A LONG HOLIDAY journey is perfect for unabridged Dickens. Naxos have followed their excellent Bleak House with Our Mutual Friend (CDs, £85) his final finished novel, published in 1865. An almost dead man is fished out of the Thames by a scavenger and his daughter.

Who is he, and how did he get there? The answer lies deep in London’s lucratively managed rubbish heaps, and a gothic mystery worthy of Wilkie Collins unrolls. David Timson makes the cavalcade of contemporary types compellingly real – the nouveaux riches Veneerings, the pompous Podsnaps, Boffin the deep and devious king of Dust, the charitable Jew Riah and the touchingly mad Jenny Wren.

If you are into iPods, broad-band and downloads, go to gilbertwhiteselborne.com for a marvellous unabridged reading of The Natural History of Selborne(£18.49; also CD, £25 inc. p&p). The 18th-century naturalist’s intimate observations are a constant delight, relating details of the copulation and hibernation of tortoises, the friendship between a cat and a leveret and the language of birds (“little is said, but much is understood”). It is read by James Taylor, who has just the right elderly, gentle voice for White. A percentage of the profits go to the Gilbert White Museum at Selborne.

For a briefer taste of the classics, go for Andrew Sachs’s abridged Don Quixote (Hodder, CDs, £16.99/offer £16.14). Cervantes’ tale of an elderly eccentric who decides to live the life of a knight errant in an age that has no time for romance gave us such metaphors as tilting at windmills and castles in the air. Sachs perfectly captures Don Quixote’s demented grace and Sancho Panza’s rustic gullibility.

For holiday escapism, it is hard to beat Harlan Coben.

The latest is The Woods (Orion, CDs, £14.99, £14.24), narrated by Tim Machin. Two stories intertwine: a rape case involving three wealthy young men in a New Jersey fraternity and a friendless 16-year-old stripper, and the skeletons in the past of the prosecutor, whose life was changed by serial killings at a holiday camp when he was a young man. Coben can make you care about his characters, and has the skill to keep you desperate to know what will happen next.

Finally, two first-rate titles that I reviewed earlier in the year. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Orion, CDs, £16.99/ £16.14, also unabridged at £21.99/ £20.08, and as a download from audible.co.uk) is Paul Torday’s story of a sheikh who believes that he can bring his people closer to God through the spiritual peace to bederived fromsalmon fishing. The cast includes John Sessions as the fisheries expert who finds love and new faith in the unlikely enterprise, Samantha Bond as his icy wife, Andrew Sachs as the Hutton-esque interrogator and Andrew Marr as himself.

Ian McEwan’s own reading of On Chesil Beach (Random House, unabridged, CDs, £12.99/£12.35), a tale of words not spoken and gestures that failed, is ideal heard through headphones while sunning yourself. The audiobook also has an illuminating interview with the author.

Buy the books here

Celebrity choice: Martin Jarvis, actor

All the colours and scents of an exotic summer location make A CARIBBEAN MYSTERY: A MISS MARPLE MYSTERY by Agatha Christie the perfect Aggie audio. Plus, the expert reader is none other than my wife, Rosalind Ayres. Sunbathing with Ros and Miss Marple? Murderously irresistible.

Martin Jarvis reads Wolf Winter by Clare Francis in a Macmillan audiobook, out now at £13

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