Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
Persephone Audio, five CDs, £20

Tell Me About It by Maurice Leitch
Absolute Audiobooks, four CDs, £14

Persephone Books, which specialises in reissuing neglected novels, found a peach in Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which was written in 1938 and is soon to be a film, starring Frances McDormand, who reads the audio version.

Fortysomething Miss Pettigrew is down on her luck, scared of the children she is supposed to teach, but when she accidentally arrives in the racy, cocaine and cocktail-fuelled world of actress Delysia LaFosse, beautician Edith du Barry, smoulderingly sexy Nick, the nightclub owner, and the impetuous and charming Michael, she finds herself, for 24 glorious hours, half Cinderella, half Delphic oracle.

With repartee worthy of Noël Coward, this will keep you chuckling but also touch your heart. Congratulations, too, on the prettiest and most practical CD casing I've come across.

Written and read by Maurice Leitch, Tell Me About It is a surreal shaggy dog of a tale that also features inebriate ramblings in London, this time in the 1960s.

We travel in the mind of Blair Burnside, a Radio 3 producer who is ineffectually recording the ways of the Irish in Britain, but the star of this show is fat, canny Crilly, who shepherds the disaster-prone Blair in and out of a series of bizarre encounters with their fellow Irish émigrés.

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