Audiobooks

The X-Files: Ground Zero read by Gillian Anderson

Footfalls in Memory read by Terry Waite and Martin Jarvis

Tales of the supernatural can easily be camped up on audiotape, but The X-Files: Ground Zero (HarperCollins, pounds 7.99) is played very straight by Gillian Andersen (Scully in the cult TV series). The familiar laconic flatness of her voice brings the perpetually puzzled partners Scully and Mulder, the most intuitively sensitive of all FBI agents, vividly into the inward eye

It was a wise move to get the versatile Martin Jarvis to read tasters of the books that Terry Waite recalled to mind, wished he'd had, and was actually given during his long years of confinement in Beirut, now collected in Footfalls in Memory (Hodder Headline, pounds 7.99). Waite himself has a tendency to plum-in-the-mouth pomposity which belies the interest of the selection and sensitivity of his commentary.

Christina Hardyment