Klasika

With a star cast including Richard Wilson as Humpty Dumpty, David Shaw Parker as Tweedledum, David Timson as the Dodo, Teresa Gallagher as the Rose and the Fawn, Sean Barrett as The Lion and many more. Alice is back in her room, stroking her cats – but not for long. Slipping through the Looking Glass she meets another wild collection of fantasy characters including the Red and White Kings and Queens, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and is entertained by the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter.

Published at the end of Flaubert’s career, Three Tales is a collection of three compelling short stories about faith, loneliness and love. In ‘A Simple Heart’ (the inspiration for Julian Barnes’s novel Flaubert’s Parrot), a saint-like servant girl begins to experience religious visions of her pet parrot after enduring the loss of loved ones.

Gertrude Stein’s pioneering triptych Three Lives portrays the lives of three working-class women in the fictional American town of Bridgepoint (Baltimore). A progenitor of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique later adopted by Joyce and Woolf, Stein takes us into the minds of three distinct women, who are each trapped in their societal positions.

Audiobook This Side of Paradise written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. First published in 1920, This Side of Paradise proved to be a best-selling novel in Fitzgerald’s own lifetime. The book follows the early life and education of Amory Blaine and is, in fact, a thinly disguised account of Fitzgerald’s own experience as an undergraduate at Princeton and as an aspiring writer.

Published in 1867, Thérèse Raquin is the novel which established Zola’s reputation as a writer who forensically explored the darker side of human nature. Thérèse is a half Algerian orphan, brought up in provincial France by her aunt and married off to her sickly cousin Camille. His ambition takes the three of them to Paris, where they set up home in the dank and dingy backstreets that run down to the Seine.

A timeless piece of feminist literature, the story follows a series of journal entries made by a woman diagnosed with hysterical tendencies by her doctor and husband. Barred from working for her "nerves", she is confined to the nursery in an old New England colonial mansion to recuperate. Trapped in this room with barred windows and sickly yellow wallpaper, she begins writing in secret as she starts to feel the walls mutate around her.

The Wouldbegoods, a sequel to The Treasure Seekers, reacquaints us with the six Bastable children: Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noël and H. O. Again, the story is told by you-may-not-know-who, and the children find all sorts of ways in which to amuse themselves in the country during the summer holidays.

This great children’s classic, written in 1900 and immortalised in the Judy Garland film, retains its charm in this reading by Liza Ross. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion are all here in technicolour – with some of the music that made the film unforgettable.

The Wind in the Willows is a classic of children's literature by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley.

Audiobook The Wind in the Willows, written by First published in 1908, The Wind in the Willows belongs to a golden age of children’s book. These charming tales of the riverbank, describing the adventures of Ratty, Mole, Badger and their irrepressible but conceited friend, Toad of Toad Hall, have become classics loved as much, perhaps, by adults as by children.