Classics audiobooks

Sketches by Boz: Volume 3

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Peter Joyce

Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Queen Victoria... and Prince Albert were married in 1840. Dickens uses this event as an ingenious ploy to salute and promote domestic felicity, advising young ladies upon several examples of the different types of male available as partners. There follows a section describing various married couples from whom the young ladies could possibly... Read more

Lady Vernon and Her Daughter

By: Jane Rubino & Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

Narrated by: Susan Duerden

Length: 11 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

In Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, Jane Rubino and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway have taken Jane Austen's novella, Lady Susan, and transformed it into a vivid and richly developed novel of love lost and found--and the complex relationships between women, men, and money in Regency England.

Lady Vernon and her daughter, Frederica, are left penniless and... Read more

Anthem

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: B.J. Harrison

Length: 2 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

“It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil.” Deep issues of conscience are explored in Ayn Rand’s dystopian tale of a man who dares to fight against a system that invades his very mind and identity. Read more

White Fang

By: Jack London

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 7 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Jack London’s tales are more than epics of hardship and survival—they are morality plays in which good wins over evil.In the desolate, frozen wilds of northwest Canada, a wolf cub finds himself the sole survivor of his litter. Son of Kiche, half-wolf, half-dog, and the ageing wolf One Eye, he is thrust into a savage world where each day renews... Read more

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

By: Victor Hugo

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 17 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

Set amid the riot, intrigue, and pageantry of medieval Paris, Victor Hugo’s masterful tale of heroism and adventure has been a perennial favorite since its first publication in 1831. It is the story of Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer of the Notre Dame Cathedral, who falls in love with the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda, who shows him kindness... Read more

Ninety-Three

By: Victor Hugo

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 13 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

It is 1793 in France—the year of the guillotine. Already, Louis XVI has been sentenced to the scaffold, and terror reigns. Ideals topple in the face of political necessity, alliances founder, and intrigue is a way of life.The architects of the Revolution—Marat, Danton, and Robespierre—have set up an embryo parliament called the Convention,... Read more

Don Quixote

By: Miguel De Cervantes

Narrated by: Andrew Sachs

Length: 2 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

DON QUIXOTE - by far the most famous book in Spanish literature - was originally intended by Cervantes as a skit on traditional popular ballads, but he also parodied the romances of chivalry. As a result he produced one of the most entertaining adventure stories of all time and created, in Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, two... Read more

Quo Vadis

By: Henryk Sienkiewicz

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 22 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Written nearly a century ago and translated into over fifty languages, this masterpiece of historical fiction is one of the best-selling novels in history and the inspiration for the MGM motion picture of 1951. An epic of love and courage in Nero's time, it illustrates the conflict of moral ideas within the Roman Empire at the dawn of... Read more

Ivanhoe

By: Walter Scott

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 19 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in England during Richard I's reign, Sir Walter Scott's fanciful, vivid reinterpretation of medieval life is a successful blend of fact, myth, and romance.Upon returning from the Crusades, where he served with King Richard I, Wilfred of Ivanhoe is met with his father's disapproval, having fallen in love with Rowena, his father's ward. When... Read more

The Looking Glass War

By: John le Carré

Narrated by: Full Cast, Ian McDiarmid, Philip Jackson & Simo...

Length: 1 hour 54 minutes

Abridged: No

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess ‘the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin’. When word reaches 'The Department' - an ailing section of British intelligence -... Read more

The Scarlet Letter

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Kristen Underwood

Length: 9 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country," Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe Scarlet Letterreaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact of a single passionate act on the lives of three... Read more

Teresa

By: Neera

Narrated by: Claudia Giannelli

Length: 6 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Teresa: primo capitolo di una triologia che affronta le condizioni della donna alla fine dell'ottocento. Read more

The Custom of the Country

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Grace Conlin

Length: 14 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

One of Edith Wharton’s most acclaimed works, The Custom of the Country is a blistering indictment of materialism, power, and misplaced values. Its heroine, Undine Spragg, is one of the most ruthless characters in all of literature, as selfishly unscrupulous as she is fiercely beautiful. When her family acquires a small fortune, they leave... Read more

