Classics audiobooks

Lore of the Stars

By: Timothy B. Shutt

Narrated by: Timothy B. Shutt

Length: 4 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

One of Kenyon College's most honored professors, Timothy B. Shutt is widely renowned as a gifted polymath and lecturer. The night sky was the ancient world's cinema, and storytellers have used this panorama to weave fascinating tales since the earliest days of mankind. This captivating series of lectures explores the mythological sagas found in... Read more

Emma

By: Alexander McCall Smith

Narrated by: Susan Lyons

Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

An unstoppable combination: Alexander McCall Smith and Jane Austen, as Sandy modernizes the story of Emma Woodhouse. Emma Woodhouse's widowed father is an anxious man, obsessed with nutrition and the latest vitamins. He lives the life of a country gentleman in contemporary England, protectively raising his young daughters, Isabella and Emma.... Read more

The Red and the Black

By: Stendhal

Narrated by: Davina Porter

Length: 20 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Handsome and ambitious, Julien Sorel is determined to rise above his humble peasant origins and make something of his life-by adopting the code of hypocrisy by which his society operates. Julien ultimately commits a crime-out of passion, principle, or insanity-that will bring about his downfall. The Red and the Black is a lively, satirical... Read more

The Charterhouse of Parma

By: Stendhal

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 19 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Marie-Henri Beyle (January 23, 1783 - March 23, 1842), better known by his penname Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism. The Charterhouse of Parma is often cited as an early example of realism, a stark... Read more

Kidnapped

By: Robert Louis Stevenson

Narrated by: Kieron Elliot

Length: 9 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Spirited, romantic, and full of danger, Kidnapped is Robert Louis Stevenson's classic of high adventure. Beloved by generations, it is the saga of David Balfour, a young heir whose greedy uncle connives to do him out of his inherited fortune and plots to have him seized and sold into slavery. But honor, loyalty, and courage are rewarded; the... Read more

The Devil and Other Stories

By: Leo Tolstoy & Richard F. Gustafson

Narrated by: Kevin R. Free, George Guidall, T. Ryder Smith &...

Length: 12 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

This collection of eleven stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. While each is unique in form, as a group they are representative of his style, and touch on the central themes that surface in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Stories as different as "The Snowstorm", "Lucerne", "The Diary of a Madman", and "The Devil" are... Read more

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 7 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Well over a century has passed since the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, but time has done little to diminish the appeal and enjoyment of this classic story of growing up in midwestern America. The world Mark Twain envisioned for his precocious hero is a "boy-perfect" one, where life is perpetual vacation, where good and... Read more

Ann Veronica

By: H.G. Wells

Narrated by: Liz Pearce

Length: 11 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

At twenty-one, the passionate and headstrong Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to rule her own life. When her autocratic father forbids her, via formal letter, from attending a fashionable art-school ball, and even further refuses to allow her advanced study of science, she decides she has no choice but to leave her family home and make a fresh... Read more

The Custom of the Country

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Barbara Caruso

Length: 15 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Edith Wharton stands among the finest writers of early 20th-century America. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton' s scathing social commentary is on full display through the beautiful and manipulative Undine Spragg. When Undine convinces her nouveau riche parents to move to New York,... Read more

The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer

By: Timothy B. Shutt

Narrated by: Timothy B. Shutt

Length: 4 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the Modern Scholar's most popular professors, Timothy B. Shutt, brings his literary acumen and trademark enthusiasm to the study of the epic poems that sit at the very wellspring of Western culture. The earliest surviving works of Greek literature, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey exert a continuing influence on modern culture, even today... Read more

The Mayor of Casterbridge

By: Thomas Hardy

Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin

Length: 14 hours

Abridged: No

One of the great novelists of British literature, Thomas Hardy caused quite a stir when this powerful novel was first published. Michael Henchard, down on his luck and drunk, sells his wife and child to a sailor for five guineas. As time goes by, Henchard becomes Mayor of Casterbridge-but he cannot escape the tragedy of his past. Read more

