Jacqueline Wilson Audiobooks

Few writers have shaped what British children actually read more than Dame Jacqueline Wilson. Since the 1990s she has written well over a hundred books, and in Tracy Beaker she created a character who gave a generation something rare: a girl in care, funny and furious and entirely unsentimental about her situation. Hetty Feather did much the same for Victorian childhood.

What distinguishes her is a refusal to soften. Divorce, foster homes, mental illness, poverty, bereavement, her books go straight at the subjects adults tend to tidy away, and they do it with humour rather than solemnity, which is precisely why children trust them. Nick Sharratt’s illustrations became so bound up with the voice that the two are hard to think of separately.

She served as Children’s Laureate from 2005 to 2007 and was made a Dame in 2008. In recent years she has turned increasingly to older readers and to reworkings of the classics she grew up with, without losing an ounce of her directness.

Her strongest performer with us is The Primrose Railway Children, read by Georgina Campbell, which reworks E. Nesbit’s classic for a modern family whose father disappears under a cloud. Hundreds of listeners have scored it, and it holds up beautifully across nearly twelve hours.

Alongside it, Baby Love takes a considerable step up in age. Set in 1960 and narrated by Tamla Kari, it follows Laura through a teenage pregnancy and the home she is sent away to, and it is one of the most moving things Wilson has written for older readers.

Katy, her modern retelling of What Katy Did with Madeleine Leslay narrating, is scheduled to join them. Younger listeners should begin with The Primrose Railway Children; teenagers and adults should go straight to Baby Love. Whatever has landed is listed below.