Chronicles of Narnia Audiobook Order: Book 1 Is Not the Wardrobe

Read them in publication order, starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. If you are listening, you have to choose that order on purpose, because Audible files the same seven recordings under two different series listings and the one it hands you first starts somewhere else. Check the narrator credit before you buy anything.

I read Narnia in middle school, in order, and I never once thought about the order. I picked up the first book, followed the numbers on the spines to the end, and that was that. Decades later I still remember them. I could not have told you until recently that there was a decision buried in that stack of books, or that I had made it without knowing.

That is the useful part of my experience, and it is why this page exists. The order question is not a question most readers ever face. It gets answered for you by whoever printed your set, and you find out years later that someone chose on your behalf.

The short version

Two orders exist.

Publication order, which is the order Lewis wrote and published them in:

1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950
2. Prince Caspian, 1951
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952
4. The Silver Chair, 1953
5. The Horse and His Boy, 1954
6. The Magician's Nephew, 1955
7. The Last Battle, 1956

Chronological order, which is the order the events happen in inside Narnia:

1. The Magician's Nephew
2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
3. The Horse and His Boy
4. Prince Caspian
5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
6. The Silver Chair
7. The Last Battle

Chronological became the worldwide standard in the mid-1990s, when HarperCollins became the sole publisher. Before that there were two numbering systems in print at once: American editions were numbered in publication order, British editions chronologically. My set was American and pre-dated the change, which is the only reason I read them the way I did.

The date is worth one footnote, because the sources do not agree. HarperCollins' own catalogue dates a chronological box set to July 1994. The official C. S. Lewis site says a new publisher began releasing the books in 1995. Mid-nineties is as precise as I am willing to be.

As for what Lewis wanted, the estate's position is on its own site: asked about the best order, in a letter of 21 April 1957, he suggested chronological order might be the easiest way to read them. He also said in the same breath that perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them, and that second half tends to get left off.

I am not going to relitigate that. It has been argued to death by people with more standing on it than I have.

What is worth saying is what the argument actually turns on, because it is a real reading experience and not a technicality. The case for publication order is that The Magician's Nephew is built as a reveal, not a setup. Read sixth, the origin of the lamppost and the wardrobe lands like being let in on a secret. Read first, it is exposition. Lines in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe also read differently depending on whether you already know what the Professor knows.

The part nobody has told listeners

Here is the thing that made me want to write this page.

On Audible, the Chronicles of Narnia exists as two separate series listings. One is filed as the author's preferred order. One is filed as publication order. Same seven books, same recordings, two shelves in the same store.

So, The Magician's Nephew is Book 1 and Book 6 at the same time, on the same retailer, depending on which listing you happen to land on.

Worth being precise about that phrase, because it is doing a lot of work: "author's preferred order" is Audible's own catalogue label. It is not the title of the HarperAudio set, which other shops list simply as The Chronicles of Narnia Complete Audio Collection, and I could find no estate or publisher record establishing that wording. It is a shop's shelving decision wearing the author's name.

A reader in a bookstore picks up a numbered spine and gets a single answer, even if it is an answer someone made for them. A listener gets whichever grouping search hands them, taps through, and never sees that the other listing exists. The default is invisible in both cases, but at least the reader is holding something physical with a number on it.

If you are listening: pick the listing on purpose. That is the whole advice.

Before you pick an order, work out what you are buying

This turned out to be the bigger problem, and I did not expect it.

Search the Narnia audiobooks and you can land on at least four different products, several of which look nearly identical in a results list.

The HarperAudio unabridged set. A different actor for each book: Kenneth Branagh reads The Magician's Nephew, Michael York The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Alex Jennings The Horse and His Boy, Lynn Redgrave Prince Caspian, Derek Jacobi The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Jeremy Northam The Silver Chair, and Patrick Stewart The Last Battle. Thirty-three hours and forty-five minutes on Amazon's listing, and 33:49:34 in the retailer metadata elsewhere, which is a rounding difference rather than a different recording. This is the set most people mean. The Last Battle won the 2005 Audie Award for Inspirational and Faith-Based Fiction, per the Audio Publishers Association's own results, and the set as a whole was a finalist that year in two other categories.

