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

The Adventures of Augie March

By: Saul Bellow

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 22 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

This grand-scale heroic comedy tells the story of the exuberant young Augie, a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Depression.While his neighborhood friends all settle down into their various chosen professions, Augie, as particular as an aristocrat, demands a special destiny. He latches on to a wild succession of occupations, proudly... Read more

Humboldt’s Gift

By: Saul Bellow

Narrated by: Christopher Hurt

Length: 18 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

For years, they were the best of friends: Humboldt, a grand, erratic figure, and Charlie, a young man of frenzied and noble longings. But by the 1970s, Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life by leaving him something in his... Read more

Rumpole

By: John Mortimer

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 9 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Here are six delightful tales featuring everyone's favorite barrister for the defense, Horace Rumpole. Eccentric characters such as his wife, Hilda, otherwise known as "She Who Must Be Obeyed," and his philandering colleague Claude Erskine-Brown are back as Rumpole visits a snooty restaurant where he engages in a battle of wills over his adored... 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

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

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Tom Parker

Length: 9 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

Huck Finn is an orphaned drifter who loves freedom more than respectability. He isn’t above lying and stealing, but he faces a battle with his conscience when he meets up with a runaway slave named Jim, who provides him with his first experiences of love, acceptance, and a sense of responsibility.The title character of this famous novel tells... Read more

Little Lord Fauntleroy

By: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Narrated by: Johanna Ward

Length: 5 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

"The best version of the Cinderella story in modern idiom that exists," is how Marghanita Laski describes Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy. It is the charming story of a seven-year-old American boy, Ceddie Errol, who lives on the edge of poverty in New York. One day he is visited by a gruff lawyer at the tiny house he shares with... Read more

The Moviegoer

By: Walker Percy

Narrated by: Christopher Hurt

Length: 6 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

A winner of the National Book Award, The Moviegoer established Walker Percy as an insightful and grimly humorous storyteller. It is the tale of Binx Bolling, a small-time stockbroker who lives quietly in suburban New Orleans, pursuing an interest in the movies, affairs with his secretaries, and living out his days. But soon he finds himself on a... Read more

Tales from Shakespeare

By: Charles Lamb & Mary Lamb

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 9 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

This retelling in prose of twenty of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays was originally published just for children. Keeping Shakespeare’s own words whenever possible but making the plots and language easily understandable, this very listenable collection has entertained and informed generations of adults as well. With such classic stories as A... Read more

Lord Jim

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 13 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

This is a novel about a man's lifelong efforts to atone for an act of instinctive cowardice. Young Jim, chief mate of the Patna, dreams of being a hero. He has taken to the seas with the hopes of adventure and the chance to prove his mettle. When the Patna threatens to sink and the cowardly officers decide to save their own skins and escape in... Read more

The Quiet American

By: Graham Greene

Narrated by: Joseph Porter

Length: 6 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Alden Pyle, an idealistic young American, is sent to Vietnam to promote democracy amidst the intrigue and violence of the French war with the Vietminh. His friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, looks on but soon finds it difficult to remain simply an observer. Fowler’s mistress, a beautiful native girl, creates a catalyst for jealousy... Read more

This Side of Paradise

By: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Narrated by: Wolfram Kandinsky

Length: 10 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel features Amory Blaine, a handsome, wealthy, spoiled, and snobbish young man from the Midwest who attends Princeton University to acquire a refined sense of the proper “social” values. Lacking all sense of purpose, he interests himself primarily in literary cults, vaguely “liberal” student activities, and a... Read more

The Mill on the Floss

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 19 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in nineteenth-century England, this great novel of domestic realism sympathetically portrays a young woman’s vain efforts to adapt to her provincial world.Maggie Tulliver, whose father owns a mill perched on the banks of the River Floss, is intelligent and imaginative beyond the understanding of her community, her relatives, and particularly... 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

A Gentleman of Leisure

By: P. G. Wodehouse

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 6 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

When Jimmy Pitt bets an actor friend that any fool could burgle a house, offering to demonstrate the feat that very night, he puts his reputation on the line.Jimmy hires the services of a professional burglar, but his difficulties are increased when he has the misfortune to select police captain McEachern’s house for the burglary. And imagine... Read more

The Comedians

By: Graham Greene

Narrated by: Joseph Porter

Length: 11 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, where corruption and terror reign under the dictatorship of Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Disillusioned and noncommittal, they are the “comedians” of Greene’s title. Brown is a disenchanted English hotel owner; the Smiths are an American couple on a good-will mission;... Read more

McTeague

By: Frank Norris

Narrated by: Wolfram Kandinsky

Length: 14 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Few works have captured the seamy side of American urban life with such graphic immediacy as Frank Norris’ McTeague. Heredity and environment play the role of fate in this portrayal of human degradation in turn-of-the-century San Francisco.McTeague, a successful but naive dentist, marries Trina, introduced to him by her cousin Marcus Schouler.... Read more

Where Angels Fear to Tread

By: E. M. Forster

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 4 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

E. M. Forster's first novel explores the comic and tragic effects of culture clash between insular, provincial British personalities and sensual Italian culture and atmosphere.Lilia Herriton, an impulsive thirty-three-year-old widow from London, travels to Tuscany, where she falls in love with both Italy and the handsome, carefree Gino Carella,... Read more

Uneasy Money

By: P. G. Wodehouse

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 6 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Dawlish, is afflicted with a moneyless title. His status has earned him a beautiful fianc├®e, but the stresses of his woefully meager income are too much for young Claire to bear. She has therefore refused to marry him until his financial situation improves—significantly.Lord Dawlish's fortunes improve... Read more

The Heart of the Matter

By: Graham Greene

Narrated by: Joseph Porter

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

In this widely acclaimed modern classic, Graham Greene delves deep into character to tell the dramatic, suspenseful story of a good man’s conflict between passion and faith.A police commissioner in a British-governed, war-torn West African state, Scobie is bound by the strictest integrity and sense of duty both for his colonial responsibilities... Read more

A Damsel in Distress

By: P. G. Wodehouse

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

P.G. Wodehouse is at his whimsical best as the characters of Belpher Castle muddle through impending catastrophes and ill-considered love affairs in this comedy of errors. George Bevan, an American composer of musicals, is in England to attend the performance of one. But when the Lady Patricia Maud Marsh slips into his taxi, he is drawn into... 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

The Hound of the Baskervilles

By: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

“Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered, “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.”The “luminous, ghostly, and spectral” hound of family legend has been seen roaming the moors at night. Sir Charles Baskerville has recently died, and it appears that the new... Read more