Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountShop small, give big!
With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.
Start giftingLimited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayTreasure Island
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn morePerhaps Stevenson’s best-known work, this adventure novel set in the eighteenth century is inspired by the actual exploits of pirate Captain Kidd and the search for his buried treasure. For pure imaginative delight, Treasure Island is unsurpassed. From the moment young Jim Hawkins meets the blind pirate Pew at the Admiral Benbow inn, to the spirited battle for hidden treasure on a tropical island, the novel spawns unforgettable scenes and characters that have thrilled young and old for more than a century.
Stevenson’s romance is noted for its swift, clearly-depicted action, its memorable character types—especially of Long John Silver—and its sustained atmosphere of menace. A story of a classic battle between good and evil, it illustrates one young boy’s rite of passage into the dangerous world of mature responsibilities.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but was finally allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted forcibly against the Presbyterianism of both his city’s professional classes and his devout parents, but the influence of Calvinism on his childhood informed the fascination with evil that is so powerfully explored in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson suffered from a severe respiratory disease from his twenties onwards, leading him to settle in the gentle climate of Samoa with his American wife, Fanny Osbourne.
Frederick Davidson (1932–2005) was born in London and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He performed in BBC radio plays before coming to America in 1976. The narrator of more than eight hundred audiobooks, he garnered numerous Earphones Awards and a Grammy nomination for his readings. He was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 1997.
Reviews
“Like the best of children’s literature, then and now, Treasure Island looks to lure its young readers into the adult world, not to cosset them from it. For all the violence, Jim learns to be brave and resourceful, to stand up to bullies, to keep his word, to help his impoverished mother, to deal with loss and betrayal. He learns not to trust strangers and even to be merciful.”
“The swashbuckling adventure of a lifetime. With its dastardly plot and motley crew of rogues and villains, it seems unlikely that children will ever say no to this timeless classic.”
“Treasure Island…must have been the first book I ever read from start to finish, with unforgettable characters, Long John Silver, Blind Pew, Ben Gunn...The Black Spot still terrifies me.”
“I don’t know of a more gripping tale of derring-do on the high seas, with its desperate search for hidden gold on a tropical island.”
“A rereading of Stevenson’s novel after all those years says nothing to me so much as that good books—and Treasure Island is a very good book—really have lives of their own, entirely apart from movies and other adaptations of them.”
“Treasure Island is a vision not only of white skeletons but also green palm trees and sapphire seas.”
Expand reviews