The latest recordings reviewed
Rebus's Scotland By Ian Rankin, Read by the author, Orion, 3 CDs plus booklet, 3½ hrs/unabridged, £15.99
Books on CD aren't cheap: but they have, up to now, come in cheap and nasty packaging. Here - at last - is a new and much more satisfying packaging solution: three discs, plus a booklet featuring arty black and white photographs, in a fold-out glossy cardboard set-up that - hooray! - looks like a book and can be stored happily on a bookshelf. The content, too, is first class. Rankin is an accomplished performer, and this is an entertaining voyage around the topic of Scotland and Scottish identity, interspersed with snippets from his best-selling crime novels, read as usual by James Macpherson. A must for Rebus fans - and, for those who aren't fans, a chance to figure out what all the fuss is about.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince By JK Rowling, Read by Stephen Fry, Bloomsbury, 17 CDs, 21hrs/unabridged, £65
Did we say not cheap? Astronomically expensive, in this case. Stephen Fry's Potterings are, however, worth every penny. He has won an award for each of his previous Rowling outings - and if there's any justice, he should get a medal for this one. Within 21 minutes you'll be hooked for the entire 21 hours, and what's more (what's almost incredible, actually, when you think about it; I mean, 21 hours), you'll be desolate when you get to the end. Movie, schmovie: these audio versions are truly magical slices of storytelling for the Hogwarts heads in your house. Full packaging marks to Bloomsbury, too, for making this an easygoing, child-friendly flip job. With any luck, brittle and toothless boxes are on their way into audio book history.
A Briefer History of Time By Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, Read by Erik Davies, Random House, 4 CDs, 4½ hrs/ unabridged, £16.99
Is it shorter? Not much. Is it easier to understand? Um, sort of. It's still not easy listening, but if you're one of the millions of people who just couldn't digest Hawking's best-selling A Brief History of Time, you'll find this new version significantly less tough to chew on. Topics are chopped into neat sections, and it works on a need-to-know basis rather than ploughing grimly through the entire history of 20th-century physics. A big bonus is the enhanced CD with pictures. Always a help, pictures.
Human Traces By Sebastian Faulks, Read by Samuel West, Random House, 6 CDs, 6hrs, £16.99
Sometimes it takes fiction to make us face up to the big philosophical and scientific questions of existence. In this wonderful, sprawling novel, Faulks asks whether madness is the price we pay for being human. Human Traces recreates the development of neuroscience, psychology and the academic discipline known as "philosophy of mind", without ever losing sight of the fact that it has a humdinger of a story to tell, not to mention vivid, all-too-human characters to tell it through. Samuel West has already won awards for his readings of Faulks's Charlotte Gray and Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War. This compelling performance will, surely, make it a hat-trick for him.
The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes, Read by Niamh Daly, Penguin, 4 CDs, 4hrs, £12.99
"Crossed women, crossed lines, crossed swords," is the tagline on this generous slice of romance fiction, though it might just as well say "Does exactly what it says on the tin", for Marian Keyes is as reliable a writer as you'll find inside the genre or out of it. Three well-balanced storylines, characters you can care about, and clever comic writing that includes hilarious send-ups of publishing and media folk - especially us reviewers. All read with the right amount of tongue in cheek by Niamh Daly.
The Portrait By Iain Pears, Read by Peter Capaldi, HarperCollins, 4 tapes, 6hrs, £15.99
As a regular audio "reader" of the darkly comic fables of another Scottish Iain - Banks - Peter Capaldi is no stranger to edgy, off-beam fiction. But The Portrait might have been designed as "the book they couldn't do on audio" - it's a six-hour monologue by a first-person narrator with no pauses, no interludes, no mercy. Capaldi grabs this unpromising text and turns it into an audio tour de force. Is Pears's chilling examination of the relationship between artist and critic, set on a remote island off the coast of Brittany, any good? Don't know and don't care: Capaldi's audio version is mesmerising.