Children's books: Old and new friends on audiobooks
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Your support makes all the difference.The enduring popularity of Beatrix Potter's 23 little books is a reassuring tribute to the charm of an elegant and unusual vocabulary used to tell unpredictably quirky tales. To celebrate the centenary of Peter Rabbit, Penguin has reissued them in the classic readings by Michael Hordern, Patricia Routledge and Tim-othy West, with music by Carl Davis. Each of three double cassettes (£7.99 each) has six to eight stories, and two hours of entrancing listening.
Almost equally well known are Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories (Naxos, 3hrs 30mins, £8.99). This new production is read by Geoffrey Palmer, allowing Kipling's bouncily alliterative narratives full rein. An added delight is the appropriate music: Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals for "The Elephant's Child", a Mozart horn concerto for the whale's horrid experience with the mariner, Janacek for "The Cat Who Walked By Himself". A very different kind of cat turns up in Jacqueline Wilson's The Cat Mummy (BBC Cover to Cover, 1 hr 20mins, £3). The old cat Mabel has always been a source of secret comfort to Verity, whose family can never bring themselves to talk about about her dead mother. When Mabel dies, the little girl tries to mummify her, inspired by a school project on the Egyptians. It's funny and sad in equal measure, and read by Wilson herself.
Frances Hodgon Burnett's The Secret Garden (Naxos, 2hrs 40mins, £8.99) has endured in children's affections almost as long as Peter Rabbit. Jenny Agutter reads with a mixture of vulnerability and pugnacity that is perfect for the famous tale of contrary Mary and her mysterious playmate.
The second volume of Kevin Crossley Holland's Magic Tales: Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland is Legends and Enchantments (Orion, 1hr 30mins, £6.99). With old friends such as the Pedlar of Swaffham as well as such unusual wonders as The Butterfly Soul, it is just as enthralling as the first and is produced with the same subtle combinations of voices and musical effects.
Philip Ridley's The Mighty Fizz Chilla (Penguin, 4hrs, £7.99) is a wild tale of a wild little boy sent to zany family friends to sort out his attitude problems. He finds a soulmate in the extraordinary Captain Jellicoe, who has an obsession with a monster reminiscent of Captain Ahab's with Moby Dick. Ridley reads the story himself, with perfect pace and timing.
Cliff McNish's The Doomspell (Orion, 3hrs 37mins, £9.99) has one of the most compelling opening scenes I have ever heard: a noise in the cellar; first one and then another child dragged from normality through brick walls into another world by a witch as hideously beautiful as Morgan le Fay. Nor does it let up at any point; though full of wonderful imaginative leaps, it is tightly held to its story line. Its end holds hope but also hidden menace. This is the first of a planned trilogy by an exciting new talent.
Whitbread and Carnegie medal winner David Almond's prose stays in the mind like poetry; now he has recorded three of his unique novels himself: Skellig, the haunting tale of an angel found on earth, Secret Heart, in which a boy indentifies so closely with a tiger he all but becomes it, and Heaven Eyes, the story of a mysterious girl who ought not to be alive at all (Hodder, all c 3hrs, each £7.99). Finally, my favourite: Archer's Goon (Collins, 3hrs 30mins, £7.99), read with decisive zest by Miriam Margoyles, is one of Diana Wynne Jones's best and most mysterious stories, pitched as usual in a universe in which the mundane and the magical are convincingly mixed. "A goon is a being who melts into the foreground and stays there": only at the end do we see how Archer relates to the seven megalomanic wizard siblings fighting one another for world dominance.
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