Facing Up, by Bear Grylls, read by the author (Macmillan, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
Suppose - OK, it's unlikely, but just suppose - you broke your back in a freefall parachuting accident in Africa. What would you do for an encore? Young Bear Grylls came up with the obvious answer: I think I'll jolly well climb Everest, he said - and then he did, a real-life case of "the Bear went over the mountain" I suppose. This is the engaging, if not especially literary, tale of how the brave young Britisher cobbled together enough sponsorship for a summit attempt. Oh, yes, it's all about money these days, but it's still about bravery too: one out of every five would-be summiteers climbers dies on those awe-inspiring slopes.
'Tis, by Frank McCourt, read by the author (HarperCollins, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
The sequel to the global bestseller Angela's Ashes sees the 19-year-old Frank arrive in the New World, where he promptly falls into the sweaty clutches of a dodgy priest (think Father Jack, but substitute "Boys!" for "Girls!" and you have the idea). The priest must have been desperate, for Frank was no catch, with his rotten teeth, infected eyes and lack of schooling. But if you've ever wondered how such a callow youth managed to produce a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, listen carefully as the Limerick lad settles down to a life of hard graft and self-improvement, courtesy of the Democratic party, the US Army and New York University. A different way of climbing Everest, perhaps? McCourt reads in his usual imperturbable style.
A Tribute To Jim Kemmy (Earth productions, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99)
Like Frank McCourt, the late Jim Kemmy TD emigrated from Limerick in his teens and educated himself by means of a voracious appetite for books. But where McCourt ended up as a media darling, Kemmy grew into an icon of the left - a precarious plinth for these ultra-conservative times. This is a biography, but it's also a magpie collection of fascinating snippets offered by friends and colleagues. You never know what's coming next, whether a reference to the anti-Semitism which overtook Limerick in the first decade of the century, or the trip made to Russia in 1891 by six Limerick pork butchers and six bricklayers, one of whom was Kemmy's grandfather - and if the sound quality of some of the interviews is variable, it all adds to the energy level, like watching a film shot with a hand-held camera. Deep concern for the unfortunate? Giving people space to think for themselves? Jim Kemmy still has a lot to teach us, folks. If you have trouble finding it, contact Earth Productions, 2 Waterloo Ave, North Strand, Dublin 3.
Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney, read by the poet (Penguin, 2 tapes, 2 1/4 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
In its original form the medieval tale of marauding monsters from the fens has an unbending ferocity which, though powerfully direct, is still alien territory for the modern reader. By rendering it into a lithe, supple language which is both his own and not his own, Seamus Heaney has done us all an incalculable favour. Contemporary phrases - "gumption", "your arms and your gear" - stride out alongside the whale road and the mead-houses; the ancient story's irresistible momentum is restored and given, as read by Heaney, a turf-warmed Derry tonality.
White, by Rosie Thomas (Random House, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
Everybody, it seems, wants to climb Everest. But a romantic novel set on those forbidding slopes - isn't that a bit of a tall order? Thankfully, there's more bickering at the bivouacs than shenanigans in the sleeping bags in this soft-centred yarn of a motley group comprising a Welsh pro, an American doctor (young, female, forced to prove herself as a man never would be, with disastrous results) and a dilettante-ish hero who, naturally, turns out to be made of The Right Stuff. It's all helped by reader Juliet Stevenson's razor-sharp timing.
Friends in High Places, by Donna Leon, read by Tim Pigott-Smith (Random House, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
Commissario Guido Brunetti has matured into one of the most amiable of crime fiction cops, and when he is visited by a planning official who informs him his Venetian apartment doesn't officially exist and may have to be demolished, the reader's sense of outrage is as real as if a friend were about to be turfed on to the street. He sets off on a trail which leads, inevitably, to the seamier side of life on the Via Veneto - but there's nothing inevitable about the denouement, and Leon keeps the storyline moving as smoothly as a gondolier's elbow. PigottSmith has great fun with a variety of Italian mobsters and you will, too, with this dolce vita audiobook. If you're going on holiday any time soon, don't leave home without it.
Emotionally Weird, by Kate Atkinson, read by Frances Tomelty (HarperCollins, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
Less a case of listening, more a case of buying a ticket for a roller-coaster ride that might, you quickly realise, lead anywhere. On paper it all looks tidy, even dull - Effie and her mother Nora tell each other stories, Effie of her life at a Dundee college, Nora of her weird and not-so-wonderful family life, which has led (or, more accurately, driven) her to a windswept Scottish island. This somewhat glum summary fails, however, to capture the swoopy wackiness of Atkinson's modus operandi, and the spirited humour of Frances Tomelty's reading - so let's just say that the opening sentence is "My mother is a virgin", and that one of the characters is a yellow dog.
Set in Darkness, by Ian Rankin, read by James MacPherson (Orion Audiobooks, 4 tapes, 6 hrs, £12.99 in UK)
Prepare to be preached at with the zeal of the newly converted, for, lo! I hated the first Ian Rankin book I came across, and it took the impressive recent TV adaptation, Black and Blue, plus this six-hour stunner to convince me otherwise. A skeleton in a fireplace, the murder of a Scottish MP, planning shenanigans and the Edinburgh underground (toughs not trains) are all swirled around under Rankin's watchful eye, and emerge as potently robust as a glass of Glenfiddich - for which the hero, Detective Inspector Rebus, has a particular fondness. Style, sarcasm, subtlety; it's all here, and all read with elegant ease by James MacPherson (the good-looking one from Taggart). Convinced?
