Reading audiobooks rocks.

It’s hard work, don’t get me wrong: reading and repeatedly re-reading text of between 50 – 100,000 words is a labour of love.

But by doing this, you get a side-benefit you never expected: you meditate on the words, you read them different ways, you notice different angles. I think it is a path to wisdom.

But you need a great text to start with. I major on the classics, from Dickens to Gogol, but surprised myself by taking on a text from an independent author and falling in love with the words he wrote.

So I’m recommending him to you. He is a page turner. If you get the audiobook to listen to in the car the hours will just fly by.

William Peskett has had excellent reviews in the national press for his set of short stories, “The Day Of The Tiger”. And rightly so. Perceptive and clever, unflinching and always ready with a new twist, his stories are compulsive reading.

And, indeed, listening.

So if you’re looking for a great read: or a tale told during a long and tedious freeway journey; or something to delight you when sleep will not come in the early hours: these are true storyteller’s tales, and you will never for a moment regret spending good hard cash on them. They are, so to speak, ‘keepers’. I find myself alluding to them in conversations; they have broadened my horizons.

The problem is, you have to be there, reading them, to understand why they’re so great: many based in Peskett’s chosen home of Thailand, they paint characters with fine brush strokes, humour and compassion. They deal with all manner of man, from the young girl who yearns to fly in the planes which swoop over her head from the nearby airport, to the old man buried beneath a pile of rambutans. Taxi drivers, bank tellers, livestock farmers, plantation owners, they are all there, the great and the humble, the hilarious and the tragic, stepping through the pages of ‘The Day Of The Tiger’.

So: You can buy the audiobook here; though if you’d like to read it yourself instead of my mellifluous tones you can catch the book here. Either way, I would not recommend that you miss his words.

Because they are rather wonderful.