Voices and reading styles are such personal things. (That is why the digital platform – specifically websites with audio samples – is such a boon to audiobooks.) You know you want to listen to Sense and Sensibility or Treasure Island, but what kind of voice and what kind of interpretation can you hear in your head?

There are so many variables in voice quality alone: to one person, Voice A has a ‘full strong classical voice’; to another, Voice A sounds rather plummy: ‘I couldn’t listen to that for any length of time – give me something easier on the ear!’

As for interpretation, you could have a classic done in classic style, or one with a more contemporary presence (in film this might be Keira Knightly, for example).

Then again, do you want a reader who can do unbelievable 3D characterisations, making the figures jump out of the CD? Or would you like a gentler approach, where the narrative is all and individual characters are ‘suggested’ rather than fully formed?

All this is crucial when deciding what to listen to, and the character of Naxos AudioBooks is formed as much by the readers we choose as by the titles themselves.

Take, for example, Bill Homewood who recorded a lot for us in our early days and has been doing more of late. He is a man with a strong personality and his readings are just like that. I couldn’t turn off his recent recording of King Solomon’s Mines – it was such a thrill... Boy’s Own from start to finish... I kept on going back to the gym and getting fitter and fitter on the running machine. And most of his recordings are like that... The Three Musketeers and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You know what you are getting from the moment you start.

So I many of you will enjoy the new digital-only release of his unabridged recording of The Count of Monte Cristo in April.

Neville Jason is quite another talent. A master reader, he casts an urbane reflection on his readings which I find totally compelling, though his characters are just as distinctive. And it is certainly important to choose the reader you like if you are about to embark on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past!

Neville Jason has recorded this for us, but you may be interested in hunting down an audio sample of the actor John Rowe. Another very fine reader, he started to read the Proust unabridged for Cover to Cover (now BBC Audiobooks) and took a different approach, with a more understated narration, pacing those long Proustian sentences with the calm motion of a long-distance runner.

There is no right or wrong way, of course: you just need to decide for yourself.

Being part of the Naxos (classical music) family, we are accustomed to the notion of performance interpretation of course, but I feel it is a concept that many in the book world don’t really appreciate. Look at the reviews of many recordings in the newspapers, and only on occasions will the performance or interpretation actually be the focus of the article. It is normally the book. I have always found this rather strange, especially with a classic (though of course I’m delighted with the attention we receive!).

Sometimes, it must be said, the performance simply cannot be ignored. Everyone reviewing Sean Barrett’s recording of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was astounded, especially by his Texan, especially as he is one of the finest readers of Samuel Beckett in the studio today (as well as Dickens... and Murakami... just listen to Kafka on the Shore!)

This month we release unabridged Anna Karenina read by Kate Lock. We first presented Anna Karenina some years ago in abridged form, with music, read by Laura Paton. She had an idiomatic feel for the novel and its traditional Russian roots – maybe because of her Slav family background – and she was widely praised. Kate Lock, however, gives the novel a more contemporary feel which some 21st-century listeners may prefer, so I enjoin you to listen and compare!

Audio samples come into their own in other areas. There is a growing amount of free audiobook material available on the web. There are many people out there, without a professional acting background (and some with, but who do not have the opportunity to record for a label), who feel they want to read Robinson Crusoe or Vanity Fair from beginning to end. And they sit in their front room and read, using recording and editing equipment which ranges from the basic to the advanced. Then they create their own website, or find a website to which they can contribute. This is part of the global Internet culture.

Some of these recordings, I am sure, are fine. There are some wonderful amateurs out there (as there are in music); but many I have experienced do show their origins, and a professional quality offers another level.

Of course there may be occasions when you think ‘to be honest, all I want to do is get to grips with the text, and it doesn’t really matter how it is read’. But most of the time it matters very much.

So – make the most of the audio samples! Naxos AudioBooks was one of the first audiobook publishers to have all its titles presented with instantly accessible samples online. You could easily spend a happy hour clicking through a series of samples to get to know different voices.

Almost certainly, you will find an unexpected gem!

Nicolas Soames

Anna Karenina is beautiful, married to a successful man, and has a son whom she adores. But a chance meeting at a train station in Moscow sets her passionate heart alight, and she is defenceless in the face of Count Vronsky’s adoration. Having defied the rules of nineteenth-century Russian society, Anna is forced to pay a heavy price. Human nature, with all its failings, is the fabric of which this great and intense work is composed. Anna Karenina has been described as the perfect Russian novel.

‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’
The common view of the Romans is that they were only interested in watching gladiators hack one another to pieces, and in lying on couches while they stuffed large meals down their throats. But of course they were a busy and clever people, who built up a great empire to prove it, with fine cities and harbours, bath houses and roads, laws and good government. In this audiobook you can hear the stories of the great Roman emperors and the enduring legacy that they left for later generations.

“‘...he seemed to stare... with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, “The horror! The horror!”’”
On a becalmed yawl in the Thames estuary, Marlow tells a tale of Africa. His job there is to find the enigmatic Kurtz, but his journey farther and farther upriver reveals the brutality of the white Imperialists who run the country. Established as one of the great English novels, and a story of mythic power, Heart of Darkness is rich in meaning – allusive, enthralling and haunting.

The Chuzzlewits are a family divided by money and selfishness; even young Martin, the eponymous hero, is arrogant and self-centred. He offends his grandfather by falling in love with the latter’s ward, Mary, and sets out to make his own fortune in life, travelling as far as America – which produces from Dickens a savage satire on a new world tainted with the vices of the old. Martin’s nature slowly changes through his bitter experience of life and his enduring love for Mary. Martin Chuzzlewit is one of Dickens’s most humorous and satirical novels, and it contains two great comic creations: the hypocrite Pecksniff and the drunken nurse Sarah Gamp.

Pleasures of the Garden begins in ancient China and ends on the Isle of Man; it admires both stately landscaped parks and a soap box full of red geraniums on a fire-escape. It shows that gardening is for everybody, whatever their resources. It features classic writers on gardens such as John Evelyn and Gertrude Jekyll, famous historical figures like Pliny, Francis Bacon and Thomas Jefferson, the novelists Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the poets John Donne, John Clare, W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling.

Religion is central to the lives of millions of people around the globe. But how did the great religions begin, and what do their followers believe? Religions of the World tells the remarkable story of some of the faiths which have helped to shape the way we live today. Aimed at younger listeners, it introduces the history and scriptures, beliefs and customs of some of humanity’s most enduring religious traditions, and looks at their place in the lives of men, women and children across the world.

When her father remarries, the honest, innocent Molly Gibson suddenly finds herself with a new stepsister, Cynthia, who is beautiful, worldly and impetuous. This would be more than enough to deal with, but the new wife is the deeply snobbish (and darkly secretive) Hyacinth. Thwarted love, scheming ambition and small-town gossip underlie the warmth, irony and brilliant social observation which link the relationships and the inevitable conflicts as profound change comes to rural England. The most mature and rewarding of her novels, Wives and Daughters places Elizabeth Gaskell in the first rank of English authors.

When her father remarries, the honest, innocent Molly Gibson suddenly finds herself with a new stepsister, Cynthia, who is beautiful, worldly and impetuous. This would be more than enough to deal with, but the new wife is the deeply snobbish (and darkly secretive) Hyacinth. Thwarted love, scheming ambition and small-town gossip underlie the warmth, irony and brilliant social observation which link the relationships and the inevitable conflicts as profound change comes to rural England. The most mature and rewarding of her novels, Wives and Daughters places Elizabeth Gaskell in the first rank of English authors.