A Word In Your Ear: The Autograph Man<br></br>Berlin: the downfall

Zadie Smith's ability to make oddball characters intensely sympathetic means that The Autograph Man (Penguin, abridged, 6 hrs 30 mins, £9.99) is touching as well as funny. Alex-Li Tandem, haunted by his gentle father's death from cancer, escapes from himself by becoming a dealer in autographs of the famous, but has to remain answerable to such friends as Adam, a black Jew with a hotline to God's purpose, as well as more materialistic cronies. The book is less firmly plotted than White Teeth, and I'm still not quite sure where we got to, if anywhere. But Smith's staccato, demotic prose is extra-enjoyable when it is spoken, and in Henry Goodman she has a reader who wraps himself around every character with equal versatility. Antony Beevor's highly fêted account of the destruction of Berlin in 1945 has topped the history bestseller lists for several months. As an audiobook, Berlin: the downfall 1945 (Penguin, unabridged, 11 hrs, £19.99) is searing stuff. Tim Piggott-Smith leads the listener inexorably through the gang-rapes by the Red Army as they approached the German capital, and the "hurricane of fire" that hit the unarmed "folk troops" left as cannon-fodder in the Reich's last-ditch defence. Keeping track of the many names and places is hard aurally (a "who's who" and map in the cover notes would help) but the detail is spellbinding – from the desperate plots by decent Germans to prevent Hitler's worst excesses to the rose-print dress in which Eva Braun chose to die beside her Führer.