and Julia Donaldson’s Monkey
Puzzle. It is published by Pan Macmillan and available from www. thebookpeople.co.uk at an offer price of £9.99 – a steal for all those hours of peace. Edith Wharton’s The Age of
Innocence (unabridged) is new from Naxos Audiobooks (nine CDS, eleven hours, £21.50), narrated by Laurel Lefkow, who does a great job of conveying the awesome politesse of Wharton’s fin-de-siècle New Yorkers. Fans of Wharton’s tales of upperclass Americans might also enjoy Juliet Stevenson’s reading of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (21 CDS, 26 hours, £42). For properly seasonal listening, what about Charles Dickens’ Christmas Stories (eleven CDS, 14 hours, £25) – read by David Timson, a stalwart of BBC radio drama with the perfect confiding voice for Dickens (www. naxosaudiobooks.com).