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What the Narnia books did for wardrobes, The Secret Garden did for the walled garden. Few readers can fail to share with Mary Lennox that inexplicable thrill of anticipation at the notion of an enclosed and secret world, bursting with potential life and beauty but remaining hidden from view. As Mary herself observes, 'Here was another locked door, added to the hundred in the strange house'.

Written in 1911, The Card is the story of Edward Henry (Denry) Machin, who rises from washerwoman's son to the Mayor of Bursley (Burslem in the Potteries town of Stoke-on-Trent) via a mixture of gentle deceit and personal hype. He is literally a trickster of confidence. His rise to fame is begun at an exclusive ball to which he has got himself invited, where he has the audacity to claim a dance with the glamourous but imposing Countess of Chell.

These fairy tales are nasty. This is the land of goblins and sorceresses, with serious lines in revenge, not the land of unicorns and once upon a Barbie. The tales that the Brothers Grimm collected during their time as linguistics professors, first at the University of Göttingen and then in Berlin, at the request of the King of Prussia, were an attempt to map the folklore of the German-speaking people.

Rudyard Kipling's short stories of life in the British Raj began in 1888 as journalistic snippets written to supplement his more serious factual output when he was employed as the assistant editor, at the meagre age of 20, of the Lahori-based Civil and Military Gazette.

Framed for a theft he didn’t commit and expelled from the church which has been his life, Silas Marner, the weaver, exiles himself to the remote rural village of Raveloe to bury himself in making money with his loom. The arrival of a golden-haired orphan toddler at his door, however, drags the recluse back into the world and away from his obsession with his hoard.

'My Daddy! My Daddy!' has become one of the most famous tearjerking lines. Bobby's cry as her father's figure appears through the mist of the steam train in this story of a family's stalwart struggle to keep calm and carry on when forced by the wrongful arrest of their father on spying charges to move from their idyllic life to a rundown cottage by a railway line has jerked the tears of generations of readers (and, in latter years, filmgoers and theatre audiences).

There are very few children's stories that have raised as much outrage in grown-up politics as The Water Babies did when it first appeared in 1863. It was written by Charles Kingsley for his own little boy and shortly after he had been made tutor to the Prince of Wales.

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales have become so much a part of the Western culture that they are often assumed to be a part of folklore and not credited to the strange and gangling Dane who wrote them. Several years before the fairy tales came out, the Brothers Grimm had published their tales taken from the folklore of European stories, but Andersen was to change the understanding of what a tale can achieve.

The wonderful Little Voice of Jane Horrocks brings this exclusive downloadable audiobook collection of your favourite childhood nursery rhymes out of the dust covers of Mother Goose's books and into strange and merry life. The nursery rhymes that make up our collection are taken from the original Mother Goose rhymes. They are the classics from our childhood, with all the original verses and all the parts of rhymes that one usually hums over due to having forgotten the words.

Three Men in a Boat was intended to be a serious travel guide. It failed dismally in this respect but succeeded in becoming an hilarious account of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The three men were based on the author and two of his friends. The holiday was a typical boating holiday of its time, carried out on what was known as a Thames camping skiff. The dog, Montmorency, however, was entirely fictional, but, as Jerome remarked, 'had much of me in it'.

It was a nightmare from which he was furious to have been woken which triggered Robert Louis Stevenson's most successful and famous work. Having been stirred from what he termed 'a fine bogey tale', Stevenson set about putting his nightmare onto paper. It reputedly took him only three days to write, but the story of a split personality warring with itself between righteousness and immorality is as much a part of modern thought as it became in 1885.

The stabbing of an antique dealer on Christmas Day leads the murderer, Markheim, to try to justify his life to the devil in an in-depth discussion about the nature of good and evil. His evening ends quite differently from how he'd planned it and results in him making an admission of guilt for the killing.... Author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh into a prestigious family of lighthouse designers and engineers on his father's side and moral philosophers on his mother's.

Trapped by the strength of the public adoration of his character Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was desperate to write other works not involving the sleuth. The Tales of Terror and Mystery have all the recognisable qualities that made Conan Doyle's work so popular - the attention to gruesome detail, the meticulous logic and the intricate and wittily bemusing plotting - yet they are free of the constraints put on Conan Doyle by Mr. Holmes.

This is the story of Alice's second visit to Wonderland, where again every idea Alice has of logic and reason is logically and rationally challenged by her adventures. From the classic Red Queen, with her manic racing to enable her to stay exactly where she is, to the highly meaningful nonsense of the Jabberwocky, Alice's trip through the looking glass has provided us with a host of now familiar but no less teasing puzzles which somehow manage to give us a whole new reflection on 'normal' life.

There is the warmest of Christmas fires in this hearth. It was reportedly written in a matter of weeks to catch the Christmas deadline. Unlike his other seasonal stories, this is not a supernatural tale but one of the perfect domestic scene with which Dickens was so obsessed throughout his writing. It is all here: the warmth of home, the loving little woman, the children, the food and the laughter. All the things that go to make an idealised Christmas are rolled into one very warming story.

Robert Louis Stevenson's lengthy short story 'The Pavilion on the Links' was considered by Arthur Conan Doyle to be 'the first short story in the world'. This unsettlingly nerve-racking tale is every bit as chilling as its much wider known follower, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and at the time of its publication was every bit as successful. Stevenson makes the choice in the story of having two fairly unpleasant characters for his main protagonists.

In A Lodging for the Night, a dissolute Parisian student finds himself forced into accepting the favours of a venerable and respected knight on a cold winter's evening in 1456. The ensuing dinner conversation is spellbinding.

Filled with an array of comic characters, The Chimes tells the story of Toby Veck, a humble porter whose loses his faith in human nature at the hands of his presumed social superiors but regains it thanks to the spirits of the bells. Like its predecessor, it carries a heartfelt plea for charity and brotherhood and examines such distressing themes as suicide and infanticide as well as the question of whether the poor have any right to live at all.

Eustacia Vye's great desire in life was to be loved to madness, and in this, one of Thomas Hardy's best-loved novels, one of his most superb female characters conducts her wild and lethal campaign against her rival - the innocent, rather conventional Thomas - against the backdrop of Egdon Heath, the equally wild and lethal Dorset moorland on which Hardy grew up.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without A Christmas Carol. At the time Dickens was writing it, many of the time-honoured customs linked with Christmas were beginning to disappear. It is largely due to this book that we carry with us much of the imagery that is now associated with the traditional celebration and spirit of Christmas.