The Jungle Book: the Mowgli stories
Rudyard Kipling; READ BY Bill Bailey and others

Perhaps the greatest achievement of a well-read audiobook is that it can rescue a classic.  It is especially true of this award-winning dramatisation of the Mowgli stories where Kipling’s whimsical, archaic style is pared back and skilled editing heightens the excitement of the tales. A cast of famous actors play the animals: among them, Celia Imrie as a passionate Mother Wolf and Richard E. Grant as the morally ambiguous and intriguing cobra Kaa.

Like the original books but unlike the Disney animation, the dramatisation takes Mowgli from babyhood right up to the brink of manhood. It begins as he toddles unafraid into the den of Father and Mother Wolf and continues with his education at the paws of the kind bear Baloo and the dangerous but loving panther Bagheera.