Kenneth Grahame Audiobooks

The Wind in the Willows: the riverbank classic that began life as a bedtime story

1 audiobook reviewed

Who is Kenneth Grahame?

Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and lost his mother before he was five, after which he and his siblings were sent south to a grandmother’s house at Cookham Dean, on the Thames in Berkshire. That river ran through everything he later wrote. He wanted Oxford; his family could not afford it, and at twenty he went instead into the Bank of England, where he stayed for thirty years and rose to Secretary of the Bank.

He wrote in the evenings. The Golden Age in 1895 and Dream Days in 1898 were sketches of childhood seen from the inside, admired by adults for their exactness rather than bought for the nursery, and the second of them contained The Reluctant Dragon.

His single great book grew out of bedtime stories and letters written to his young son Alastair, and it appeared in 1908 to reviews that entirely missed the point. Readers did not. Grahame died in 1932, having published almost nothing after it.

Kenneth Grahame in audiobooks

The Wind in the Willows is the whole of his reputation and, on audio, one of the most naturally suited books in English. It was spoken aloud before it was ever written down, and it still works best that way: Mole’s spring cleaning abandoned, Ratty’s boat, Badger’s fireside, and Toad, who is a disaster in a motoring cap and the most quoted character of the lot.

The edition we hold is read by Michael Page and runs a little over six hours, which is an easy weekend or a week of short journeys. It is a book for children that adults tend to reread for the sentences, and the chapter called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is not really for children at all.

Do take a look at what is listed below, and settle in somewhere comfortable.