Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, Pigeon Post and The Picts and the Martyrs, and the Norfolk Broads with Coot Club by Arthur Ransome
www.swallows-and-amazons.com , £13.50

Children of the New Forest by Captain Murryat
Naxos, 3 CDs, £13.99 Buy the audiobook
Listen to a sample

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
BBC, 2 CDs, £13, Buy the audiobook
Listen to a sample

The Haunting of Hiram by Eva Ibbotson
Macmillan, 3 CDs, £10.99 Buy the audiobook
Listen to a sample

Listening to a story set in the place you are visiting on holiday gives it a new dimension - especially for children. Arthur Ransome immortalised the Lakes in summer with Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, Pigeon Post and The Picts and the Martyrs, and the Norfolk Broads with Coot Club, rich in details of boats, birds and folklore. Gabriel Woolf's skilled abridgements of all five are available from www.swallows-and- amazons.com at £13.50 each.

Captain Marryat's Children of the New Forest gives an exciting picture of the time of the Civil War. Orphaned by the death of their father in battle, the Beverley children become homeless fugitives when Roundheads raze their home. With the help of a stalwart forester they learn to cook, garden and hunt and even help the Royalist cause themselves. Abridgement has made this a faster, cruder story than the one I remember as a child, and has lost its Ransome-esque details of contriving in adversity, but Glen McCready has just the right voice to carry off the stately language of the nobs and the pungent wisdom of the peasants.

When in Wales, everyone will enjoy the light-hearted alliteration and wit that characterises Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. Lilly Smalls, Polly Garter Organ Morgan and Captain Cat are just a few of the characters who inhabit the little seaside town of Llareggub, and are brought to life marvellously on this digitally remastered recording: it combines Richard Burton's legendary 1963 narration with a modern all-Welsh cast (Siân Phillips, Matthew Rhys and Glen Houston, with John Humphrys as the voice of the guidebook).

Finally, a tale for our own times set (in part) in Scotland: Eva Ibbotson's delectable The Haunting of Hiram. When Alex, 12, last of the MacBuffs, makes the painful decision to sell his birthplace, the romantic, rotting, sea-washed Castle Carra, Hiram C. Hopgood, an American millionaire, seems an ideal buyer. But first Alex has to find new homes for the characterful castle ghosts, his mentors and companions from childhood. Next he finds that the castle is to be taken down stone by stone and rebuilt in the American mid-West. How on earth things can turn out happily involves one of Ibbotson's most resourceful plots yet: a sickly heiress, kidnappers, a giant squid and an amputated hand. Anton Lesser entices us irresistibly into the tale, and keeps us mesmerised.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy