Audio-books are a newish Aladdin’s Cave to plunder for presents - for adults as well as children. But when the abridgments are done with care, there are some outstanding treats to be had.

The coup of the season has to be Arthur Miller’s own reading of his autobiography Time Bends (Reed), a riveting narrative covering public and private life - everything from the McCarthy witch-hunts to his tragic marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Miller emerges as a strikingly honest chronicler, and an accomplished reader.

Behind the Wall (also Reed) is Colin Thubron’s account, read by Kenneth Haigh, of a journey through China. He meets survivors of the Cultural Revolution, and describes the decimation of the social landscape, where - variety and beauty having been criminalised - chess was banned, and flowers and trees torn up. Women stand on buses while young men sit, but they are still lucky to be alive when so many of their sisters were disposed of, thanks to the national obsession with male offspring. What Thubron thinks is a pet shop, full of cats, kittens, owls and monkeys, turns out to be a butcher’s. Positively Martian.

Quentin Crisp reads his autobiography The Naked Civil Servant (Penguin). It took courage to display homosexuality when Crisp first did: housewives hissed, jeering crowds followed him, workmen spat on his gilded toenails. Attacked by thugs, he continued to brazen it out. In a gravelly voice, this brave narcissist relates how he progressed from the effeminate to the bizarre. From the age of 28 onwards, he never did anything he didn’t want to do, except grow old.

Also for Penguin, William Hootkins reads Paul Theroux’s The Pillars of Hercules, a Mediterranean tour whose title refers to Gibraltar and Ceuta (in Morocco). Tourism has ruined much of the coastline he follows, but he is enraptured by Corsica, appalled by the howling, grabbing beggars of Albania, and discovers that Malta has the culture of south London in a landscape like Lebanon.

With A Christmas Carol we have a choice. Geoffrey Palmer reads the Penguin version in a poised and dignified manner, bringing out the characters’ light and shade. Cover to Cover has enlisted Miriam Margolyes, whose test-reading in a BBC studio was interrupted by a key figure complaining that there seemed to be about nine people in the booth, not one. She gives a splendidly OTT performance, probably very similar to Dickens’s own readings.

Cover to Cover also publishes Trollope’s Phineas Redux, the sequel to Phineas Finn, with Timothy West giving another assured and convincing performance. This gripping but little-known novel reveals 19th-century political antics which closely prefigure those of today. Phineas finds himself arrested for murder, and the tale closes with a courtroom drama.

Ex-lawyer, and deviser of many a courtroom drama, John Grisham has produced in The Rainmaker his best book yet (Random House publishes this and all his previous novels in cleverly abridged form). This is perfect for air travel: if you switch on at take-off, you won’t stop listening till touch-down.

Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh is available in a reading by Art Malik (Random House). Admirers of his style will doubtless enjoy this; those who have never read him will be able to decide for themselves if they like the ornate complexity of this ancestral puzzle.

After the grim beauty of White Fang, Naxos now offers another Jack London story, Call of the Wild. Abducted from his pleasant life in the south, the canine protagonist becomes a brutalised sled dog, until he finally breaks free to join a wild pack. Having worked with sledgers and their dogs, London had lived through the experiences in this tale, which is read with exhilarating conviction by Garrick Hagon.

Naxos has also just published Robinson Crusoe, the first English novel, in a gritty reading by Nigel Anthony. One of the surprises of this tale - so often travestied - lies in the elegant dignity of Man Friday. And it’s salutary to be reminded of the contrast with Swiss Family Robinson, whose protagonists seemed to have a DIY shop and the entire resources of Sainsbury’s at their command. Crusoe is happy to improvise.

Penguin’s sensitive abridgment of Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, is read with subtle skill by Geraldine McEwan. Hodder has filleted Wuthering Heights into two tapes, but Richard Pasco reads so well that this drama of obsessional love emerges in all its grim magnificence. In a longer abridgment from Naxos, Freda Dowie and Ken Drury perform comparably well. Apart from length and price, there is little to choose between these versions.

Naxos also offers a thrilling version of Huckleberry Finn. Garrick Hagon infuses the 12-year-old hero’s voice with anarchic vigour, as he discovers the reality of racist slavery. His attempted escape with “Nigger Jim” on a Mississippi raft is very moving: uneducated but astute, he is the ideal narrator.

Cover to Cover.

A Christmas Carol, two cassettes Pounds 7.99 Phineas Redux, 16 cassettes Pounds 44.99 Cover to Cover mail order, 01264 731227 Hodder Wuthering Heights, two cassettes Pounds 5.99 (W H Smith exclusive) Naxos Call of the Wild, Huckleberry Finn, two cassettes each, Pounds 5.99 Robinson Crusoe, Wuthering Heights, three cassettes Pounds 7.49 Penguin The Pillars of Hercules, A Christmas Carol, and The Naked Civil Servant, two cassettes each, Pounds 7.99 Persuasion, four cassettes, Pounds 9.99 Random House The Moor’s Last Sigh, four cassettes Pounds 12.99 The Rainmaker, four cassettes Pounds 12.99 Reed Time Bends, Behind the Wall, two cassettes each Pounds 7.99 Tapes are generally available from general bookshops.