This has been a rich year for audiobooks. The medium goes from strength to strength, as more listeners realise that a good abridgement offers a new take on a written text that is just as legitimate as a film or a play. Publishers are also offering more unabridged versions, thanks to the lower costs of downloading. Why not add audiobook vouchers to the gift of an iPod? But bear in mind that these are not limited to the mighty audible.co.uk. The independent producer Silksound has a star-studded and exclusive list — I’m thoroughly enjoying listening to Geoffrey Palmer reading Diary of a Nobody (silksoundbooks.com, unabridged download, £7.95) on my winter walk to work.
Two enthralling audiobooks offered light on the credit crunch and the war in Afghanistan. Geraint Anderson’s Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile (Hachette, 3 CDs, £13.70; Buy this book) revealed how he rose through the coke-fuelled ranks to become a star analyst, exhilarated by spiralling bonuses but at heart appalled by the endemic corruption. After cashing a final huge bonus just before C-day, he came out as author of the internet column Cityboy and published this memoir. Read in pungent estuarial English by Tom Hollander, it is an all-too-lucid guide to hedge funds, insider trading and laddish sex.
Gregory Feifer’s The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (Tantor, 8 CDs, £12.49; Buy this book, or download from audible.co.uk) features interviews with KGB commanders, Soviet conscripts, Mujahidin leaders and frontline journalists. With descriptions, too, of the difficulty of the terrain, it is further proof that the campaign there is unwinnable.
A perfect present for the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth is the narration by Richard Dawkins of his own new edition of On the Origin of Species (CSAWord, 5 CDs, £18.59 £16.73). He prefaces it with a splendid endorsement of the value of audiobooks: “The exercise revealed to me subtleties and depths of meaning that I had missed when reading quietly to myself.”
Rose Tremain’s The Road Home (Naxos, 6 CDs, £19.99 £17.99), the story of an Eastern European immigrant who is seized with a dream of taking home the cooking skills he learns in England, is a roll call of new Britons, including an Arab kebab- maker, an Irish drunk, Chinese asparagus pickers and go-getting estuary chefs. Skilfully voiced by Juliet Stevenson, it is a story to enrich your capacity for compassion.
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This year Gabriel Woolf has completed publication of all 12 Arthur Ransome children’s novels on CD, each abridged and read by him. So cleverly slimmed down that it’s hard to hear what’s gone, they take you beyond Swallows and Amazons (£13.50 including p&p from www.swallows-and-amazons.com) to the better later books. Winter Holiday would be perfect for Christmas, but if you want a real nail-biter opt for We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea.
The poetry audiobook of the year was Ralph Fiennes reading T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Faber, 1 CD, £12.99; Buy this book). It is one of those poems that haunts the mind, riddled as it is with phrases from the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, Dante and other literary ghosts, but also full of startling modern asides. Fiennes’s voice is measured and perfectly modulated.
The most original was On Common Ground: The Enclosure of John Clare (1 CD, £12 plus p&p from hughlupton.com), a portrait of the “peasant poet” in narrative, poetry and song by Hugh Lupton. Clare’s direct, honest poems describe the effect on men, birds and animals of the enclosures of the commons of England and his own enclosure in a madhouse (“My friends forsake me like a memory lost”). Lupton, whose great-uncle was Arthur Ransome, is in the first rank of Britain’s performance storytellers.
Finally, Nick Warburton’s Witness: Five Plays from the Gospel of St Luke (5 CDs, £21.52 £19.37) projects Jesus’s life as if he had only just died by using modern dialogue and regional accents that accurately parallel the different classes and occupations of the characters who appear in the Gospel (American for Pontius Pilate is particularly apposite). Each CD offers a deeper analysis after the play ends.