Classics audiobooks

Thérèse Raquin

By: Émile Zola

Narrated by: Traci Svendsgaard

Length: 6 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend, Laurent. But their passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a... Read more

Elsie in New York and The Purple Dress

By: O. Henry

Narrated by: Susan McCarthy, David Thorn & Bobbie Frohman

Length: 32 minutes

Abridged: No

Two delightful tales by one of America’s favorite storytellers.In “Elsie in New York,” Elsie is an innocent young woman who, upon the death of her father, must look for work to make a living. Her father expected her to trust to the goodheartedness of his previous employer, but Elsie prefers to make her own way in life. Although she visits an... Read more

The Screwtape Letters

By: C. S. Lewis

Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard

Length: 3 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

A timeless classic on “Hell’s latest novelties and Heaven’s unanswerable answer”A masterpiece of satire, this classic work has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to “Our Father Below.” At once wildly comic,... Read more

The Cossacks

By: Leo Tolstoy

Narrated by: David Thorn

Length: 7 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Olenin is an aimless young nobleman who is disenchanted with city life. Taking a post as a Cadet in the army, he finds himself assigned to the remote Cossack outpost in the Caucasus. It is here, among the Tatars, the Chechens, and the Old Believers, that he will fall in love with a beautiful Cossack girl. The only problem is that she is promised... Read more

The Light That Failed

By: Rudyard Kipling

Narrated by: David Thorn, Stuart Bennett, Kevin Kennedy, Mar...

Length: 8 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Dick Heldar is a war correspondent and an artist, well known for the drawings he sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious artist and reencounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. Then he learns that a minor problem with his eyes is... Read more

The Warden

By: Anthony Trollope

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 7 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

The Warden is the first of the six classic Chronicles of Barsetshire novels, Trollope's best-loved and most famous work.Anthony Trollope's classic novel centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity, whose charitable income far exceeds the purpose for which it was intended. On discovering this, young John Bold turns his... Read more

The Forsyte Saga

By: John Galsworthy

Narrated by: Fred Williams

Length: 42 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

The Forsyte Saga chronicles the ebbing social power of the upper-middle-class Forsyte family through three generations, beginning in Victorian London during the 1880s and ending in the early 1920s. The saga begins with Soames Forsyte, a successful solicitor who buys land at Robin Hill on which to build a house for his wife, Irene, and future... Read more

Lady Susan

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: a full cast

Length: 2 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Jane Austen’s earliest known serious work, Lady Susan is a short, epistolary novel that portrays a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction.Lady Susan, a clever and ruthless widow, determines that her daughter is going to marry a man whom both detest. She sets her own sights on... Read more

A Country Doctor

By: Sarah Orne Jewett

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Length: 8 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Though not as well known as the writers she influenced, Sarah Orne Jewett remains one of the most important American novelists of the late nineteenth century. A Country Doctor, Jewett’s first novel, is a luminous portrayal of rural Maine and a look at the author’s own world. In it, Nan’s struggle to choose between marriage and a career as a... Read more

The Cave Girl

By: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

"In an instant there sloughed from the heart and mind and soul of Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones every particle of civilization and culture and refinement that had required countless ages in the building, stripping him naked, age on age, down to the primordial beast that had begot his first human progenitor. He saw red as he leaped for the throat of... Read more

Tales of the Alhambra

By: Washington Irving

Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard

Length: 8 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Written in 1831, Washington Irving’s dreamlike description of the Alhambra, the beautiful Moorish castle that defined the height of Moorish civilization, and of the surrounding territory of Granada remains one of the most romantic and entertaining travelogues ever written of this region in Spain.Enhanced here with exquisite Spanish guitar music,... Read more

The Shadow-Line

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: William Sutherland

Length: 4 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Written at the start of the Great War, when his son Borys was at the Western Front, The Shadow-Line is Conrad's supreme effort to open man's eyes to the meaning of war through the stimulus of art. In many ways an autobiographical narrative, this masterpiece relates the story of a young and inexperienced sea captain whose first command finds him... Read more

Poor People

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrated by: John Lescault & Julia Emlen

Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Both a masterpiece of Russian populist writing and a parody of the entire genre, Poor People is an early example of Dostoevsky’s genius.Written as a series of letters, Poor People is the tragic tale of a petty clerk and his impossible love for a young girl. Longing to help her and her family, he sells everything he can, but his kindness leads... Read more

Wives and Daughters

By: Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 25 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in nineteenth-century England, Wives and Daughters centers on the story of the youthful Molly Gibson, raised by her doctor father. When he remarries, a new stepsister enters Molly’s quiet life, the loveable but worldly and troubling Cynthia. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and... Read more

Cranford

By: Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 6 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Cranford is Elizabeth Gaskell’s gently comic picture of life and manners in an English country village during the 1830s. It describes the small adventures in the lives of two middle-aged sisters in reduced circumstances, Matilda and Deborah Jenkyns, who do their best to maintain their standards of propriety, decency, and kindness. At the center... Read more

The Lost Girl

By: D. H. Lawrence

Narrated by: Johanna Ward

Length: 15 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Perhaps D. H. Lawrence’s most beautiful, thoroughly contemporary love story, The Lost Girl charts the journey of a woman caught between two worlds and two lives: one mired in convention in industrial England, the other promising sensual liberation in the vibrant landscape of Italy. Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a widowed Midlands draper,... Read more

The Talisman

By: Walter Scott

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 11 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Encamped in the Holy Land, the crusaders are torn by the dissensions and jealousies of their leaders. The army’s impotence is accentuated by the illness of their chief, Richard I of England. Meanwhile, a poor but doughty Scottish crusader known as Sir Kenneth, on a mission far from the camp, encounters a Saracen Emir. After an inconclusive... Read more

The Deerslayer

By: James Fenimore Cooper

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

Length: 20 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Set during the French and Indian Wars, The Deerslayer vividly captures the violence and rugged beauty of the American frontier. In the wilds of New York, where tensions rage between tribal Indians and white pioneers, a white hunter known as Deerslayer is initiated into the moral codes of wilderness society. When he and his loyal Mohican friend... Read more

The Christmas Stories

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 4 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

No writer is more identified with the modern idea of Christmas than Charles Dickens. In some ways, Dickens helped define the holiday that we now celebrate by immortalizing it as a time of warmth and sharing, with an emphasis on family and friends.Dickens wrote all the stories presented here during the 1850s as contributions to the special... Read more

The Other House

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

This terse and startling novel is the story of a struggle for possession—and of its devastating consequences. Three women seek to secure the affections of one man, while he, in turn, tries to satisfy them all. But in the middle of this contest of wills stands his unwitting and vulnerable young daughter. The conclusion of The Other House makes it... Read more

Under Drake’s Flag

By: G. A. Henty

Narrated by: Fred Williams

Length: 12 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

In the days when England and Spain struggled for the supremacy of the sea, a young lad sails with Sir Francis Drake, the daring sixteenth-century privateer, in this action-packed story based on true historical events. Drake’s superb navigational skill enabled him to outrun or outmaneuver his incessant pursuers. He escaped so often and so... Read more

Daisy Miller

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Susan O’Malley

Length: 2 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

“What the European male fails to understand is that the American Girl is innocent by definition, mythically innocent; and that her purity depends upon nothing she says or does…”—Leslie FiedlerWhen Frederick, an American expatriate traveling in Europe, meets the newly rich Miller family from New York, he is charmed by the daughter, Daisy, and her... Read more

Miss Mapp

By: E. F. Benson

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 8 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

Miss Elizabeth Mapp, magnificent grande dame and heiress, is always on the lookout lest her neighbors fall outside the bounds of perfect, exemplary manners. Opera glasses and notebook in hand, she gazes out her window, ever the vigilant sentinel. But her tightly controlled world is soon beset on all sides by interlopers, first in the... Read more

Washington Square

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 7 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

On New York City’s Washington Square lives Catherine Sloper, a shy and plain young woman who is tyrannized by her wealthy, overbearing father. When young Morris Townsend begins to court her, Dr. Sloper distrusts his motives, believing that the young man could not possibly love his daughter. Both lovers are obstinate in their affections; but when... Read more