We will be spending a lot of time in the car during the summer holiday, driving our three children aged six, eight and 10 to visit relatives. They could each watch a DVD but we'd rather have a story that we could all enjoy. Are there any audio books which would work for such a wide age range – and keep us entertained too?
Long car journeys can be transformed by good family listening – and by the conversations about the books afterwards. Think of yourselves as going back to the time of storytellers who told stories to whole communities together, assuming that everyone would get something out of them.
Now, as then, all ages can be held spellbound by the same story even if they each take something different from the story they have heard.
The combination of a dramatic story (which everyone can understand) and an important underlying truth (which may become more comprehensible and meaningful as you get older) lies at the heart of most folk and fairy stories going right back to Aesop's Fables. None of them were written with an age-specific audience in mind.
While your six-year-old may not get all the points in a story, because you have all been listening, any gaps can easily filled by the rest of you.
Superficially at least, listening is less demanding than reading so all three children can be getting to grips with a story which may be slightly beyond their reading capacity or stamina.
One obvious advantage of audio books on car journeys is that the listeners are a captive audience; with nothing else much to distract them they are likely to be willing and able to listen to a story for far longer than they would read to themselves.
That being so it could be a good time to choose a classic, which are likely to have far longer descriptive passages before anything exciting happens than anything written today.
If you are going to be driving anywhere in the country Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden brings nature alive vividly and will encourage listeners to start looking more closely.
The power of the garden to transform poor unhappy Mary will cast its own spell and make looking at birds, flowers and trees more interesting.
Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows also goes close up to nature specifically on the river bank. His famous characters Ratty, Mole, Badger and the outrageous Mr Toad are given tremendous personalities in multi-voiced recordings.
For some understanding of British history, Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth brings the story of the missing Roman legion vividly to life, in a story which is as human and heart-warming as it is dramatic. Sutcliff's Roman Britain sequels to this, or any of her other stories set in long-ago Britain, will give visits to anywhere in the UK added interest.
For contemporary stories, US Children's Ambassador, Kate di Camillo's Because of Winn-Dixie, the story of a lonely little girl who adopts a dog, would be a perfect choice. Told in the first-person, the book opens: "My name is India Opal-Buloni, and last summer, my daddy, the preacher sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice and two tomatoes, and I came back with a dog". Listening to Cherry Jones, the US narrator on the audio version, gets to the heart of this touching story.
Ian McKellen is equally brilliant in his reading of Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother and its sequels. Set 6,000 years ago in a powerfully imagined and treacherous countryside of mountains and forests and icy, fast running rivers, it tells of the struggle for survival of the boy Torak and his wolf companion who are on a mission to save the world.
For an inventive world of a different kind, Cressida Cowell's best-selling How to Train your Dragon series, is irresistible. Starring the unlikely hero Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, who turns out to be an amazing dragon whisperer, the rambunctious Viking world is first introduced in How to Train Your Dragon. In David Tennant's reading of the stories the drama and the dottiness are both captured perfectly. You can also download a Guardian podcast of Cressida Cowell reading from How to Train Your Viking.
Michael Morpurgo is best known for War Horse but his many other books include adventures set both in the past and the present, in the UK and abroad and about humans and animals. Grouped together in Classic Collections the boxed-sets of audio books read by a star-studded cast of actors, including Tim Piggott- Smith, Ian McKellen, Jenny Agutter and Michael Morpurgo himself, makes each story different and special.
We also have some fantastic free audio downloads on the Guardian children's books site including Michael Morpurgo on why we should remember the first world war and Jo Nesbo on why he's obsessed with farting – find all our podcasts here.
And may you never hear the whine: "Are we there yet?" again.
