Classics audiobooks

Fathers and Sons

By: Ivan Turgenev

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

Length: 8 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticizing the landowning way of life... Read more

The Gambler

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrated by: Michael Kramer

Length: 6 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

The Gambler is a psychologically probing novel concerning the gambling episodes, tangled love affairs, and complicated lives of Alexis Ivanovitch, a young gambling addict; Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves; a pair of French adventurers; and other characters. Narrated by Alexis, this short novel is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's own... Read more

The Voyage Out

By: Virginia Woolf

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 12 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

Rachel Vinrace, Virginia Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at twenty-four, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who wishes to teach Rachel "how to live." Arriving in Santa Marina, a... Read more

The Duel and Other Stories

By: Anton Chekhov

Narrated by: William Dufris

Length: 6 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Anton Chekhov was a Russian short story writer and a playwright. His playwriting career produced four classics, while his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics alike. As his writing evolved, Chekhov made formal innovations that have influenced the evolution of the modern short story.



This collection of short stories... Read more

The Very Best of O. Henry

By: O. Henry

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

O. Henry, the pseudonym of the American writer William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), is best known for writing stories full of wit, wordplay, and warm characterizations, and particularly for their clever twist endings. This volume contains twenty of O. Henry's best and best-loved stories. They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well... Read more

The Sea-Wolf

By: Jack London

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 11 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

When Humphrey Van Weyden finds himself struggling in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay, he thinks the worst that can happen to him is drowning. After he is rescued by the Ghost and its captain, Wolf Larson, Humphrey discovers that there are fates far worse than death. On Larsen's hell-ship, the dilettante hero is forced to slave as cabin... Read more

Scaramouche

By: Rafael Sabatini

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 11 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

The passionate Andre-Louis Moreau makes an unexpected entrance into the French Revolution when he vows to avenge his best friend's death. His target: Monsieur de La Tour d'Azyr, the aristocratic villain who killed his friend. Andre-Louis rallies the underclass to join him in his mission against the supreme power of the nobility. Soon the rebel... Read more

King Solomon's Mines

By: Henry Rider Haggard

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century, King Solomon's Mines has inspired dozens of adventure stories, including Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan books and the Indiana Jones movies. Vivid and enormously action-packed, Henry Rider Haggard's tale of danger and discovery continues to shock and thrill, as it has since it was first... Read more

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

By: James Weldon Johnson

Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones

Length: 5 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction. The first fictional memoir ever written by a black, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man influenced a generation of writers during the Harlem Renaissance... Read more

The Virginian

By: Owen Wister

Narrated by: John Pruden

Length: 14 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

A strong, silent stranger rides into the lawless lands of the western frontier, battles horse thieves, deals with unyielding scoundrels, and wins the heart of a schoolmarm. Owen Wister's 1902 classic—the first great novel of the American West—is rich in moral drama and vernacular wit. His hero—like knights of old—lives by an enduring code of... Read more

Agnes Grey

By: Anne Bronte

Narrated by: Anne Flosnik

Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Written when women—and workers generally—had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequities of the rigid class system in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess. Pampered and protected at home, she is unprepared... Read more

Wives and Daughters

By: Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrated by: Josephine Bailey

Length: 26 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, is regarded by many as her masterpiece. Molly Gibson is the daughter of the doctor in the small provincial town of Hollingford. Her widowed father marries a second time to give Molly the woman's presence he feels she lacks, but until the arrival of Cynthia, her dazzling stepsister, Molly finds... Read more

The Bostonians

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Xe Sands

Length: 17 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

From Boston's social underworld emerges Verena Tarrant, a girl with extraordinary oratorical gifts, which she deploys in tawdry meeting-houses on behalf of "the sisterhood of women." She acquires two admirers of a very different stamp: Olive Chancellor, devotee of radical causes and marked out for tragedy; and Basil Ransom, a veteran of the... Read more

The Prince and the Pauper

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 8 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Originally published in 1881, Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper is a timeless tale of switched identities. After the young Prince Edward VI of England and a peasant boy switch places, the "little king" tries to escape from a world in which he must beg for food, sleep with rodents, face ridicule, and avoid assassination. Meanwhile, the... Read more

Little Dorrit

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Antony Ferguson

Length: 31 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

One of Charles Dickens's most personally resonant novels, Little Dorrit speaks across the centuries to the modern audience. Its depiction of shady financiers and banking collapses seems uncannily topical, as does Dickens's compassionate admiration for Amy Dorrit, the "child of the Marshalsea," as she struggles to hold her family together in the... Read more

The Rainbow

By: D. H. Lawrence

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 18 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in the rural midlands of England, The Rainbow revolves around three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than sixty years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow and adopts her daughter as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupt. Suffused... Read more

Nostromo

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Antony Ferguson

Length: 16 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the greatest political novels in any language, Nostromo reenacts the establishment of modern capitalism in a remote South American province locked between the Andes and the Pacific. In Sulaco, a harbor town in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, a vivid cast of characters is caught up in a civil war to decide whether its... Read more

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 30 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is closely modelled on the eighteenth-century novels that Charles Dickens loved as a child, such as Robinson Crusoe, in which the fortunes of a hero shape the plot. The likeable young Nicholas, left penniless on the death of his father, sets off in search of better prospects. His meandering route to... Read more

The Magnificent Ambersons

By: Booth Tarkington

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 10 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in the Midwest in the early twentieth century—the dawn of the automobile age—The Magnificent Ambersons begins by introducing the Ambersons, the richest family in town. Exemplifying aristocratic excess, the Ambersons have everything money can buy—and more. But George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled grandson of the family patriarch, is unable to... Read more

The Ambassadors

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 18 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Lambert Strether, a mild, middle-aged American of no particular achievements, is dispatched to Paris from the manufacturing empire of Woollett, Massachusetts. The mission conferred on him by his august patron, Mrs. Newsome, is to discover what, or who, is keeping her son Chad in the notorious city of pleasure and to bring him home. But Strether... Read more

Babbitt

By: Sinclair Lewis

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 13 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

In this sardonic portrait of the up-and-coming middle class during the prosperous 1920s, Sinclair Lewis perfectly captures the sound, the feel, and the attitudes of the generation that created the cult of consumerism. With a sharp eye for detail and keen powers of observation, Lewis tracks successful realtor George Babbitt's daily struggles to... Read more

Main Street

By: Sinclair Lewis

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 18 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

This classic by Sinclair Lewis shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire. Main Street attacks the conformity and dullness of early-twentieth-century midwestern village life in the story of Carol Milford, the city girl who marries the town doctor. Her efforts to bring culture to the prairie village are met... Read more

The Wings of the Dove

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Justine Eyre

Length: 17 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Beautiful Kate Croy may have been left penniless by her relatives, but her bold, ambitious nature ensures she will not succumb meekly to a life of poverty. If the financial circumstances of Merton Densher, the man she is passionately in love with, are not sufficient to secure her future, perhaps her cunning will.



So when Milly Theale arrives in... Read more

Women in Love

By: D. H. Lawrence

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 18 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

A powerful and engrossing tale of extremes and extremists, D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love follows the passionate relationships of two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen, with their respective lovers, the ominous Gerald Crich and the charismatic but fragile Rupert Birkin. Beginning in a narrow-minded English colliery town and culminating amidst... Read more