ARMINTA WALLACEreviews a number of recent releases...

Let The Great World Spin

Colum McCann

Various narrators

Whole Story Audiobooks (13 CDs, 15 1/2 hrs, £24.99)

Whole Story is a new(ish) audio imprint which is dedicated to bringing, as its title suggests, full books rather than abridged versions in the audio format. This can be a prohibitively expensive undertaking, but the idea is to use anonymous narrators instead of the big-name readers we've come to expect. It's a strategy perfectly suited to a book such as Let The Great World Spin, with its multiple voices and interwoven narratives and the absence of famous names becomes a positive force, allowing McCann's array of strong characters to make themselves known to us gradually as the text unfolds. And what a text.

Using Philippe Petit’s now-legendary 1974 walk on a wire that was strung between the towers of the World Trade Center as a jumping-off point, McCann pulls off a high-wire act of his own with this merry dance into the corners of human lives we don’t normally ever think about. Hookers, visual artists, mothers who have lost sons in the Vietnam War – the book fizzes with energy and empathy for its parade of damaged souls. One to spin, and spin again.

Nocturnes

Kazuo Ishiguro

Read by Trevor White, Ian Porter, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Adam Kotz and Neil Pearson

Faber Faber (5 CDs, 6 1/2 hrs, £16.99)

A guitarist and former chorister himself, Kazuo Ishiguro sets out in these five stories to evoke the qualities of the musical piece called a nocturne. It’s a tricky proposition. Musical nocturnes are, by tradition, full of regret and melancholy as well as being suffused with the kind of vagueness associated with the indistinct tones of twilight. Wisely, Ishiguro has decided to leaven this material with a healthy sprinkling of outright farce. The result is a series of easy-listening pieces with a crooning, dreamy feel, its success proven by the fact that certain key images linger in the mind the way a melody does.

Whether the publisher’s decision to employ five different readers was a wise one is another matter. So different are their voices that you could easily miss one of the central points of the collection, which is that the unhappy wife of the first story turns up again – swathed in mummy-like bandages, having undergone plastic surgery – in the final piece. That quibble apart, it’s a most entertaining and memorable slice of whimsy.

The Sound of General Ignorance

John Lloyd and John Mitchinson

Read by the authors

Faber Faber (4 CDs, 4 hrs, £16.99 )

I cordially detest QI, the irredeemably irritating TV quiz show in which the hapless contestants are routinely silenced by show-off Stephen Fry. I'm also getting very tired of the kind of QA books with sassy titles that have milked the success of Does Anything Eat Wasps?to the last pop-science drop. So, I approached this box-set by the authors of QIwith some suspicion, expecting it to be the worst amalgam of both. It turns out to be an amiable and entertaining romp through the tangled undergrowth of "common knowledge", most of which is actually half-baked, imperfectly understood or just plain wrong. Clever links between topics make for much less staccato listening than you'd expect, and there's enough stuff in here to keep the nerdiest anorak amused. Did you know, for instance, that chicken tikka masala was invented in Glasgow? Don't get me started.

The Classic Collection, Volume I

Michael Morpurgo

Read by Ian McKellen, Tim Pigott-Smith, Jenny Agutter, Emilia Fox and the author

HarperAudio (9 CDs, 10 hrs, £14.99)

Though described as "classics", these three books from the children's writer are quite varied in style and mood. The Dancing Bearis a German-style fable with a contemporary spin; The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tipsis a war story; Alone on a Wide, Wide Seais a coming-of-age tale told across two generations.

The latter is the most compelling of the three (even though it’s abridged) as it moves from England to Australia and back again when a young orphan boy loses his sister and finds a new life. With its veritable parade of voices, this set would make a marvellous gift for anyone embarking on a long car journey, being highly palatable to adults and children alike.

Get Her Off The Pitch

Lynne Truss

Read by the author

HarperAudio (5 CDs, 6 hrs,£14.99 )

The author of the hugely successful Eats Shoots Leavesrecalls her four years as a sportswriter for The Timesin this satisfyingly waspish memoir. Brought in to provide comic relief at such events as Euro '96, the Ryder Cup and the Rugby World Cup, the girl Truss ended by asking some extremely pertinent questions – Why does golf treat women so badly? When does sport stop and the entertainment industry begin? What's the relationship between sport and the international political arena? – and she writes about Zinedine Zidane in a way that may well bring a tear to the most cynical eye. Perhaps that's because she never underestimated the delicate balancing act required in order to do this apparently daft assignment properly. As she puts it herself: "I had to (a) enjoy the fact that I didn't understand it, (b) understand exactly how far I didn't understand it and (c) understand and enjoy the fact that I couldn't enjoy it as much as people who understood it." Go, Lynne.