They are two very different looks at war — one a true-life tale of the chaos today in Darfur, the other a novel set amid Bangladesh’s struggle for independence almost four decades ago — but both of this week’s audio books are worth a listen.

The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur, by Daoud Hari, read by Mirron Willis. Unabridged, 6 hours. Random House Audio, $34.

I’ll confess: I didn’t want to listen to this book. The continuing genocide in Darfur is difficult to hear about, and I thought that between newspaper stories and TV treatments, I knew all I needed to know about Sudan’s one-sided war against the tribal people of its western region.

But the book stared accusingly at me for weeks as I listened to detective stories and biographies, kids’ books and thrillers. Eventually, I put it in my CD player.

I’m glad I did. Hari — a Zaghawa tribesman who has worked with such well-known reporters as NBC’s Ann Curry and The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof, as well as with United Nations investigators, translating and trying to ensure their safe passage in and out of Darfur — tells a personal story that illuminates the region’s complex geopolitics.

Hari tells of the havoc wreaked in the villages by the Sudanese government’s helicopter gunships, working with the horseback-riding Janjaweed to clear the land of Darfur’s tribal people. He tells of the devastation of his family, and — most compellingly — of his capture and torture by forces aligned with the government while he was working with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Paul Salopek.

Accused of spying, Hari, Salopek and their driver are moved from place to place, sometimes tantalizingly close to freedom. They’re offered chances to escape if they will leave one another behind. They endure beatings and lack of food. All in all, their treatment is a microcosm of the brutality of the Sudanese government and the forces aligned with it.

In a pair of appendices, Hari offers first a primer on the players and history in Sudan, helping make sense of the chaos, and then a recitation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a 1948 document whose provisions the Sudanese government clearly is uninterested in observing.

In reading the book, Willis, an actor whose work has ranged from Shakespeare to several episodes as a detective on E.R., uses an African accent that seems perfect — understandable, but lending a strong feeling of authenticity to the story.

A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam, read by Madhur Jaffrey. Includes an author interview. Unabridged, 9 hours. Harper Audio, $34.95.

Bangladesh’s 1971 war for independence from Pakistan is the backdrop for this story of a mother’s love, and the lengths to which she’ll go to protect her children.

Rehana Haque is a widow whose son and daughter are in their late teens — just the right age for getting involved in radical politics — when East Pakistan, home to the Bengal people, declares its independence. A dozen years earlier, when Rehana’s husband Iqbal had just died, she had been forced to turn the children over for a year to Iqbal’s childless brother and sister-in-law, who had gone to court contending that Rehana lacked the means to raise them properly. Now Rehana is determined that, come what may, she will not lose them again.

As the year unfolds, and West Pakistan uses ever-escalating cruelty to keep the East under control, Rehana finds to her surprise that she’s knee-deep in the revolution — right alongside her willful daughter, Maya, and idealistic son, Sohail. Meanwhile, she’s falling in love with a former major in the Pakistani Army, a Bengali rebel brought to her house to recuperate after a botched guerrilla operation.

But everything she values is placed in jeopardy when her family falls under suspicion.

Anam, born in 1975 in Bangladesh but educated at Mount Holyoke and Harvard, deftly tells a complicated tale in this first book of a planned trilogy. In an interview that follows the book’s end, she explains that many of its events are based on stories told by her parents, who were freedom fighters during the war. But she never lets the larger events overwhelm the human story of Rehana and her family.

Jaffrey, an Indian-born actress and food writer who has appeared in several Merchant-Ivory films, is at home with these characters, and does an equally fine job as mother, child or interfering neighbor.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s South County regional editor.

arosenbe@projo.com