A Morbid Taste for Bones

By: Ellis Peters

Narrated by: Patrick Tull

Length: 8 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

On an expedition to acquire a saint’s remains, Brother Cadfael instead finds intrigue and murder

It is 1137, and the ambitious head of the Shrewsbury Abbey wishes to acquire the remains of Saint Winifred for the glory of his Benedictine order. Brother Cadfael is part of the expedition sent to the saint’s final resting place in Wales, where he... Read more

Northanger Abbey

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Flo Gibson

Length: 7 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious... Read more

Passing

By: Nella Larsen

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Length: 4 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Nella Larsen’s fascinating exploration of race and identity—the inspiration for the Netflix film directed by Rebecca Hall, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga.

Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her... Read more

Persuasion

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Flo Gibson

Length: 8 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

A story of the love between upper-class Anne Elliott and Captain Wentworth, who must earn his fortune. Set against the rarefied sensibilities of the upper-class England of Austen's day, the novel is both a satire upon class values and differences, and an engaging story. Read more

The Prince and the Pauper

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 8 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the more famous stories in children' s literature, The Prince and the Pauper has become an adult classic as well. Twain' s tall tale about a bedraggled street urchin who becomes king for a day, and his twin, the pampered Prince of Wales left to fend for himself among his seedier subjects, showcases the author' s satirical wit and his... Read more

The Little Red Chairs

By: Edna O'Brien

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

Length: 9 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

A fiercely beautiful novel about one woman's struggle to reclaim a life shattered by betrayal from the 2018 winner of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

One night, in the dead of winter, a mysterious stranger arrives in the small Irish town of Cloonoila. Broodingly handsome, worldly, and charismatic, Dr. Vladimir... Read more

Carol

By: Patricia Highsmith

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is... Read more

Drums along the Mohawk

By: Walter D. Edmonds

Narrated by: Mark Bramhall

Length: 21 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Drums along the Mohawk, Walter D. Edmonds’ masterpiece, is not only the best historical novel about upstate New York since James Fenimore Cooper, it was also number one on the bestseller list for two years, only yielding to the epic Gone with the Wind.This is the story of the forgotten pioneers of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary War.... Read more

King Rat

By: James Clavell

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 15 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

The epic novel of war, savagery, and survival in a Japanese POW camp by the #1 New York Times bestselling author and unparalleled master of historical fiction, James ClavellJapanese POW camp Changi, Singapore: hell on earth for the soldiers contained within its barbed wire walls. Officers and enlisted men, all prisoners together, yet the old... Read more

Queen of Hearts

By: Colleen Oakes

Narrated by: Moira Quirk

Length: 6 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

The first novel in Colleen Oakes’s epic, imaginative and twisted series, perfect for fans of Dorothy Must Die and Heartless, tackles the origin of one of the most infamous villains—the Queen of Hearts. This is not the story of the Wonderland we know. Alice has not fallen down a rabbit hole. This is a Wonderland where beneath each smile lies a... Read more

Eve

By: Wm. Paul Young

Narrated by: Roger Mueller

Length: 8 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

From the author of the twenty-five-million-copy bestseller The Shack comes a captivating new novel destined to be one of the most talked-about books of the decade.

Eve is a bold, unprecedented exploration of the Creation narrative, true to the original texts and centuries of scholarship—yet with breathtaking discoveries that challenge traditional... Read more

The Tale of Tales

By: Giambattista Basile

Narrated by: Dorothy Dillingham Blue, Paul Boehmer, Mark Bra...

Length: 18 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, and Vincent Cassel: a rollicking, bawdy, fantastical cycle of 50 fairy tales told by 10 storytellers over 5 days
 
Before the Brothers Grimm, before Charles Perrault, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was Giambattista Basile, a seventeenth-century poet from... Read more

Heart of Darkness

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Michael Thompson

Length: 4 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon. The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind... Read more