Classics audiobooks

The Good Soldier

By: Ford Madox Ford

Narrated by: Gildart Jackson

Length: 7 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Handsome, wealthy, and a veteran of service in India, Captain Edward Ashburnham appears to be the ideal "good soldier" and the embodiment of English upper-class virtues. But for his creator, Ford Madox Ford, he also represents the corruption at society's core. Beneath Ashburnham's charming, polished exterior lurks a soul well-versed in the arts... Read more

Summer

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Lorna Raver

Length: 6 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

One of America's first novels to deal frankly with a young woman's sexual awakening, Summer shocked readers with its forthright exploration of desire and sexuality when it was first published in 1917. Set in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, it tells the story of Charity Royall, a young New England woman of humble origins who... Read more

Cranford

By: Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 6 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell's best-known work, is a humorous account of a nineteenth-century English village dominated by a group of genteel but modestly circumstanced women. This is a community that runs on cooperation and gossip, at the very heart of which are the daughters of the former rector: Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister, Miss Matty.... Read more

The Moonstone

By: Wilkie Collins

Narrated by: James Langton

Length: 18 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Called "the first and greatest of English detective novels" by T. S. Eliot, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone is a masterpiece of suspense.



A fabulous yellow diamond becomes the dangerous inheritance of Rachel Verinder. Outside her Yorkshire country house watch the Hindu priests who have waited for many years to reclaim their ancient talisman,... Read more

The Woman in White

By: Wilkie Collins

Narrated by: Josephine Bailey & Simon Prebble

Length: 25 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the greatest mystery thrillers ever written, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White was a phenomenal bestseller in the 1860s, achieving even greater success than works by Charles Dickens. Full of surprise, intrigue, and suspense, this vastly entertaining novel continues to enthrall audiences today.



The story begins with an eerie midnight... Read more

Winesburg, Ohio

By: Sherwood Anderson

Narrated by: George K. Wilson

Length: 7 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small town at the end of the nineteenth century. In the perfectly imagined world of Winesburg, an archetypal small American town, Anderson reveals the hidden passions that turn ordinary lives into fonts of unforgettable emotions. Played out against... Read more

O Pioneers!

By: Willa Cather

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Length: 5 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," writes Willa Cather in O Pioneers! The country is America; the woman is Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father's farm in Nebraska. A model of emotional strength, courage, and resolve, Alexandra fights long and hard to... Read more

The Thirty-Nine Steps

By: John Buchan

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

Length: 4 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

John Buchan takes us back to Edwardian Britain on the eve of the First World War in the modern thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. An inexplicable murder drives the innocent Richard Hannay, on the run from a manhunt that never seems to end, to hide in remote Scottish moorland. Disguise and deception are his only weapons, as he struggles to decode... Read more

Moll Flanders

By: Daniel Defoe

Narrated by: Davina Porter

Length: 13 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the most determined, energetic, and lusty heroines in all of English literature, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders will do anything to avoid poverty. Born in Newgate Prison, she was for twelve years a whore, five times a wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a thief, and eight years a transported felon in Virginia before finally... Read more

Dubliners

By: James Joyce

Narrated by: Gerard Doyle

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Dubliners is a collection of short stories by James Joyce that was first published in 1914. The fifteen stories were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the twentieth century.



The stories were written at a time when Irish nationalism was at its peak and a search for a... Read more

The Secret Agent

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

Length: 10 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

Secret agent Mr. Adolph Verloc operates from a seedy Soho shop, where he deals in pornography and espionage. Idle, treacherous, and self-righteous, he makes the life of his wife, Winnie, one of silent misery. When Verloc is assigned to plant a bomb at Greenwich Observatory, his plans go terribly awry, and his family has to deal with the tragic... Read more

The Pilgrim's Progress

By: John Bunyan

Narrated by: James Langton

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

"As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream."



So begins one of the best-loved and most widely read books in English literature. An acknowledged classic of the heroic Puritan tradition, and a founding text in the... Read more

This Side of Paradise

By: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 9 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

If the Roaring Twenties are remembered as the era of "flaming youth," it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who lit the fire. His semiautobiographical first novel, This Side of Paradise, became an instant bestseller and established an image of seemingly carefree, party-mad young men and women out to create a new morality for a new, post-war America. It... Read more

Notes from the Underground

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 5 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

A predecessor to such monumental works as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground represents a turning point in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing toward the more political side. In this work, we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he... Read more

The Moon and Sixpence

By: W. Somerset Maugham

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

Length: 7 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

Based on the life of Postimpressionist artist Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence builds on a long tradition of European writing about the South Pacific as an exotic locale. It also marks the transformation of British writer W. Somerset Maugham from celebrated playwright to accomplished novelist.



In The Moon and Sixpence, Charles Strickland is a... Read more

The Iliad

By: Homer

Narrated by: Michael Page

Length: 20 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode in the Trojan War. At its center is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his refusal to fight after being humiliated by his leader, Agamemnon. But when the Trojan Hector kills Achilles's close friend Patroclus,... Read more

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

By: Howard Pyle

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 9 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

In Merry England, in the time of old when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest near Nottingham Town a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood. No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his, nor were there ever such yeomen as the sevenscore... Read more

Swann's Way

By: Marcel Proust

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 17 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Swann's Way is the first novel of Marcel Proust's seven-volume magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. Following the narrator's opening ruminations about the nature of sleep is one of twentieth-century literature's most famous scenes: the eating of the madeleine soaked in a "decoction of lime-flowers," the associative act from which the remainder of... Read more

The Mayor of Casterbridge

By: Thomas Hardy

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 11 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Set against the backdrop of peaceful southwest England, where Thomas Hardy spent much of his youth, The Mayor of Casterbridge captures the author's unique genius for depicting the absurdity underlying much of the sorrow and humor in our lives.



Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his... Read more

Sons and Lovers

By: D. H. Lawrence

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 16 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence's first major novel, was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden for long.



When the marriage between... Read more

Anna Karenina

By: Leo Tolstoy

Narrated by: Lorna Raver

Length: 39 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

Vladimir Nabokov called Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina "one of the greatest love stories in world literature." Set in imperial Russia, Anna Karenina is a rich and complex meditation on passionate love and disastrous infidelity.



Married to a powerful government minister, Anna Karenina is a beautiful woman who falls deeply in love with a wealthy army... Read more

Silas Marner

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor

Length: 7 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Silas Marner, which first appeared in 1861, is a tale about life, love, and the need to belong. Accused of a crime he didn't commit and unjustly forced from his home town, Silas the weaver lives a reclusive and godless life, finding love and companionship only in material objects. It takes the theft of his gold and the discovery of an abandoned... Read more

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: William Dufris

Length: 11 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is both a whimsical fantasy and a social satire chock-full of brilliant Twainisms. Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American—a Connecticut Yankee—by a stroke of fate is sent back into time to sixth-century England and ends up in Camelot and King Arthur's Court. Although of average intelligence, he... Read more

Ivanhoe

By: Sir Walter Scott

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Length: 18 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

The epitome of the chivalric novel, Ivanhoe sweeps listeners into Medieval England and the lives of a memorable cast of characters. Ivanhoe, a trusted ally of Richard the Lion Hearted, returns from the Crusades to reclaim the inheritance his father denied him. Rebecca, a vibrant, beautiful Jewish woman, is defended by Ivanhoe against a charge of... Read more