It’s storytime for the whole family

the novels make up a story of friendship, brilliantly conveying the complexity and tension of interpersonal relations. I cannot think of two books better suited for listening to during these anxious times.

If you’ve never read Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (Audible Studios, 735 minutes), this is an opportunity to acquaint yourself with one of the most loved English novels since it was published in 1948.

Narrated here in the clear, no-nonsense voice by Jenny Agutter (Sister Julienne in Call the Midwife), the novel takes the form of a journal kept by 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, an aspiring writer and acerbic commentator. She begins with her father’s decision to plonk his family down in a draughty castle in Suffolk, England. He is an avantgarde novelist suffering writer’s block and extreme, if genteel, poverty.

The novel is very funny, atmospheric, and lightly romantic, a deft mash-up of Pride and Prejudice and Cold Comfort Farm.

Jason Reynolds’ Ghost (Simon & Schuster Audio, 210 minutes) introduces us to eighth-grader, Castle ‘‘Ghost’’ Cranshaw, son of a violent, imprisoned father and a hard-working mother. Bullied because of his uncool, off-brand clothes, Ghost is disruptive at school and has never participated in team sports.

On an impulse to compete, he demonstrates his running speed to the city’s track coach and is taken into the team. This helps him deal with his anger and find a goal that calls for determination and hard work. But an act of desperate folly nearly extinguishes Ghost’s prospects, along with his evolving sense of belonging.

Guy Lockard narrates this stirring book in a feisty voice full of youthful bounce and occasional chagrin.

Zetta Elliott’s Dragons in a Bag (Listening

Library, 210 minutes) presents 9-year-old Jaxon, whose mother – on a mission to prevent their eviction from a run-down Brooklyn apartment – leaves him in the charge of an ornery old woman known only as ‘‘Ma’’.

Ma, it emerges, is a witch and has troubles of her own in the shape of three tiny dragons who must be returned to another dimension, one where magic flourishes.

Jaxon and Ma travel together through a portal to another world, the wrong one, as it happens. From then on complications proliferate, most arising from a missing dragon.

Jaxon’s friend Vikram and his little sister, Kavita, get involved with ramifications that spill over into a sequel, The Dragon Thief (Listening Library, 240 minutes).

Ron Butler narrates the first book and is joined by Soneela Nankani in the second, both readers bringing a wonderful medley of voices to the characters, human and animal, who populate these adventures in fantasy.

Our homes, so familiar and confined, do, in fact, contain the world, as Bill Bryson demonstrates in At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Random House Audio, 990 minutes).

Starting with the mid-19th century former rectory in which he lives, he introduces us to a universe of fact, anecdote, history, and whimsy, spun out of the lares and penates around him.

The genial-voiced Bryson reads the book himself, sharing his pleasure in peculiar details – Henry Ford owned a concrete piano; the Duke of Marlborough was a cheapskate who wouldn’t ‘‘dot his ‘i’s’ . . . to save on ink’’; Cornelius Vanderbilt’s wife went to a costume party as an electric light.

The book – an attempt to ‘‘write a history of the world without leaving home’’ – is an intoxicating jumble: witty, informative and all over the map.