Classics audiobooks

South Sea Tales

By: Robert Louis Stevenson

Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

The literary world was shocked when in 1890, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently in Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical... Read more

Adam Bede

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Jill Tanner

Length: 23 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts University of Kent at Canterbury 'Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your immediate feelings...' Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot's first full-length novel, marked the emergence of an... Read more

The Other Wind

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by: Samuel Roukin

Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

The sorcerer Alder fears sleep. The dead are pulling him to them at night. Through him they may free themselves and invade Earthsea. Alder seeks advice from Ged, once Archmage. Ged tells him to go to Tenar, Tehanu, and the young king at Havnor. They are joined by amber-eyed Irian, a fierce dragon able to assume the shape of a woman. The threat... Read more

Tehanu

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin

Length: 8 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

The Nebula and Locus Award–winning fourth novel in the renowned Earthsea series from Ursula K. Le Guin.

In this fourth novel in the Earthsea series, we rejoin the young priestess Tenar and powerful wizard Ged. Years before, they had helped each other at a time of darkness and danger. Together, they shared an adventure like no other. Tenar has... Read more

Daniel Deronda

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Jill Tanner

Length: 36 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Gwendolen Harleth gambles her happiness when she marries a sadistic aristocrat for his money. Beautiful, neurotic, and self-centred, Gwendolen is trapped in an increasingly destructive relationship, and only her chance encounter with the idealistic Deronda seems to offer the hope of a brighter future. Deronda is searching for a vocation, and in... Read more

Plain Tales From the Hills

By: Rudyard Kipling

Narrated by: Michael Page

Length: 7 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Including the stories "Lispeth," "Beyond the Pale," and "In the Pride of His Youth," this collection tells of soldiers, wise children, exiles, forbidden romances and divided identities, creating a rich portrait of Anglo-Indian society. Originally published for a newspaper in Lahore when Kipling was a journalist, the tales were later revised by... Read more

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

By: Laurence Sterne

Narrated by: John Keating

Length: 21 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Laurence Sterne's beloved comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the "biography" of Tristram Shandy-a wonderfully humorous and eccentric narrator who guides the reader from his conception to his birth, and on to his life as an adult. The twists and turns of Tristram's life expose him to such memorable characters as... Read more

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

By: Samuel Johnson

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

Length: 4 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Rasselas and his companions escape the pleasures of the "happy valley" in order to make their "choice of life." By witnessing the misfortunes and miseries of others they come to understand the nature of happiness, and value it more highly. Their travels and enquiries raise important practical and philosophical questions concerning many aspects... Read more

North and South

By: Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrated by: Heather Wilds

Length: 18 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

As relevant now as when it was first published, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South skillfully weaves a compelling love story into a clash between the pursuit of profit and humanitarian ideals. When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to... Read more

Agnes Grey

By: Anne Bronte

Narrated by: Virginia Leishman

Length: 8 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

In her daring first novel, the youngest Bronte sister drew upon her own experiences to tell the unvarnished truth about life as a governess. Like Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte was a young middle-class Victorian lady whose family fortunes had faltered. Like so many other unmarried women of the nineteenth century, Bronte accepted the only "respectable"... Read more

Humphry Clinker

By: Tobias Smollet

Narrated by: Steven Crossley, John Keating, Liz Pearce, Eliz...

Length: 17 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Matthew Bramble, a gout-ridden misanthrope, travels Britain with his nephew, niece, spinster sister and man-servant, the trusty Humphry Clinker. In poor health, Bramble sees the world as one of degeneracy and raucous overcrowding, and will not hesitate to let his companions know his feelings on the matter. Peopled with pimps, drunkards,... Read more

Oroonoko

By: Aphra Behn

Narrated by: Susan Lyons

Length: 3 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Oroonoko, the grandson of an African king, is madly in love with Imoinda, the daughter of the king's general. When the king-who is also in love with Imoinda-catches wind of their affair, he sells Imoinda as a slave. This betrayal sets off a chain of events that carries unforeseen consequences for everybody involved. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko has... Read more

Exemplary Novels

By: Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra & Edith Grossman

Narrated by: Luis Moreno

Length: 21 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Edith Grossman, celebrated for her brilliant translation of Don Quixote, offers a dazzling new version of another Cervantes classic, on the 400th anniversary of his death The twelve novellas gathered together in Exemplary Novels reveal the extraordinary breadth of Cervantes's imagination: his nearly limitless ability to create characters, invent... Read more

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

By: Italo Calvino

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 3 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Italo Calvino's brilliant reflection on what makes great literature, from the classics to more contemporary works, punctuated with personal details about Calvino's own writing processes.

