Audiobooks: Great listens for your drive

"Shrines of Gaiety," by Kate Atkinson. (Random House Audio, unabridged, 16 hours.)

Set in the 1920s in a London of Bright Young Things and disenchanted war veterans, Atkinson's 12th novel is an ingenious cat's cradle of linkages, loops and wittily contrived coincidences. Nightclub owner (and mother of six) Nellie Coker finds her empire under threat from three different parties: a corrupt policeman; a bad apple from Malta; and Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, who would like to bring Nellie down.

To this end, Frobisher has accepted the assistance of Gwendolyn Kelling, who has come from York to find two runaway teenagers, aspiring actress Freda and her galumphing friend Florence. Funny, suspenseful, occasionally poignant, the story is served magnificently by Jason Watkins, whose performance captures the manner and voice of each character to perfection. You may remember him from "The Crown" as a plain-speaking Yorkshireman, Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and he brings that accent into play here too, capturing the bluntness, so disconcerting to Londoners, of Gwendolyn, Freda and cloddish Florence.

"The Whalebone Theatre," by Joanna Quinn. (Random House Audio, unabridged, 18 1/3 hours.)

Quinn's debut novel is an enticing concoction of surefire ingredients: resourceful, determined girls growing into strong, independent women; a heartless, self-involved stepmother; artists and their scandalous domestic arrangements; the decline of England's landed estates; the Second World War and French Resistance; wartime heroics; love, friendship and a (dead) whale.

The sprawling story begins in 1919 and follows three half-siblings, Cristabel, Florence and young Digby Seagrave, who grow up in a grand(ish) manor house on the coast of Dorset. Under the leadership of the indomitable Cristabel, and with scenery devised by a louche Russian painter, the children put on theatrical productions staged in a whalebone structure. Adventure and suspense enter the picture when two of the children, now grown, become undercover operatives in Nazi-occupied France.

Though the story has less of a plot than an expansion, it is held together by narrator Olivia Vinall, who has a low, pleasant voice of the sort that once marked the upper classes. She doesn't "do" voices so much as invest each character with a tone and cadence appropriate to his or her personality.

"README.txt: A Memoir," by Chelsea Manning. (Macmillan, unabridged, 9 hours.)

Manning reads her own memoir, a methodical account of the circumstances that culminated in her 2010 decision to leak thousands of military documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Shocked by what she learned from her work as an Army intelligence analyst, Manning believed the American people should know what was really being done in their name: indiscriminate killing and abuse of civilians, vendettas, corruption, incompetence, callousness.

She tells, too, of her years in prison, during which she endured weeks of being caged, long soul-destroying periods of solitary confinement, and the wanton exercise of power by prison and military functionaries. Her memoir is also — and crucially — a painful story of her alienation from her assigned sex at birth and of finally attaining her true identity as a woman. Manning reads her book in a sharp voice that is clearly accustomed to marshaling information, though she does, at times, slide over consonants and collapse syllables.

A Minnesota native, Katherine A. Powers reviews for the Star Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. She writes this column for the Washington Post.