Classics audiobooks

New Grub Street (Unabridged)

By: George Gissing

Narrated by: Michael Tudor Barnes

Length: 21 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious... Read more

Vanity Fair (Unabridged)

By: W.M. Thackeray

Narrated by: Eric Gillett

Length: 36 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Vanity Fair is the story of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, who have just completed their studies at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies and are beginning to embark upon the world. The simple-minded nature of Amelia, who comes from a wealthy family, is contrasted with the strong-willed nature of Becky, who will stop at nothing to climb the... Read more

Tom Jones (Unabridged)

By: Henry Fielding

Narrated by: John Richmond

Length: 39 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Tom Jones is brought up by the generous Mr Allworthy on his Somerset estate, where Tom eventually falls in love with his beautiful neighbour, Sophia Western. Because of his partially unknown parentage, however, their respective guardians are against the match. When Tom is banished due to his occasionally heated temper and sexual encounters with... Read more

Pamela (Unabridged)

By: Samuel Richardson

Narrated by: Elizabeth Proud

Length: 43 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

This novel is told in a series of letters from the heroine, Pamela Andrews, a young low-born maid whose mistress has just died when the story opens. The lady's son, Mr B, attempts to seduce Pamela. Although Pamela finds him loathsome and leaves the house, he pursues her relentlessly. This is a work of pioneering psychological complexity; it is... Read more

The Whirlpool (Unabridged)

By: George Gissing

Narrated by: Robert Gladwell

Length: 19 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Set against a background of Imperial Britain, this novel depicts life on the fringes of fashionable London in the 1880's. The author examines a `rational' marriage and the frustrations of an English `Madame Bovary'. Read more

Roderick Random (Unabridged)

By: Tobias Smollett

Narrated by: Gabriel Woolf

Length: 20 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

Roderick Random is a boisterous and unprincipled hero who answers life's many misfortunes with a sledgehammer. Left penniless, he leaves his native Scotland for London and on the way meets Strap, and old schoolfellow. Together they undergo many adventures at the hands of scoundrels and rogues. Roderick qualifies as a surgeon's mate and is... Read more

The Virginians (Unabridged)

By: W.M. Thackeray

Narrated by: Eric Gillett

Length: 40 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

This novels depicts the fortunes of the descendants of Henry Esmond and the once beautiful Beatrix, with a brilliant picture of eighteenth-century London society at the time of the American War of Independence. Read more

The Vicar of Wakefield (Unabridged)

By: Oliver Goldsmith

Narrated by: Arthur Bush

Length: 8 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

This novel depicts the fall and rise of the Primrose family, presided over by the benevolent vicar, the narrator of a fairy-tale plot of impersonation and deception, the abduction of a beautiful heroine and the machinations of an aristocratic villain. By turns comic and sentimental, the novel's popularity owes much to its recognizable depiction... Read more

The Age of Innocence (Unabridged)

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Gretel Davis

Length: 12 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

The return of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout the upper reaches of society. Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May's cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their... Read more

Daniel Derona (Unabridged)

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Gabriel Woolf

Length: 32 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

The author created in Daniel Deronda possibly the most likeable character of all her novels. Through the actions and reactions of society life in the mid-nineteenth century there emerges a clear picture of the life of the European Jew, no longer actively persecuted yet made aware of English prejudice. Read more

The Return of the Soldier (Unabridged)

By: Rebecca West

Narrated by: Pauline Munro

Length: 2 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

A shell-shocked soldier returns from the First World War. There are three women who love him and who are waiting for him. But he can only remember two of them as they were years ago, and he cannot remember his wife at all. The three women have a choice - to leave him or to "cure" him. Read more

The Castle of Otranto (Unabridged)

By: Horace Walpole

Narrated by: Nigel Graham

Length: 4 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

On the day of his wedding, Conrad, heir to the house of Otranto, is killed in 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 unlawful... Read more

The private papers of Henry Ryecroft (Unabridged)

