Audiobooks reviewed

Audiobooks are invaluable for keeping the children out of your hair while you're busy with other things. They are not, however, best-suited for the very young.

Rod Campbell's classic, Dear Zoo, is a case in point. One of the very best books you can buy a toddler, it has the simplest story - a zoo sends a child a series of animals, in boxes of different shape and size, which the child lifts a flap to name. The new audio version (Macmillan £8.99) includes animal noises instead of flaps, and Caroline Quentin reads it like the nicest kind of nursery school teacher but my test audience got bored in five minutes and demanded to go back to the book.

The Gruffalo, as probably the greatest picture book of the 21st century, has enjoyed a superstar recording process that won many awards. The sequel, The Gruffalo's Child (Macmillan £10) tells pretty much the same joke in reverse with the Gruffalo warning its child against "the Big Bad Mouse". Once again, the audiobook is embellished with original music, whistling wind and sound effects and read by the doughty Imelda Staunton. It's all very classy, yet as at least half the charm of the book lie in the wonderful paintings by Axel Scheffler, I'm not convinced. While both of these might give a very good child of three and over the impetus to look at the book alone, the reality is that you're better off with a DVD.

Narnia will be inescapable with the release of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. There are several competing versions on tape. BBC Audiobooks has issued a new dramatisation (£9.99) starring Paul Scofield as the Narrator and David Suchet as Aslan, which works very well thanks to stirring music and sound effects, and which has the merit of not losing C S Lewis's kindly narrative voice. Don't bother with the abridged version read by Michael Hordern (HarperCollins £12.99), despite its lovely harp music, unless you have very young children. Instead go for the unabridged recording read by Michael York, also from HarperCollins (£14.99), which gets Aslan's leonine melancholy just right.

For children of six and over, Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch Saves the Day (BBC Audiobooks, £4.99) is probably less frightening. Read with gargantuan relish by Miriam Margoyles, it tells of the hapless Mildred Hubble's doomed attempts to do better as a witch-in-training at Miss Cackle's Academy. As usual she gets into magical scrapes with her two friends, and although the terrifying Miss Hardbroom is no longer around to make her miserable there is an even worse teacher in the form of Miss Granite. Children enjoy reading the Worst Witch books by themselves, but they are just as good to listen to in the car; as Harry Potter's gentler predecessor they lack the over-blown exposition that is increasingly spoiling J K Rowling's magical world.

Although Stephen Fry's reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Bloomsbury £65) is as unctuously funny as ever, you can hear the needless repetition creeping into the early chapters. The penultimate Harry Potter will see you through the whole of Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and leaves us on a terrific cliff-hanger as, with Dumbledore dead, Harry sets off into the world alone to find the magical objects in which Voldemort has hidden his life.

Martin Jarvis's readings of Richmal Crompton's Just William stories are works of genius, and it is with joy I can say that a third new audiobook, William Again, is now ready from BBC Audiobooks (five CDs £17.99). The sophistication of the humour renders them incomprehensible to under-nines and irresistible to everyone with a middle-class bone in their body. The immortal boy has 14 stories in which to sell his friend Ginger's twin cousins as slaves, wreak havoc on an Irish holiday and much more.

The secret of Crompton's humour is the dryness with which she observes life with children (tantrums in which a child bites her nurse are tartly described as "a stirring domestic scene") and the unflagging sympathy for a boy whose irrepressible enthusiasm for being a great detective, a shipwrecked mariner or a circus ringmaster invariably leads to disaster. I especially love William's exhausted, polite, ferociously bored father, who, on hearing his son is writing a play, drawls: "Let's hope it's a nice long one."

Helen Dunmore's major new children's trilogy, Ingo (Harpercollins, £13.99), is a very different magical tale for 10+. Set in Zennor, it plays with the Cornish legend of a fisherman who caused a mermaid to fall in love with him (see review p28).Like the best kind of children's novel it is about much more than magic: about the loss of a parent, the dawn of adolescent unease with your body, the adrenalin rush of danger and the love of place. The quality of the writing, especially in describing the feeling of being underwater, is absolutely outstanding, and Dunmore's sensitivity to noise and music make this a particularly good adaptation for audio. Niamh Cusack's reading wavers between Cornish and Irish accents, and her emotional register is too limited for the intense scenes between brother and sister, but this is a great story for a long, wet journey.

Those longing for African heat should check out Naxos's recording of King Solomon's Mines (three CDs, £13.99). Naxos have been quietly making some of the best recordings of Victorian and Edwardian children's classics around, and this joins their excellent E Nesbit audiobooks as a must-have. Although my children began by squeaking, "That's racist!", and we were all appalled by the description of the elephant hunt, the thrill of Rider Haggard's yarn is undiminished. Bill Homewood's ability to summon up the entire cast, from Sir Henry Curtis, Dr Goode and beautiful Foulata to the evil King Twala and the witch Gagool, is magnificent. He gets the clicks, the accents, the rhythm of the prose and the feel of Africa spot on. The music, a mixture of Max Steiner's original score to King Kong and Gottschalk's Night in the Tropics is powerfully evocative. I tried vainly for years to get my kids to read this book, and they listened agog as the four adventurers struggle across the burning desert, over Sheba's Breasts and into a lost kingdom where their former servant and the rightful king must fight a battle. If you have children of 10+, this is my choice for audiobook of the year. I only hope Naxos go ahead with She and Allan Quartermain next, because despite Rider Haggard's lack of political correctness, these are tales from a time when both Englishmen and Africans understood what heroism meant.

If that isn't hot enough for you, Darren Shan's Lord Loss (HarperCollins £14.99, read by Rupert Degas) will open up the pit of hell. This is a very, very scary book - don't let kids under 13 read or listen to it, it really will freak them out. Our narrator, Grubs Grady, seems to be just another stroppy teenager, moaning about his mum, his sneaky older sister and being punished for smoking. But why are his family obsessed by chess, and why is he sent away one night? He finds out when he sneaks home to find them horrifically eviscerated by the demons of Lord Loss, who has a pact with his family to play chess for their souls. You don't need the creepy drum effects, the female voices wailing and the usual deep echoing Satanic voice to have your hair standing on end. Shan's talent for imagining what could scuttle out of Hell - a baby with mouths on its hands, a scalp crawling with cockroaches and a heart filled with snakes - and then making it fiendishly funny is dazzling. For kids who want a different kind of nightmare before, during and after Christmas, this is the one to keep them spellbound.