Listen to a clip from The Gathering

Listen to a clip from Shatter

When writers linger on close encounters of a genital kind it can make for tough listening. Anne Enright is undoubtedly a writer whose work, like that of James Joyce, is intensified by hearing it aloud. Fiona Shaw's mesmerising reading of her 2008 Man Booker prize novel The Gathering (Naxos, unabridged, 6 CDs, £19.99, offer £17.99 inc p&p from 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst) is a tour de force.

But the story is a tough one to take: we are lodged in the anguished head of a frequently drunk, sexual obsessive whose too-tidy world is imperfectly papered over her muddled memories of childhood. The tipping point that forces her to confront her ill-starred Irish family and to revisit and reinterpret her past is the suicide of the charming waster of a brother who shared its horrors with her. Not, then, a cheerful earful, with overtones of the woodshed in Cold Comfort Farm, but one that lovers of deft word-handling and searingly truthful exposure of human frailty may enjoy sipped in small doses (to leave time for reflection), perhaps when alone.

Michael Robotham's nail-biting thriller Shatter (Hachette, 5 CDs, £15.99, offer £14.39) features women victims in humiliating naked exposure, but the details are brief, and its compelling interest lies in his subtle drawing of the damaged psychology of an Afghan war veteran who uses mother love to entrap his victims. Dual narration (Tim Pigott-Smith as storyteller, Christopher Kelham as the killer) intensifies the experience.

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