TALKING books are brilliant. Listen to them anytime, anywhere and without having to take your hands off the wheel to turn the pages.

Pass a long, boring, delayed rail journey through the privacy of your headphones; enjoy a book at bedtime without getting eye strain; or pass the time on a long drive with your book in the car stereo - but beware losing yourself in the exciting bits when you are in heavy traffic!

Dick Francis has been churning out bestsellers based on horse racing for decades and is reaching a new audience with his books on cassette.

Twice Shy (Penguin Audiobooks, £8.99) was first published on paper 20 years ago and even if you read it then, it was long enough ago for you to have forgotten the plot.

A school teacher is unwittingly in possession of computer tapes containing a bookie-breaking betting system and the baddies are prepared to murder and torture to get them back.

Fourteen years later, the teacher's younger brother is threatened by one of the self-same thugs and the nightmare returns.

The story was written at a time when home computers were almost unheard of, the floppy disk had not been invented and the comparatively primitive data was recorded on cassette tapes.

The book is read by stage, film and TV actor Martin Jarvis and runs for two hours and 45 minutes on two cassettes.

u LOVE her or loathe her, you cannot get away from Barbara Windsor. From the busty, brainless blonde of the Carry On films to the feisty landlady, Peggy Mitchell, in TV's EastEnders, she is now something of an institution. She reads her own three-hour autobiography, All of Me - My Extraordinary Life (Hodder Headline Audiobooks, £8.99).

Barbara has revealed almost all on the big screen, but in her life story she does reveal all in a refreshingly honest, entertaining and moving memoir of 50 years in showbiz. It reads - with a liberal sprinkling of four-letter words - like Carry On Confessions, with a catalogue of her sexual adventures and abortions. But the name-dropping of British showbiz characters is fascinating.