Three great audiobooks for that long holiday drive

“The Spy and the Traitor: The Great Espionage Story of the Cold War”

“The Spy and the Traitor” lives up to its subtitle, not least because Ben Macintyre has no equal in portraying the real-life, chimerical world of double agents. He has found gold in Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KBG officer who passed Soviet secrets to Britain’s MI6 for more than a decade. Sickened by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Gordievsky resolved to undermine the oppressive regime and began to relay high-grade information to the British, some of which may, in Macintyre’s telling, have prevented a Third World War. Gordievsky was outed as a possible spy by CIA functionary and Soviet mole Aldrich Ames. Called back to Moscow and interrogated, Gordievsky knew he would be arrested, tortured and executed. Thus began his escape, a white-knuckle affair that is almost unbearably suspenseful. John Lee narrates the book with his usual panache. (Random House Audio, Unabridged, 13 1/4 hours) “Miguel Street” The earliest work by V.S. Naipaul, who died in August, is finally available as an audiobook. “Miguel Street” is a collection of linked stories set on a street in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad during the 1940s. Told from the point of view of a young neighborhood boy, the stories are an increasingly poignant chronicle of the small dramas and misfortunes of several recurring, highly idiosyncratic characters. Among them are Bogart, a man who has adopted the mien of that popular actor; Eddoes, rarely seen without a fashionable toothbrush in his mouth; Laura, proud of having eight children by seven fathers; Morgan, who aspires to make millions selling fireworks to “the King of England and the King of America”; and Popo, the carpenter who builds nothing. The dialogue comes in the patois of the Caribbean street, its cadence and beat beautifully rendered by Bahamian-born, American actor, Ron Butler. (Blackstone Audio, Unabridged, 5 3/4 hours) “The Silence of the Girls” Women played vital roles in the “Iliad,” notably in that it was Helen’s abduction that caused the Trojan war and Briseis’ appropriation by Agamemnon that sent Achilles into his fatal sulk. Missing from the poem, however, is a sense of the women’s point of view, and that is just what is supplied in all its desolation and heartbreak by Pat Barker in “The Silence of the Girls.” Barker recreates the story from the fall of the Trojan city Lyrnessus to shortly after the death of Achilles. The greater part is told by Briseis, a young woman who has watched as her menfolk were slaughtered. She is awarded to Achilles as his “prize of honor,” and her account is narrated by Kristin Atherton in a clear, soft voice that conveys both the resignation to fate and the determination to maintain personhood of a woman reduced from royalty to slavery. In time, Briseis’ version alternates with that of Achilles, passages narrated by Michael Fox, who lends them the proper moods of pride and grief over the death of his dear friend Patroclus. (Random House Audio, Unabridged, 10 3/4 hours)