Classics audiobooks

A Room with a View

By: E. M. Forster

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

E. M. Forster’s celebrated social comedy explores romantic intrigue and prim propriety among a colorful cast of Edwardian characters. Lucy Honeychurch, a young English woman traveling in Italy with her stuffy chaperone aunt, finds herself constrained by the claustrophobic influence of her British guardians and attracted to the free-spirited... Read more

Dubliners

By: James Joyce

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

James Joyce paints vivid portraits of the poorer classes of Dublin in a collection of stories whose larger purpose, he said, was to depict a "moral history of Ireland." From the first story, in which a young boy encounters death to the haunting final story involving the middle-aged Gabriel, the book gives an unflinchingly realistic portrayal of... Read more

Hard Times

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 11 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Originally written for Dickens’ weekly magazine, Household Words, this short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The “eminently practical” Thomas Gradgrind believes... Read more

Around the World in Eighty Days

By: Jules Verne

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

The eccentric Phileas Fogg, a distinguished but sedentary member of London’s Reform Club, takes up a wager that he can circle the globe in just eighty days—an amazing feat in the 1870s. What follows is a lively narrative recounting the journey by Fogg and his valet, Passepartout, as they overcome obstacle after obstacle to win the wager with... Read more

Summer

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Grace Conlin

Length: 5 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Wharton's most erotic and lyrical novel, Summer explores a daring theme for 1917: a woman's awakening to her sexuality.Eighteen-year-old Charity Royall lives in the small town of North Dormer, ignorant of desire until the arrival of architect Lucius Harney. Independent yet kept from love until now by society's expectations, Charity finds herself... Read more

Songs on Bronze

By: Nigel Spivey

Narrated by: Yuri Rasovsky

Length: 8 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Songs on Bronze is the first major retelling of Greek mythology in half a century; a set of lively, racy, dramatic versions of the great myths which, in a multicultural society, are recognized more than ever as stories without equal.Modern translations of the Greek myths have often sought to instruct, to edify, or to impart a personal... Read more

I Will Repay

By: Baroness Emma Orczy

Narrated by: Johanna Ward

Length: 7 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

It has been ten years since Juliette de Marny’s father asked her to swear revenge upon Déroulède for the death of her brother in a duel. At last she finds herself in Déroulède’s house with an easy opportunity to betray him to the citizens of France for conspiring against the people. But Juliette realizes, too late, that she is in love with... Read more

The Awakening

By: Kate Chopin

Narrated by: Grace Conlin

Length: 4 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

First published in 1899, this revolutionary novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation. Rooted in the romantic tradition of Melville and Dickinson, it is the story of twenty-eight-year-old Edna... Read more

The Moon and Sixpence

By: W. Somerset Maugham

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the story of an artist who was willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of art. Charles Strickland, a stock broker in London, seems like a good, honest man. But one day, at the age of forty, heleaves his business, his wife, and his children and goes to Paris. He has neither money nor prospects, and he knows practically nothing about... Read more

Never Come Morning

By: Nelson Algren

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 10 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Bruno Bicek, “Lefty,” is a prizefighter and small-time hood in Chicago. Boxing is his ticket to escape hard times and gang life, but when Bruno doesn’t prevent the brutal gang rape of his girlfriend, Steffi, it tears them apart, their worlds changed forever. Bruno is sent to jail and Steffi to a brothel governed by the brutality of a local crime... Read more

Elmer Gantry

By: Sinclair Lewis

Narrated by: Anthony Heald

Length: 15 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Elmer Gantry is the portrait of a silver-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church, yet lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence.The title character starts out as a greedy, shallow, philandering Baptist minister, turns to evangelism, and eventually becomes the leader of a large Methodist congregation.... Read more

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

By: Muriel Spark

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 3 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

In the classic work that launched a play, a movie, and a song, Muriel Spark tells the darkly intriguing story of an eccentric Edinburgh teacher and the intense relationship she develops with six of her students.At the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, in Edinburgh, Scotland, teacher extraordinaire Miss Jean Brodie is unmistakably, and... Read more

