Audiobooks

Four-cassette audio novels are much more than twice as good as two cassette ones and much less than twice the price. Happily there seems to be a distinct shift in favour of these meatier abridgements. Elizabeth George's Deception on His Mind (Hodder, 6hrs, pounds 11.99) is a classic English detective thriller with plenty of red herrings and a totally unexpected climax. Read with chameleonic flair by Derek Jacobi.

Intergalactic truth seems a lot stranger than fiction. Improvisations with duck tape saved the day for the jinxed fifth American mission to the moon. At a time when our sympathies are with the Russian astronauts in the Mir spaceship, the faction tale of Apollo 13 (Hodder, 3hrs, pounds 8.99) makes heart-stopping listening. Kerry Shale reads with all the laconic boy scout heroism that Tom Hanks and company provided in the movie.