This week's audiobooks compiled by ARMINTA WALLACE
Alone in Berlin
By Hans Fallada
Read by John Telfer
Hachette Digital,
16 CDs, unabridged, 20 hours, £25
When this 1947 novel about life in Berlin during the second World War first appeared in English, two years ago, it became a publishing sensation, and deservedly so. The story begins with the death of a young German soldier. His father, maddened by grief and appalled by the brutality and bullying he sees around him, begins to drop anonymous anti-Hitler postcards around the city. His activities create dangerous ripples for an ever-widening circle of people: neighbours, family, his son’s ex-girlfriend, a gambler and womaniser who gets involved in a burglary in their shabby apartment building, even a Gestapo inspector. And, tragically, for himself and his wife. John Telfer reads with such simple directness that, listening, you may well find your heart beating faster with the terror of it all.
The Trinity Six
By Charles Cumming
Read by Jot Davies
HarperCollins, unabridged, nine CDs, £19.99
Charles Cumming’s fascination with spies began in 1995 when, as a hotshot young journalist, he was approached by MI6. But instead of turning him into James Bond or George Smiley, his brush with the secret world sparked a series of novels, of which this is his fifth. If you long for the old-fashioned intrigue of John le Carré or Len Deighton, but with a contemporary edge – which means everything from properly drawn female characters through seriously scary Russian assassins to woeful wedding parties in Prague – you’ll love The Trinity Six. Jot Davies is a new reader on the audiobook scene, and he is a fantastic discovery: accomplished, versatile and easy to listen to. It all slips down as beautifully as a Pimm’s with ice.
Stories for Children
By Ted Hughes
Read by the author with Michael Morpurgo
Faber and Faber, five CDs, unabridged, four hours, £16.99
God’s hat is stolen by a bad-tempered demon. But the demon is bad tempered for a reason: he’s being henpecked by his scary bald wife, who wants a glamorous hairpiece. Ted Hughes’s Creation Tales are an absolute joy: mischievous, cheeky and, as read in his inimitably blunt way, delightfully deadpan. The Iron Man is a different kettle of fish, the opening chapters especially being weird and scary, though the story all comes good in the end. But it’s all a terrific antidote to the anodyne commercial franchises with which most children are bombarded nowadays as soon as they can talk, never mind read for themselves. A companion CD with Hughes’s poems for children is also available.
Cannery Row
By John Steinbeck
Read by Trevor White
Hachette Digital, four CDs, six hours, £17.99
It’s half a century since John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature. So much has changed in the western world since then that in this great love letter to California he might as well be documenting the landscape of another planet. The hearts of the human beings who inhabit Cannery Row haven’t changed much at all, however, and Steinbeck brings them to life with the expertise of the true master. Trevor White produces a masterful performance as reader, too. From the famous opening sentence – “Lee Chong’s grocery, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply” – the reader is plunged right into the centre of this unlikely, unlovely milieu, with its sardine-canning factory, its brothel and its bums. It’s a joyous book, and in the character of Doc, inspired by Steinbeck’s friend, a marine biologist, there’s a gentle eco-hero for a world in eco-meltdown.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
By David Mitchell
Read by Tim Piggott-Smith and Paula Wilcox
Sceptre, six CDs, seven hours, £19.99
David Mitchell abandoned his trademark blending of disparate narratives for this conventional historical novel. Set on a Japanese island where the officials of the Dutch East India Company are corralled in an effort to keep them away from their Japanese trading partners, it’s a love story and an adventure peopled by secret scrolls, a ghastly crime and a heroic samurai. The writing is virtuoso and then some: you can almost smell the jasmine and cinnamon of this unfamiliar world. In this abridged version, alas, many of the prose glories of the original book have had to be curtailed in order to trace the complex twists and turns of the plot. Tim Piggott-Smith and Paula Wilcox do their best, but it just makes you long for the full text.
