Long stories

The timings across the site assume reading aloud at about 130 words a minute, so a nine-minute story is roughly 1,200 words and an eleven-minute one closer to 1,400. Those are honest numbers for the text and optimistic ones for the evening: with voices, interruptions and a child who wants to look at the picture again, a long story is a twenty-minute commitment.

Decide whether you have that before you start, because abandoning a long story halfway with no plan is the thing that actually causes trouble. If you do not have it, the ten-minute page exists for precisely this reason.

The range here is narrower than it looks. Most of these tales sit between nine and eleven minutes rather than stretching to half an hour, so a long story is one extra fairy tale's worth of reading, not a different species of evening. That makes them far more manageable than parents expect.

Long stories are best read across two or three nights. The skill is entirely in how you stop.

Pick the break before you open the book

Say it out loud first: two chapters tonight, the rest tomorrow. A limit announced at the start is a rule; a limit announced at the end is a betrayal, and a seven-year-old will treat it as one. The chapter breaks in the reader are there to be used.

Stop after the calm bit, not the cliff-hanger

The instinct is to leave them hanging so they want tomorrow. It works for getting them into bed on time and badly for getting them to sleep, because an unresolved threat is exactly what an alert brain chews on in the dark. Read to the point where the hero is safe for the night, then close it. With Aladdin and the Magic Lamp or The Baba Yaga there is always such a point within a minute or two.

Recap in two sentences

Start the next night by asking them to tell you where you got to. It takes twenty seconds, it is a better memory exercise than most homework, and it saves you rereading.

Not every story benefits from being long. These do.

A Little Princess, retold from Frances Hodgson Burnett, is eleven minutes and the closest thing here to reading a novel aloud. East of the Sun and West of the Moon is the same length and needs it: a bear, a broken promise and a journey to the four winds, with a suggested range of ages 5 to 12. Cinderella at ten minutes has room for the sisters to be properly awful before the ending puts it right.

For a child who wants magic rather than length, The Frog Prince and The Fisherman and His Wife are both nine minutes of Grimm, and the second has an ending that older children find bleakly funny. The Master Maid and The Lad Who Went to the North Wind are Norwegian, and both move fast enough that the length never drags.

If the listener is younger, Sunshine Stories and Huffy Puffy Wolf are the calmest long tales on the page, with suggested ranges reaching down to three; note how many of these stories also appear on big kids and early readers, because the age ranges overlap and one long story often suits both.

Three cases. On a school night that has already run late, a long story is a promise you will break. With an overtired child, length works against you, because the exciting middle arrives at the point where they have no capacity left for it. And with two children of different ages in the room, a long story usually loses the younger one somewhere in the third chapter, which our guide on reading to two children has better answers for.

Where these tales genuinely shine is outside bedtime: a wet Saturday, a long car journey with the read-aloud voice switched on, or an afternoon when nobody is watching the clock. Our guide to the read-aloud voice covers listening rather than reading, which is how most long stories get finished.

For more of the same appetite, the adventure stories collection overlaps heavily with this page, and the A to Z is the quickest way to find a title someone half remembers.

Every story on this page is divided into chapters in the story-book reader, which is what makes reading one across several nights practical rather than fiddly.

Where the breaks fall

They sit at changes of scene rather than at a fixed word count, so a chapter usually ends where a journey ends or a day does. In The Blue Bird that means each place the children visit is its own section, and in Old Sultan the breaks fall between the dog's schemes.

Three nights is not too many

A ten-minute story taken in three sittings is not a failure to finish it; it is how serial storytelling has always worked, and children hold the thread better than adults expect. Goody Two Shoes is ten minutes with a suggested range starting at three, and reading it in short pieces is the only way it works for a listener that young.