Fun with particle physics

The End of Mr Y, by Scarlett Thomas, read by Clare Corbett and Steven Pacey (14hrs unabridged, Clipper, £29.95)

If anyone had suggested that I would not only finish but actually enjoy a book in which a bunch of ferociously clever PhD students sit around eating roasted vegetables and discussing the relative merits of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics versus the many-worlds interpretation, I'd most likely have said "dream on". To be fair, in between analyses of Einstein and Derrida and arcane jokes about the periodic table, there's a terrific story. Ariel Manto, working on her thesis about an eminent scientific Victorian, Thomas Lumas, comes across a rare copy of his last book, The End of Mr Y, in a secondhand bookshop. It's the intriguing tale of a man who stumbles on a potion at a fairground stall that allows him to travel back in time to what he calls the troposphere, or the universe of the collective unconscious. There's just one snag: the book carries a curse; read it and you will die. Undaunted, Ariel - a feisty young woman who weathered her dysfunctional childhood on a housing estate by getting a library card and binge-reading everything on the shelves - determines to get hold of the ingredients for the potion (there's a recipe in the book) and do a bit of metaphysical space tourism herself. As heroines go, she's not exactly lovable. She's more of a weirdo - casual sex, dangerous sex, she's game for anything - but Clare Corbett's exuberant, intelligent reading succeeds in making her hugely attractive. In cold print I suspect she'd be insufferable.

The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks, read by Peter Kenny (7hrs unabridged, Hachette, £16.99)

At last, only 24 years after it was first published, I've finally got hold of a version of Banks's extraordinary first novel with a reader who does it justice. It isn't often that I have to abandon an audio because the reader is driving me to distraction - beggars can't be choosers - but there are a few authors whose novels simply don't make sense without the right person reading them. This is one of them. It's the story of 17-year-old Francis Cauldhame, whose family makes the Starkadders sound run-of-the-mill. At three, Frankie was savaged by a dog, losing most of his genitalia; by the age of nine, he had killed three young relatives, recalling his part in their deaths with the amused nostalgia usually reserved for anniversaries and reunions. His older brother, Eric, has just escaped from the mental asylum where he's been locked up for setting dogs on fire, and, while he waits for the renegade to show up, Frankie carries out his daily ritual of torturing wasps and inspecting his "sacrifice poles", topped with the skulls of animals he has throttled, stabbed or shot. No, it doesn't sound funny, but believe me it is - it has to be, otherwise it would be too grim to contemplate. Peter Kenny is the one reader (I've heard five) who brings out Banks's glorious sardonic wit. Good things are worth waiting for.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated and read by Simon Armitage (2hrs, Faber, £12.99)

Weird and wonderful doesn't come more inspiring than this epic Middle English poem about a mysterious knight, green from head to toe including his beard and his horse, who appears one Christmas at King Arthur's Round Table. In one hand he brandishes a sprig of holly, in the other "the mother of all axes, a cruel piece of kit, I kid you not". Do any of the bumfluffed bairns he challenges have the gall, the gumption or the guts to cut off his head? Armitage's translation is accessible as a comic strip, but here's the joy of it: the poetry is still there. For once the rave reviews are fully justified.