A Word in Your Ear: Carol Shields, Lives of the Great Artists

Carol Shields excels in drawing our attention to the significance of familiar things. The narrator of the Booker-shortlisted Unless (HarperCollins, c. 6 hrs, read by Lorelei King, £12.99) is 44-year-old Rita, a wife and mother whose literary dabblings are oddly split between translating a German feminist and her happy-ending "summertime novels". Then one of her daughters rejects college, friends and family to sit on a street corner with a sign around her neck saying simply, "goodness". With agonising thoroughness, leavened with dry humour, Rita re-examines the world of home for clues, trying to escape her own (and the world's) assumption that she must be to blame. Don't worry; there's a happy ending. Mum rules OK.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) rubbed shoulders with many of the greatest artists of the Renaissance – Michelangelo, Titian, Signorelli – and he could talk to men who knew or remembered many more: Leonardo, Mantegna, Raphael and Dürer. His intimate Lives of the Great Artists (Naxos, c. 8 hrs, tapes, £18.99, CDs £24.99) is full of arresting details: Pietro di Cosimo used to boil 50 eggs at a time in his glue-pot to save the bother of cooking; Leonardo would follow people whose head attracted him around the streets until he could go home and recreate them. Neville Jason reads with fluent confidence; he also made the selections and wrote the usefully full cover notes. As many of the artists were also musicians, the contemporary music which frames the selections is especially apposite.