Celebrating love this February? Choose one of several recent audios which feature this theme!

Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (HighBridge, $36.95, abridged, 10 CDs, 12 hours) is one of the strangest love stories ever told! Enter the relationship of Henry and Clare who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry thirty-six, and married when Henry was thirty-one and Clare was twenty-three. Impossible?! Here's the explanation. Henry is one of the first human beings diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder. He's a time traveler whose journeys are unpredicatable, funny, embarassing and sometimes dangerous. Clare has to cope with his sudden disappearances. Beautiful writing expresses both points of view, makes the story gripping, believable, and has you riding the emotional roller coaster with this devoted couple! The two voices would alone differentate and define the story, but Matti Meg-Ryan and Christopher Burns have voices so well chosen that they make the story live. My only complaint was that this was available abridged only!

Sirine is the heroine of Dina Abu-Jaber's Crescent (HighBridge, $34.95, abriged, nine hours, seven CDs). She's thirty-nine and has never been in love. Sirine lost her parents early in life and never recovered, though her life with a kind uncle and loving dog, King Babar, is happy. She enjoys her work at a Lebanese restaurant surrounded by the scents and delights of food, but she longs for love. When the poet, Hanif, enters her life, she is quick to fall in love, slow to mend the pieces of her broken heart, and struggles with her identity as an Arab-American. A mix of beautiful writing and sensory delights of all kinds. The male and female readings by Nike Doukas and Marcelo Tubert are excellent both in dramatic quality and in representing the two main characters.

Originally serialized in the New Yorker, Andrea di Robilant's A Venetian Affair (Recorded Books,$34.99; unabridged, seven cassettes;11.25 hours) traces an 18th century love affair with the help of letters the author's father found in the old family palazza. Young Andrea Memmo (the author's ancestor) and Giustinana Wynee (a half-English sixteen-year-old) began their affair in the gambling halls, costumed balls and salons of Venice and continued it into their maturity across decades and distances of Europe. The narration by Paul Hecht and interposed male and female voices of Lisette Lecat and Jeff Woodman reading the letters are all exellently executed and very effective!

New in audio is the second installment of the Otori trilogy, Lian Hearn's Grass for His Pillow, (Highbridge, $34.95; unabridged, eight CDs, nine and one half-hours). Again set in a mythical feudal Japan, this sequel begins as the hero,Takeo quitely leaves his sleeping true love, Kaede. Soon she discovers she is with child and the rest of the story goes back and forth between the two protaganist as they face their individual struggles. Kaede loses the child and must deal with her troubled ancestral home. Takeo flees the secret organization he's promised to join. Kaede's determination to avoid conventional behavior makes her the more interesting character. This second book didn't grip as the first did, but neither did it drag. The back and forth of narrators Kevin Gray and Aiko Nakasone differentiates and dramatizes somewhat, but their readings seemed somewhat wooden

Tracy Chevalier returns to art-based historical fact-fiction in The Lady and the Unicorn (PenguinAudio, $34.95; unabridged, seven CDs, approximately eight hours) Her focus is the set of medieval tapestries that hang in the Cluny Museum in Paris; six lavish scenes of women and a unicorn. Chevalier shifts settings from the house of a French nobleman and the weaving studios of a Brussels master. The main character, Nicolas, the tapestry designer, moves from one to the other, leaving a path of ruined women in his wake. In each setting we see the maneuvering of medieval women who strive to gain the power which rightly belongs to them, just as they do in the tapestries. Read by Robert Blumenfeld and Terry Donnelly, the shifts in voices add to the story, not just in clarity, but tone. Bluemnfeld's voice is rich and textured, while Donnelly's is gentle and determined at the same time.