Classics audiobooks

Oliver Twist - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: John Wells

Length: 3 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Through the immortal characters of Oliver, Nancy, Bill Sikes, Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Mr Bumble, Dickens mercilessly sends up the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century life - the high-minded reformism of the intellectuals and the snobbery of those in power.

(P)1995 Hodder & Stoughton Audiobooks Read more

Essential Welty

By: Eudora Welty

Narrated by: Eudora Welty

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1956, Caedmon had the great fortune to record Eudora Welty reading some of her finest stories. In her sweetly vibrant Mississippi drawl, Ms. Welty deftly draws the listener in to the uproariously multilayered ""Why I Live at the P.O.,"" the spontaneous ""Powerhouse"" and the insightful voice of women's truths in ""Petrified Man."" Ms. Welty's... Read more

The Sea Wolf

By: Jack London

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 10 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

“The danger lay in the heavy fog which blanketed the bay, and of which, as a landsman, I had little apprehension.”This is the first line in this tale of a man uprooted and thrust into the unfamiliar and dangerous world of the sealing sailor. Humphrey Van Weyden, a San Francisco sophisticate and an intellectual, finds himself the captive voyager... Read more

Sense and Sensibility - Abridged

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Kate Winslet

Length: 3 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The reduced circumstances of the Dashwood family cast a shadow over the romantic aspirations of daughters Elinor and Marianne - who must learn to mix sense with sensibility in approaching their problems with both money and men.

(P)1995 Hodder & Stoughton Audiobooks Read more

Collected Stories and Poems

By: Edgar Allan Poe

Narrated by: Ralph Cosham

Length: 6 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Hundreds of books and articles have been written about Edgar Allan Poe. Even so, no one is really sure who Poe was. Many people say that he was as crazy as the characters he wrote about. Others say that Poe was a driven man with a simple wish. He wanted to write and to make a living by his writing. Even though Poe lived a miserable life, he... Read more

London Lavender

By: E. V. Lucas

Narrated by: Peter Joyce

Length: 7 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

‘London Lavender’ is not a story; it is a party. It is a party at which Mr Lucas invites his readers to meet all sorts of interesting and unusual seeming guests, and lets them tell their queer and quaint and funny ideas about life, and gives little sketches of their history. And yet when one thinks them over, the guests at Mr Lucas’s party are... Read more

Siddhartha

By: Hermann Hesse

Narrated by: Firdous Bamji

Length: 5 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life -- the... Read more

The Old Man and the Sea

By: Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by: Donald Sutherland

Length: 2 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

2007 Audie Award Finalist for Solo Narration—Male

*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize*
“A beautiful tale, awash in the seasalt and sweat, bait and beer of the Havana coast. It tells a fundamental human truth: in a volatile world, from our first breath to our last wish, through triumphs and pitfalls both trivial and profound, what sustains us,... Read more

Pilgrim's Progress Unabridged

By: John Bunyan

Length: 10 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

John Bunyan was a simple maker and mender of pots and kettles who received very little education. In spite of that, he penned the most successful allegory ever written. He lost his first wife and was imprisoned for twelve years for his compelling—but unlicensed—preaching. Nevertheless, his preaching about the gravity of sin, salvation by grace,... Read more

A Farewell to Arms

By: Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by: John Slattery

Length: 8 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of love during wartime.

Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming... Read more

For Whom the Bell Tolls

By: Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by: Campbell Scott

Length: 16 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece on war, love, loyalty, and honor tells the story of Robert Jordan, an antifascist American fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good... Read more

Light in August

By: William Faulkner

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 17 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

From the Nobel Prize winner—one of the most highly acclaimed writers of the twentieth century—a novel set in the American South during Prohibition about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality.

