The Snow Goose (BBC Radio 4: Classic Serial)

The Silent Miaow is the classic instruction book for all cats, based upon first-hand feline experience. Inside it contains all the information that every cat should know, such as: How to win a way into a household, take over a family and achieve control over each member. How to select a family and what to look for. How to move in. How to establish total and unquestioned sovereignty over the most comfortable chair. How to obtain the choicest food. How to treat visitors.

Raised on a ranch in northern California, Jody is well-schooled in the hard work and demands of a rancher's life. He is used to the way of horses, too; but nothing has prepared him for the special connection he will forge with Gabilan, the hot-tempered pony his father gives him. With Billy Buck, the hired hand, Jody tends and trains his horse, restlessly anticipating the moment he will sit high upon Gabilan's saddle. But when Gabilan falls ill, Jody discovers there are still lessons he must learn about the ways of nature and, particularly, the ways of man.

David escapes from the concentration camp where he has spent his entire life and flees across Europe. He is utterly alone – who can he trust? What will await him? And all the while, how can he be sure that they won’t catch up with him...David learns that his polite manner, his haunted eyes and his thin features are strange to other people. He must learn to fend for himself in this strange new world. This is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas meets Jonathan Safran Foer for children.

It's 1919. Henry has moved to the countryside with her parents and her baby sister, Piglet - all still scarred by the death of her brother. Alone in her head, she begins to explore her surroundings, encouraged by her only friends - characters from her favourite books. Nobody much notices when she wanders into the woods at the bottom of the garden and meets Moth, a striking witchlike woman. Together they form a bond that could help Henry save her family.

The head of the Mortmain family is Cassandra Mortmain’s father, a writer suffering from writer's block who has not published anything since his first book, a hit entitled, Jacob Wresstling. Ten years before the story begins, he took out a forty-year lease on a dilapidated but beautiful castle, hoping to find either inspiration or isolation there; now, his family is selling off the furniture to buy food.