It has become tradition for Audible to bring out the big guns in the run-up to Christmas and deliver star-studded adaptations of well-known novels; the last few years have brought terrific productions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Bleak House and David Copperfield.
Now attention has turned to younger listeners with a new, full-cast recording of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first of the Potter books in which the orphaned Harry, consigned to sleep in a cupboard in his aunt and uncle’s house, learns he is a wizard and is to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The Good Wife’s Cush Jumbo is our narrator, steering the story alongside a cast including Hugh Laurie as venerable wizard-in-chief Albus Dumbledore; Michelle Gomez as Professor McGonagall; Riz Ahmed as Professor Snape; Mark Addy as Hagrid; Matthew Macfadyen as Lord Voldemort; and newcomers Frankie Treadaway, Max Lester and Arabella Stanton as young wizards Harry, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.