The Small House at Allington

By: Anthony Trollope

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 22 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

TheSmall House at Allingtonintroduces Trollope's most beloved heroine, the charming Lily Dale, to the Barsetshire scene. Lily is the niece of Squire Dale, an embittered old bachelor living in the main house on his property at Allington. He has loaned an adjacent small house rent-free to his widowed sister-in-law and her daughters, Lily and Bell.... Read more

The Scarlet Pimpernel

By: Emma Orczy

Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard

Length: 8 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

“Who is this man, this Scarlet Pimpernel?” Each day this question grew more pressing to the rulers of the French Revolution. Only this man and his band of followers threatened their total power. Only this maddeningly elusive figure defied the vast network of fanatics, informers, and secret agents that the Revolution spread out to catch its... Read more

My Ántonia

By: Willa Cather

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

Length: 7 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Widely recognized as Willa Cather’s finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Ántonia tells of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska.Through Jim Burden’s endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the... Read more

I Am Legend

By: Richard Matheson

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 5 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

The basis for the film starring Academy Award nominee Will Smith, I Am Legend is a classic of horror and suspense.In I Am Legend, a terrible plague has decimated the world, and those who were unfortunate enough to survive are transformed into bloodthirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on earth. Every other man,... Read more

The Three Musketeers

By: Alexandre Dumas

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 22 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

This historical romance, perhaps the greatest cloak-and-sword story ever written, relates the adventures of four fictional swashbuckling heroes who loyally served the French kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV.When the dashing young d’Artagnan arrives in Paris from Gascony, he becomes embroiled in three duels with the musketeers Athos, Porthos, and... Read more

The Magnificent Ambersons

By: Booth Tarkington

Narrated by: Geoffrey Blaisdell

Length: 9 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize when it was first published, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The family serves as a metaphor for the old society that crumbled after the Industrial Revolution while a middle-western town spread and darkened into a city.George Amberson... Read more

Maid in Waiting

By: John Galsworthy

Narrated by: David Case

Length: 10 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Maid in Waiting is the first novel in the third and final trilogy of John Galsworthy's Forsyte Chronicles. In this seventh installment, the story continues the lives and times, loves and losses, and fortunes and deaths of the fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians, the Forsytes. The trilogy here begun is called End... Read more

Doctor Thorne

By: Anthony Trollope

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 20 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Anthony Trollope once said, "A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos." Trollope admirably fulfills his own criteria in this charming third novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire.When Doctor Thomas Thorne adopts his niece, Mary, he chooses to keep secret her illegitimate birth as he introduces her... Read more

Mildred Pierce

By: James M. Cain

Narrated by: Christine Williams

Length: 10 hours

Abridged: No

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain... Read more

Barchester Towers

By: Anthony Trollope

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 18 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

This magnificent sequel to The Warden satirizes the struggle for ascendancy among the clergy of a cathedral city as they contend for each newly vacant post within the archdiocese.The contest for power is between Archdeacon Grantly and his followers, who favor high-church tendencies, and the new bishop and his followers, with their distinctly... Read more

In the Reign of Terror

By: G. A. Henty

Narrated by: Stuart Langton

Length: 8 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

When young Harry Sandwith, a Westminster boy, becomes a resident at the chateau of a French marquis, he begins a series of adventures with the family. One day, an ill-advised trip takes them to Paris at the height of the French Revolution. Suddenly Harry and his party are beset with perils at every turn. As they struggle to escape, imprisonment... Read more

The Castle of Otranto

By: Horace Walpole

Narrated by: Tony Jay

Length: 3 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

On the day of his wedding, Conrad, heir to the house of Otranto, is killed under mysterious circumstances. His calculating father, Manfred, fears that his dynasty will now come to an end and determines to marry his son’s bride himself—despite the fact he is already married. But a series of terrifying supernatural omens soon threaten this... Read more