The Secret Garden

Mary Lennox is a sour, spoiled girl of ten when cholera kills her parents in India and she is sent to her uncle's lonely house on the Yorkshire moors. There she hears crying in the corridors, finds a key and then a door into a garden that has been locked for ten years, and with Dickon, a moor boy who can charm animals, she begins to bring it back to life. The garden in turn brings back to life Mary herself and her bedridden cousin Colin, who has been told he will not live to grow up.

Frances Hodgson Burnett published the novel in 1911, and its faith that fresh air, work and friendship can heal has kept it among the best-loved children's books in English. Kara Shallenberg, one of LibriVox's most admired readers, recorded it alone, in about nine hours.