At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued, and which he believed would define... Read more

The Road to San Giovanni

By: Italo Calvino

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 3 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

“In each other’s presence we became mute, would walk in silence side by side along the road to San Giovanni. To my father’s mind, words must serve as confirmations of things, and as signs of possession; to mine, they were foretastes of things barely glimpsed, not possessed, presumed.”—from The Road to San Giovanni

In these autobiographical... Read more

Beowulf

By: Stephen Mitchell

Narrated by: Stephen Mitchell

Length: 3 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Stephen Mitchell's marvelously clear and vivid rendering recreates the robust masculine music of the original. It both hews closely to the Old English and captures its wild energy and vitality, not just as a deep "work of literature" but also as a rousing entertainment that can still stir our feelings and rivet our attention today, after more... Read more

Anthem

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: Andrew Garman

Length: 2 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Ayn Rand's classic tale of a dystopian future of the great "We"-a world that deprives individuals of a name or independence-that anticipates her later masterpieces, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. They existed only to serve the state. They were conceived in controlled Palaces of Mating. They died in the Home of the Useless. From cradle to... Read more

Lorna Doone

By: R.D. Blackmore

Narrated by: Tim Gerard Reynolds

Length: 29 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

First published in 1869, Lorna Doone is the story of John Ridd, a farmer who finds love amid the religious and social turmoil of seventeenth-century England. He is just a boy when his father is slain by the Doones, a lawless clan inhabiting wild Exmoor on the border of Somerset and Devon. Seized by curiosity and a sense of adventure, he makes... Read more

Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

By: L. Frank Baum

Narrated by: John McDonough

Length: 4 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

From the author of the Wizard of Oz comes a magical tale about the origins and story of Santa Claus including Santa's childhood among the fairies and animals, how he came to make presents, and why he comes down our chimneys at Christmas. Read more

The Complete Cosmicomics

By: Italo Calvino

Narrated by: Jefferson Mays

Length: 15 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Italo Calvino's short stories explore natural phenomena and the origins of the universe. The Complete Cosmicomics brings together all of these enchanting stories—including some never before translated—in one volume for the first time.

Italo Calvino’s beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the... Read more

Powers of Darkness

By: Bram Stoker & Valdimar Ásmundsson

Narrated by: Adam Verner, Robertson Dean, Ralph Lister, Dere...

Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Powers of Darkness is an incredible literary discovery: In 1900, Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar Ásmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker’s world-famous 1897 novel Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna (literally, “Powers of Darkness”), this Icelandic edition included an original preface written by Stoker himself. Makt Myrkranna was... Read more

The Getting of Wisdom

By: Henry Handel Richardson

Narrated by: Justine Eyre

Length: 7 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

The Getting of Wisdom, a wicked and satirical novel on the pain and confusion of growing up, first appeared in 1910. A century later, it has lost none of its bite. One of the most memorable characters in Australian fiction, Laura Rambotham, aged twelve, enters the portals of an exclusive girls’ school eager to be accepted. But this precocious... Read more

The Man Who Loved Children

By: Christina Stead

Narrated by: C. M. Hébert

Length: 19 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for one another. As Sam uses the children’s adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak despair, knowing the bitter reality that lies just below his mad visions. A chilling novel of the relations between parents and children, husbands and... Read more

Catherine Carmier

By: Ernest J. Gaines

Narrated by: D. M. Greene

Length: 5 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence. When Jackson returns home to his family after an absence of ten years, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation, he... Read more