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'In the high and far off times...' begins Rudyard Kipling’s 'How the Elephant Got His Trunk', and off we are taken by one of the most supreme storytellers into a world where children’s questions are turned neatly on their heads, and questions are provided which, far from stopping the stream of enquiries, only serve to make it gush faster.

The epic story of this hero’s battle against dragons, monsters, and their mothers is particularly suited to being recorded as an audiobook given that for the first 300 years of its existence it was only ever spoken. The first known (and indeed the only surviving manuscript) of the poem was written in AD 1,000. It survived Henry VIII’s attempts to destroy it (as a religious artifact) and a catastrophic fire that destroyed many other historical British documents.

A collection of Rosetti's most well known and loved poetry. Alongside the famous beauty of Rosetti's 'In the Bleak Midwinter', 'Goblin Market' is a deceptively simple poem. The story of two sisters and their temptation, punishment and redemption, written in Christina Rosetti's characteristically songlike poetry, is easily passed over as a fable or fairy story. But there are several layers more to discover in this most intriguing of poems.

Written as the letters of the five members of Squire Bramble's household sent as they journey around Britain, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker is a grouchy, very funny examination of how one story varies depending on who's doing the telling. The tale is centered around the arrival of Mr. Clinker into the otherwise uneventful household, who never speaks and does not even enter the novel until a third of the way through.

These fairy tales are nasty. This is the land of goblins and sorceresses, with serious lines in revenge, not the land of unicorns and once upon a Barbie. The tales that the Brothers Grimm collected during their time as linguistics professors, first at the University of Göttingen and then in Berlin, at the request of the King of Prussia, were an attempt to map the folklore of the German-speaking people.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is an exploration of the nature of evil and how far a man can go towards it when released from the constraints of what can be called civilisation. Before beginning his life as a writer at the age of 36, Conrad spent 16 years as a merchant seaman. In 1889 he became captain of a steamboat in the Congo Free State, and the atrocities he witnessed there, perpetrated by the representatives of the Belgian colonial powers, led him to write what he called his Congo Diary.

Everyone has a swipe at their parents and the way they were brought up at some point in their lives. Very few of us exact revenge to the extent that Edmund Gosse did upon his father in this superbly funny, agonising account of a very strange childhood. The subtitle of the book is A Study of Two Temperaments, and these were temperaments not destined to get on. Gosse, Sr. was an eminent naturalist and zoologist and a keen follower of the Plymouth Brethren.

Attraction, desire and sex were not proper subjects for a 19th-century novel, and Charlotte Brontë's clear and open handling of all three in Jane Eyre was shocking, exciting and revolutionary. Jane Eyre - a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan - is abused by her aunt and cousins as a child; acquires role models during her education at Lowood Academy; and becomes the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester.

The three tales that make up Edgar Allan Poe's The Dupin Mysteries introduce us to the cracking character of Chevalier Auguste Dupin. As a rationalist and practitioner of brilliant deduction, he was to become the template for most of the detective fiction that followed speedily in his wake. The first tale, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", details a form of murder solving that was to become only too familiar.

There is the warmest of Christmas fires in this hearth. It was reportedly written in a matter of weeks to catch the Christmas deadline. Unlike his other seasonal stories, this is not a supernatural tale but one of the perfect domestic scene with which Dickens was so obsessed throughout his writing. It is all here: the warmth of home, the loving little woman, the children, the food and the laughter. All the things that go to make an idealised Christmas are rolled into one very warming story.

The Chronicles of Clovis, published in 1911, was the third in Saki (H. H. Munro)'s series of very funny and very vicious stories. As an insider, Saki was ideally poised to eviscerate the Edwardian middle class way of life, and his pitiless and magnetic sense of humour - teamed with an ability to wield that sharpest of writer's tools, the (very) short story - makes these some of the funniest and most quotable of tales. All of the running themes in Saki's work are here.

Filled with an array of comic characters, The Chimes tells the story of Toby Veck, a humble porter whose loses his faith in human nature at the hands of his presumed social superiors but regains it thanks to the spirits of the bells. Like its predecessor, it carries a heartfelt plea for charity and brotherhood and examines such distressing themes as suicide and infanticide as well as the question of whether the poor have any right to live at all.

Written in 1911, The Card is the story of Edward Henry (Denry) Machin, who rises from washerwoman's son to the Mayor of Bursley (Burslem in the Potteries town of Stoke-on-Trent) via a mixture of gentle deceit and personal hype. He is literally a trickster of confidence. His rise to fame is begun at an exclusive ball to which he has got himself invited, where he has the audacity to claim a dance with the glamourous but imposing Countess of Chell.

This is one of the most famous children's books ever written. Since its publication in 1877, it has sold well over 30 million copies. It held the world record for sales far and above any other piece of children's literature for 130 years. It wasn’t, however, written for children - the story of the highly spirited and gorgeous black stallion and his transfer from owner to increasingly abusive owner until his final happy rescue was originally intended to be a campaigning work distributed to those who worked with horses.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without A Christmas Carol. At the time Dickens was writing it, many of the time-honoured customs linked with Christmas were beginning to disappear. It is largely due to this book that we carry with us much of the imagery that is now associated with the traditional celebration and spirit of Christmas.

In 1886 Arthur Conan Doyle, whilst struggling to make a success of a failing medical practice in Portsmouth, set about writing a novel in order to boost his income. He began a story about a fiercely intelligent sleuth called Sheridan Hope. A year later A Study in Scarlet was published, and one of the most successful of literary characters began to take hold of the public's affections.

In A Lodging for the Night, a dissolute Parisian student finds himself forced into accepting the favours of a venerable and respected knight on a cold winter's evening in 1456. The ensuing dinner conversation is spellbinding.

Anthony Trollope’s The Warden was the first of Trollope’s hugely successful Barchester Chronicles, appearing in 1855 and reversing the rather unfortunate sales of his previous three novels. It concerns the story of Mr. Septimus Harding, Warden of Hiram's Hospital almshouses and Precentor of Barchester Cathedral.

This is the story of Alice's second visit to Wonderland, where again every idea Alice has of logic and reason is logically and rationally challenged by her adventures. From the classic Red Queen, with her manic racing to enable her to stay exactly where she is, to the highly meaningful nonsense of the Jabberwocky, Alice's trip through the looking glass has provided us with a host of now familiar but no less teasing puzzles which somehow manage to give us a whole new reflection on 'normal' life.

The refusal to settle for what life has dealt you and the consequences of trying to change it is a theme which hasn’t altered much in the last 150 years, and the astonishing beauty and challenge of Madame Bovary is as electric today as it was then. Very few books have created this much outrage and adoration.