Classics audiobooks

The Touchstone

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Grace Conlin

Length: 2 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

This spare, mesmerizing novel is Edith Wharton’s money-can’t-buy-happiness tale. Young Stephen Glennard is poor, but he has an unanticipated gambling chip: a collection of love letters from a scorned but now famous lover, the distinguished novelist Margaret Aubyn. To raise money for his forthcoming wedding to another woman, Stephen stoops to... Read more

Almayer’s Folly

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard

Length: 5 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

A tale of personal tragedy as well as a broader meditation on the evils of colonialism, Almayer’s Folly is Joseph Conrad’s first novel. Set in the lush jungles of Borneo in the late 1800s, it charts the decline of a Dutch merchant after a twenty-five year struggle against overwhelming odds.Despite the bitterness of his disillusioned wife,... Read more

La Vagabonde

By: Colette

Narrated by: Johanna Ward

Length: 6 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Largely autobiographical, La Vagabonde recalls the author’s own years as a dance-hall performer in turn-of-the-century Paris. Colette takes the listener backstage and into the demimonde of Renée Néré, an aging dancer, mime, and failed writer. In a sultry, passionate, and intelligent voice, Renée narrates the story of her romance with an admirer... Read more

Villette

By: Charlotte Brontë

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 20 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Arguably Charlotte Brontë's most deeply felt work, Villette draws on her own profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings.Left to fend for herself after a family tragedy, Lucy Snowe flees from her unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a French boarding school in the cosmopolitan capital of Villette.... Read more

Allan Quatermain

By: H. Rider Haggard

Narrated by: Fred Williams

Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Thrilled by rumors of a lost civilization, three Englishmen decide to travel to the heart of Africa with their Zulu guide, where they meet with continual peril: an attack by a cruel warrior tribe, the scorch of underground volcanic fires, and an encounter with a huge species of ferocious black crab. Exhausted and depleted of supplies, the men at... Read more

Good Wives

By: Louisa May Alcott

Narrated by: C. M. Hébert

Length: 9 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Three years after the close ofLittle Women, the March girls, four of the most beloved young women in American literature, are young adults carving out their futures. John Brooke is home and planning a life with Meg, despite his modest financial situation. The other girls see promises of fulfillment ahead as well, as they grow and develop a... Read more

Scaramouche

By: Rafael Sabatini

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 12 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

With swordfights and romance, adventure and treachery set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, this is the book that made Rafael Sabatini famous.Andr├®-Louis Moreau has good prospects as a young lawyer, but an unfair duel with the ruthlessly cruel Count de La Tour d'Azyr leaves Andr├®-Louis' best friend dead and Andr├®-Louis himself a... Read more

The Reef

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Kristen Underwood

Length: 10 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

The Reef follows the fancies of George Darrow, a young diplomat en route from London to France, intent on proposing to the widowed Anna Leath. Unsettled by Anna's reticence, Darrow drifts into an affair with Sophy Viner, a charmingly naïve and impecunious young woman whose relations with Darrow and Anna's family threaten his prospects for... Read more

The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories

By: Rudyard Kipling

Narrated by: Fred Williams

Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

This collection brings together seventeen of Kipling’s early stories, written between 1885 and 1888, when he was working as a journalist in India. Wry comedies of British officialdom alternate with glimpses into the harsh lives of the common soldiers and the Indian poor, revealing Kipling’s legendary powers of observation. The title story, “The... Read more

Little Men

By: Louisa May Alcott

Narrated by: C. M. Hébert

Length: 10 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Little Men, written by legendary author Louisa May Alcott, is widely considered to be one of the greatest books of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers.The lovable Jo March, introduced to us in Little Women, is now married, with two sons of her own and an adopted family of twelve boys. And she... Read more

Germinal

By: Émile Zola

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 17 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

With flawless construction and impeccable detail, Germinal chronicles the conflicts, lusts, and deprivation of life in the coal fields of nineteenth-century France.A father and three of seven children work brutal hours, facing such hazards as landslides, fire, and poisoned air, to scrape together enough money for food. When their lodger,... Read more

The Prairie

By: James Fenimore Cooper

Narrated by: Noah Waterman

Length: 14 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

The Prairie marks the final chapter in James Fenimore Cooper’s great saga of American frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Though nearly ninety in 1804, Bumppo, now on the Great Plains, is still a competent frontiersman and trapper. Once more he is drawn into conflict with society in the form of an emigrant party led by the surly Ishmael Bush and his... Read more

Something Fresh

By: P. G. Wodehouse

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Welcome to Blandings Castle, a place that is never itself without an imposter.Wodehouse himself once noted that "Blandings has impostors like other houses have mice." On this particular occasion there are two, both intent on a dangerous enterprise. Lord Emsworth's secretary, the Efficient Baxter, is on the alert and determined to discover what... Read more

Oliver Twist

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 16 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

One of Dickens’ most popular novels, Oliver Twist tells the story of a young workhouse orphan who escapes into the mean backstreets of Victorian London. There, he is thrust into a den of thieves where some of Dickens’ most depraved villains preside: the incorrigible Artful Dodger, the barbarous bully Bill Sikes, and the terrible Fagin, whose... Read more

Agnes Grey

By: Anne Brontë

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 6 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Written when she was twenty-six, Agnes Grey is Anne Brontë's first novel. It tells the story of a rector's daughter who has to earn her living as a governess when her family enters a financial crisis. Drawing directly from her own experiences, Anne Brontë set out to describe the immense pressures that the governess' life involved: the... Read more

Moll Flanders

By: Daniel Defoe

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 11 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Possibly the first novel in the English language, Moll Flanders is the fictional autobiography of a delightfully scandalous young female rogue. Born in Newgate Prison in seventeenth-century England, Moll is predestined to poverty and lawlessness, yet relentlessly driven to overcome her fate. Donning whatever mask suits her best in the moment,... Read more

Rob Roy

By: Sir Walter Scott

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 18 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Rob Roy MacGregor is the romantic outlaw who comes alive in Sir Walter Scott's classic epic of the passions and struggles of the Scottish border lands.In rich, vivid prose, Rob Roy follows the adventures of Frank Osbaldistone, who falls out of favor with his father after failing to measure up to his expectations in the world of business. Sent to... Read more

The Return of the Native

By: Thomas Hardy

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 14 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

In the barren moor of Egdon Heath, a wild tract of country in the southwest of England, one native yearns to escape to city life while another has just returned from that life, unimpressed.Clym Yeobright, a former diamond merchant in Paris, returns home to become a schoolmaster in Egdon, where he falls passionately in love with the sensuous,... 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

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

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

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

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

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