By: George Gissing

Narrated by: David Dunhill

Length: 6 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is a semi-fictional autobiographical work by George Gissing in which the author casts himself as the editor of the diary of a deceased acquaintance, selecting essays for posthumous publication. Observing "how suitable many of the reflections were to the month with which they were dated", he explains that he... Read more

The Odd Women (Unabridged)

By: George Gissing

Narrated by: Gretel Davis

Length: 16 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

The Odd Women reflects the major sexual and cultural issues of the late nineteenth century. Set in a grimy, fog-ridden London, Gissing's 'odd' women range from the idealistic, financially self-sufficient Mary Barfoot to the Madden sisters who struggle to subsist in low paying jobs and little chance for joy. With narrative detachment, Gissing... Read more

Born in Exile (Unabridged)

By: George Gissing

Narrated by: Crawford Logan

Length: 17 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Godwin Peak leaves his lowly Midlands home to carve out a career as a journalist in London. His poverty and origins hamper him at every turn, but at last one of his articles - attacking the hypocrisy of the Victoria Church - is accepted. Then catastrophically, Peak falls in love with devout well-born Sidwell Warricombe. To be acceptable to her,... Read more

Clarissa (Unabridged)

By: Samuel Richardson

Narrated by: Pauline Munro

Length: 93 hours

Abridged: No

Clarissa is of lower birth than her would-be lover: the Harlowes are indeed country gentry, but only recently enriched in the city, while the devious Lovelace is a young nobleman. This is a margin sufficient to breed suspicion on the one side and arrogance on the other; a story of male determination pitted against feminine principles and told in... Read more

The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. (Unabridged)

By: W.M. Thackeray

Narrated by: John Cormack

Length: 12 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in the second half of the eighteenth century, Barry Lyndon is the fictional autobiography of an adventurer and rogue. Born into the petty Irish gentry, and outmanoeuvred in his first love-affair, a ruined Barry volunteers for the British army. After seeing service in Germany he deserts and, after a brief spell as a spy, pursues the career of... Read more

The House of Mirth (Unabridged)

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Judith Whale

Length: 14 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

This is a novel of the aristocratic society of New York in the early 1900s. Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social... Read more

Oliver Twist - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Dick Cavett

Length: 2 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Oliver Twist is an orphan, born into the world of workhouses and poverty. Apprenticed at a young age, he runs away and finds himself with a curious collection of thieves, rogues and murderers. Tragedy and death are constantly at his heels. Oliver struggles with the burden of being a child and of being poor in industrial England. In this tale,... Read more

Common Sense

By: Thomas Paine

Narrated by: Adrian Cronauer

Length: 1 hour 42 minutes

Abridged: No

"When my country, into which I had just set foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir," wrote Paine. This pamphlet, which he had published in 1776, put into print the word every man was thinking but no man dared say: Independence! It captured the imagination of the colonists as no other document had. Read more

The Call of the Wild

By: Jack London

Narrated by: Frank Muller

Length: 3 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

The Call of the Wild is a novel by American author Jack London published in 1903. The story is set in the Yukon during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush-a period when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The novel's central character is a dog named Buck, a domesticated dog living at a ranch in California as the story opens. Stolen from his home and... Read more

Frankenstein

By: Mary Shelley

Narrated by: George Guidall

Length: 9 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

On the deck of his ice-imprisoned ship, explorer Robert Walton watches from a great distance as an enormous apparition travels with much haste across the frozen shore. The next day, Walton fishes from the sea a melancholy scientist named Frankenstein, who shares with Walton the horrifying account of his life and of the "hideous progeny" he set... Read more

Life on the Mississippi

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 15 hours

Abridged: No

Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless... Read more

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

By: Victor Hugo

Narrated by: George Guidall

Length: 22 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

-Written in 1831 before Hugo was forced to flee from Louis Napoleon's France. In this novel-perhaps his most popular-Hugo paints a vivid portrait of medieval Paris. Quasimodo, the one-eyed, hunchbacked refugee; Esmeralda, the dancing gypsy girl, threatened by the gallows; and a world where chaos is in charge-Hugo captures them all in this... Read more