Smoke

By: Ivan Turgenev

Narrated by: Stuart Langton

Length: 6 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Written by one of Russia’s literary masters, Smoke is both a poignant love story and a brilliant socio-political study. Marked with a barbed wit and a visionary modernism, it became the center of a famous philosophical breach between Turgenev and Dostoevsky.On the brink of marriage, Grigorii Litvinov visits the fashionable European spa of... Read more

A Modern Mephistopheles

By: Louisa May Alcott

Narrated by: C. M. Hébert

Length: 5 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Known for her beloved children’s classics, Louisa May Alcott’s true zeal was for writing sensational literature, which she chose to have published anonymously or under a pseudonym. Her favorite of these works was A Modern Mephistopheles.This chilling tale of greed, lust, and deception opens on a midwinter night when Felix Canaris, a despairing... Read more

Heart of Darkness

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 3 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Compelling, exotic, and suspenseful, Heart of Darkness is far more than just an adventure story. The novel explores deep into the dark regions of the hearts and souls of its characters and into the conflicts prevalent in more "primitive" cultures. It is also a striking picture of the moral deterioration that can result from prolonged... Read more

Not George Washington

By: P. G. Wodehouse & Herbert Westbrook

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 5 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

This rollicking semi-autobiographical novel weaves a tale of Wodehouse’s early days as a writer, romance gone awry, and the colorful characters he encountered.James Orlebar Cloyster, in order to marry his true love, embarks on a scheme of such clever deception that he very nearly manages to ruin both his romance and his career.Told from multiple... Read more

Jacob’s Room

By: Virginia Woolf

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 6 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

This impressionistic novel by Virginia Woolf marks the author’s first move toward the experimentation for which she would later become recognized. Through a montage of passing images, conversations, and stream-of-consciousness monologues, it tells the story of Jacob Flanders, an idealistic and sensitive young man attempting to reconcile his love... Read more

Antic Hay

By: Aldous Huxley

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Theodore Gumbril, a mild young Oxford tutor, has become thoroughly dismayed by the formality of college life and the staid British institutions of learning. An impetuous need for celebration, even rebellion, possesses him. He and his bohemian companions embark on wild and daring bacchanalian adventures that steer them resolutely away from... Read more

Howards End

By: E. M. Forster

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 11 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

In this vibrant portrait of Edwardian England and the many intricacies of class relations in English society during the turn of the century, two families with conflicting values are brought together by an inheritance dispute over a charming country house called Howards End. Sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel and their brother Tibby place their... Read more

Salambo

By: Gustave Flaubert

Narrated by: Fred Williams

Length: 12 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Beyond the gardens of Hamilcar’s palace, beyond the walls of Carthage, the Roman hordes stood waiting to annihilate the noblest city of ancient Africa. Within the city, all was madness—the houses were filled with the screams of women and the streets teemed with terrified men. The veil of the goddess Tanit, sacred to Carthage, had fallen to... Read more

Framley Parsonage

By: Anthony Trollope

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 18 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

Mark Robarts, a young vicar, is newly arrived in the village of Framley. With ambitions to further his career, he seeks connections in the county's high society. He is soon preyed upon by a local member of parliament to guarantee a substantial loan, which Mark in a moment of weakness agrees to—despite knowing the man is a notorious debtor—and... Read more

Gone With the Wind

By: Margaret Mitchell

Narrated by: Linda Stephens

Length: 49 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Margaret Mitchell's great novel of the South is one of the most popular books ever written. Within six months of its publication in 1936, Gone With the Wind had sold a million copies. To date, it has been translated into 25 languages, and more than 28 million copies have been sold. Here are the... Read more

The Enormous Radio

By: John Cheever

Narrated by: Meryl Streep, Ben Cheever & Peter Gallagher

Length: 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Performed by Meryl StreepHere is one of twelve magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates—with unequaled grace and tenderness—the deepest feelings we have.As Cheever writes in his preface, ""These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York... Read more