Light in August features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn... Read more

El Idiota - Abridged

By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Narrated by: Santiago Munevar

Length: 3 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: Yes

El inmenso novelista ruso Fedor Dostoyevsky, autor de algunas de las novelas que mas profundamente exploran las intimidades del alma humana, en El Idiota presenta a un personaje inolvidable, Mishkin, un joven de la nobleza, sin experiencia, con gran fe en todos y una bondad innata, todo lo cual combinado hace creer a muchos que se trata de un... Read more

Right Ho, Jeeves

By: P. G. Wodehouse

Narrated by: Jonathan Cecil

Length: 7 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

Mayhem has broken out at Brinkley Court and there would seem to be a desperate need for Jeeves. But Bertie is fed up with the assumption that he is merely an addendum to his personal attendant. There are more brains in the Wooster household than just Jeeves, you know! Stand back—Bertram Wooster is on the case. Read more

Bleak House - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Beatnie Edney & Ronald Pickup

Length: 6 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Penguin Classics presents Charles Dickens' epic Bleak House, adapted for downloadable audiobook and read by Ronald Pickup and Beatnie Edney.

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being... Read more

Kidnapped

By: Robert Louis Stevenson

Narrated by: Peter Joyce

Length: 8 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house". So begins one of the greatest tales in literature, an account of David Balfour's trials and tribulations as he falls foul of his miserly uncle who has him... Read more

Max und Moritz und andere Lieblingswerke von Wilhelm Busch

By: Wilhelm Busch

Narrated by: Otto Sander & Götz Alsmann

Length: 1 hour 1 minute

Abridged: No

Wilhelm Busch begleitet uns seit Kindesbeinen. Max und Moritz, seine erste Bildergeschichte, machte ihn weltberühmt und ist das erfolgreichste Kinderbuch aller Zeiten. Sein Werk wurde in zahlreiche Sprachen übersetzt, sogar ins Lateinische, Altgriechische und in die Blindenschrift. Neben seinen bekannten satirischen Bildergeschichten hat Wilhelm... Read more

Persuasion

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Janet Suzman

Length: 2 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

BBC Audio presents Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel. Anne Elliot had never forgotten the personable Captain Wentworth, who reappears in Anne Elliot's life several years after she had been persuaded to break off their engagement.

He makes no secret of his angry indignation. Newly wealthy from success at sea, a marriage with Frederick Wentworth... Read more

Rebecca

By: Daphne du Maurier

Narrated by: Harriet Walter

Length: 3 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

'There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been...Time itself could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.'

When Maxim de Winter brings his shy new bride to his beautiful stately home on the Cornwall coast, it seems like all her dreams have come true.... Read more

La mort d'Ivan Ilitch

By: Léon Tolstoï

Narrated by: Christophe Lemée

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

Léon Tolstoï est né en 1828 dans une petite ville de Russie. Son enfance est frappée par le malheur, consécutivement, il subit la perte de sa mère puis de son père et de sa grand-mère. Son tempérament, très sensible, l'amène à se poser très jeune des questions sur les inégalités sociales qu'il voit autour de lui. Il se fait soldat et les scènes... Read more

Much Ado about Nothing - Abridged

By: E.A. Copen, William Shakespeare, Pierre Arthur ...

Narrated by: a full cast

Length: 2 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Young Claudio has fallen for the lovely heiress Hero, who also loves him. Their path to the altar looks smooth, until the evil Don John intervenes. All ends happily, thanks to his incompetent assassins and the lucky discoveries of the bungling constable Dogberry. Central to the play, one of Shakespeare's best-loved comedies, are Beatrice and... Read more

Pudd'nhead Wilson

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Peter Joyce

Length: 5 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

Puddn’head Wilson is Mark Twain’s novel of satirical wit aimed at the injustices in the southern states of America in the mid 19th century. It tells the story of two children, one born free, the other a slave. When the slaves mother, Roxana, switches the infants in their cradles she is not the only one who lives to regret the action. The tale... Read more

Bigfoot

By: Edgar Wallace

Narrated by: Peter Joyce

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

The brutal murder of a woman in a lonely beach cottage, huge footprints found nearby, a meandering tramp singing snatches of opera in the night! Superintendent Minter - "Sooper", rattles around the countryside on his noisy motorbike and tries to find a connection. Hampered by amateur detective Gordon Cardew, aided and admired by lawyer Jim... Read more

The Vicar of Wakefield

By: Oliver Goldsmith

Narrated by: Peter Joyce

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

The uplifting and heroic tale of a north country clergyman. The story is told by Dr. Charles Primrose, 'a priest, and husbandman and the father of a family'. He lives his life of quiet contentment until he loses his indepedent income. Moving to a humbler dwelling near the estate of Squire Thornhill starts a series of misfortunes which befall the... Read more