Books: Spoken word

On the whole I don't bother to review lousy audiobooks, but Apaches (Random House, 2hrs 30mins, pounds 8.99) is so very lousy that I can't resist doing so. I don't suppose that Lorenzo Carcaterra's cardboard cut- out story of seven ex-cops who rescue a kidnapped 13-year-old after only a few hours of casual rape and a coupla' sessions of voodoo was ever meant to be more than a film vehicle. Unintelligibly abridged, it is a complete waste of time, the sort of thing that gives spoken word a bad name.

By contrast, Fergal Keane's Letter to Daniel: despatches from the heart (BBC, 2hrs, 45mins, pounds 8.99) is a near-perfect production: an intensely moving blend of the personal - his thoughts on first holding his newborn son, his memories of his grandmother's house in Ireland, long the stable centre of his world, and the public - the foreign correspondent with a conscience, trying to make some sort of sense of man's inhumanity to man.

Christina Hardyment