Clara’s Verdict
There is a reason Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler have become the defining children’s book partnership of the past thirty years, and The Gruffalo and Other Stories demonstrates it in under seventy minutes. The combination of Donaldson’s metrically perfect, endlessly quotable verse and Scheffler’s expressive illustration has produced some of the most genuinely memorable work in children’s literature — and in this collection, with performances from Imelda Staunton, Jim Carter, and Steven Pacey, those words are given a staging they thoroughly deserve.
I’ve listened to this with several small children, and the response is always the same: immediate attention, repeated requests, and a frankly alarming level of memorisation. The Gruffalo‘s « terrible tusks and his terrible claws and his terrible teeth in his terrible jaws » becomes part of a child’s vocabulary within days.
About the Audiobook
The collection brings together four of Donaldson and Scheffler’s best-loved stories: The Gruffalo, A Squash and a Squeeze, The Smartest Giant in Town, and Monkey Puzzle. Each story also includes a song and sound effects, giving the listen a theatrical quality that goes considerably beyond a simple read-aloud.
The Gruffalo remains the standout — the story of a small mouse who invents a terrible monster to deter predators, and then has to deal with the consequences when the monster turns out to be real, is a model of children’s storytelling: satisfying narrative structure, perfectly calibrated tension, a resolution that’s both surprising and inevitable. A Squash and a Squeeze is a gentler piece, a cumulative folktale about a woman whose house feels too small. The Smartest Giant in Town is a kindness fable with a satisfying twist. Monkey Puzzle is the most tender of the four — a young monkey searching for his lost mother, helped by a well-meaning but systematically wrong butterfly.
Together they represent the full range of what Donaldson does best, and at just over an hour they’re perfectly sized for a single journey or bedtime session.
The Narration
Imelda Staunton leads the performances alongside Jim Carter and Steven Pacey, with Donaldson herself reading one of the stories. This is casting of the highest order. Staunton brings her extraordinary theatrical intelligence to the material — she finds the comedy, the tenderness, and the rhythm of the verse with the precision you’d expect from one of the country’s finest stage actresses. Carter’s warm, authoritative voice suits the larger, more expansive stories. Pacey handles the more intimate material with care.
The sound design — original songs, ambient effects — enhances rather than clutters the listening experience. This feels like a produced piece of children’s theatre, not a recording of someone reading at a microphone.
What Readers Say
With a rating of 4.7 from 333 listeners, the response is consistently warm. Parents describe it as indispensable for car journeys, with one noting that it makes « car rides a learning and less stressed experience for everyone. » Another praised the « good clear speech » and the accessibility for very young listeners. Several reviewers mention that their children request it repeatedly — the test of any children’s audiobook is whether the adults can bear to hear it again, and the consensus is that these performances remain enjoyable on the twentieth listen.
A two-year-old loving it, a three-year-old objecting to the songs: the only note of anything less than enthusiasm, and even then the parent awarded five stars.
Who Should Listen?
Any family with young children, without qualification. The stories work from around age two upwards and maintain their appeal through primary school — there’s enough verbal sophistication in Donaldson’s verse that adults reading alongside children find things to appreciate that fly over younger heads.
This is an excellent car-journey companion, a reliable bedtime option, and a strong gift for families who want to invest in children’s listening rather than just screen time. At just over an hour, it’s also refreshingly unpretentious — it doesn’t outstay its welcome, which is a virtue not all children’s audio collections manage.
Listen on Audible UK: Get The Gruffalo and Other Stories on Audible. Also available on Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