The Woodkeep unabridged set, released June 2021, narrated by Victor Craig reading all seven, at roughly 33 hours. Some listeners specifically want one voice across the whole series rather than seven.

Radio Theatre. Not the audiobooks. It is a full-cast dramatization with score and sound design, dramatized by Paul McCusker, running over 22 hours against the unabridged set's 33 and three quarters. Paul Scofield narrates, David Suchet plays Aslan. It ranks high enough in audiobook searches that people buy it expecting the text and get something else. It may well be excellent. It is not a reading of the books. Focus on the Family calls it dramatized and does not say whether it is also abridged, and some older catalogue descriptions of the CD edition say it is, so if a complete text matters to you, ask before you buy.

An abridged set narrated by Michael Hordern, still circulating, packaged as a complete Chronicles of Narnia.

Two unabridged sets, one dramatization, one abridgement, all presenting as the Narnia audiobooks. The narrator credit is often the only thing distinguishing them on a product page. Check it before you check the order.

What I would tell someone today

If they are reading: publication order, starting with the wardrobe, because the reveal in The Magician's Nephew is worth more than the setup is and a first reader only gets one shot at it. If they have already read the series, chronological is a genuinely good reread.

If they are listening: same order, but they have to choose it deliberately, because the store has already chosen for them. Pick the publication order listing rather than the first result, and confirm the narrator credit matches the set they want.

One practical note on cost, since the whole thing is sold as a single Audible title rather than seven separate purchases: a trial credit will cover it. Whether it is one credit on any given day depends on your storefront and the promotion running, so check that in your own account rather than taking my word for it.

Why I have never listened to a minute of it

Not the HarperAudio set, not the Woodkeep recording, not Radio Theatre, nothing at bedtime as a kid. Everything above is catalogue fact and buying advice, not a judgement about how any of it sounds.

But the reason I have not listened is worth more than the disclosure.

I could not get on with the live-action Narnia adaptations. They kept colliding with the version preteen me had already built and refused to give up. The animated one worked, and I still like it. Bill Melendez directed it, the same man behind the Peanuts specials, and it aired on CBS across two nights in April 1979. It is hand-drawn in a flat, storybook style that never pretends to be a window.

That is the difference. A drawing sits next to the version in your head. A live-action Aslan asks you to put yours away.

An audiobook does the same thing the live-action films did. A narrator makes choices about who these people sound like, and those choices are as much an interpretation as a casting call. Seven different actors across seven books is seven interpretations. For a series I read once, decades ago, and still carry around intact, that is a trade I have never wanted to make.

That is not advice. Plenty of people would say I am missing something, and they may be right. But if you have been putting off the Narnia audiobooks and could not say why, that might be why.

Worth adding, since it cuts the other way. I have since sat down with an hour of Lewis on audio, the Mere Christianity recordings, and none of this applied. There are no characters in it to voice and nobody's Aslan to overwrite, and the reader I heard never performs it. The objection above is about fiction, and it turns out to be narrower than I thought.

One last thing

The screen adaptations have been answering this page's question all along, and they have not agreed with each other either.

Melendez went with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1979. It worked: two Emmys, and thirty-seven million people watched it. His studio then tried to make The Magician's Nephew as a follow-up in the eighties, with a screenplay by Douglas Lloyd McIntosh, and never got it made. The prequel was attempted second and never arrived at all.

Greta Gerwig's Netflix film opens with The Magician's Nephew. It reaches cinemas on 12 February 2027 and Netflix on 2 April 2027.

So, the first screen Narnia started with the wardrobe and the next one starts with the magician, forty-eight years apart, opposite answers to the same question. Somebody upstream picks the order, and you find out decades later that a choice was made.