Classics audiobooks

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

Jane Eyre

By: Charlotte Brontë

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 18 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

Jane Eyre, the plain yet spirited governess, introduced a new kind of heroine to literature: one whose virtuous integrity, sharp intellect, and tireless perseverance broke through class barriers to win equal stature with the man she loved.Orphaned and subject to a cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit... Read more

Puck of Pook’s Hill

By: Rudyard Kipling

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

On Midsummer’s Eve, Dan and Una enact A Midsummer Night’s Dream three times over—right under Pook’s Hill. That is how they meet Puck, “the oldest Old Thing in England,” and the last of the People of the Hills.Through Puck, they are introduced to the nearly forgotten pages of old England’s history and to characters that can illuminate their own... Read more

Mansfield Park

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Johanna Ward

Length: 16 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Fanny Price, a poor relation of the rich Bertrams, is reluctantly adopted into the family to be brought up at Mansfield Park, where she is treated condescendingly. Only her cousin Edmund, a young clergyman, appreciates her fine qualities. Fanny soon falls in love with him, but Edmund is, unfortunately, drawn to the shallow and worldly Mary... Read more

The Thirty-Nine Steps

By: John Buchan

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 3 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Perhaps more than any other book The Thirty-Nine Steps has set the pattern for the story of the chase for a wanted man. And, of the many writers who have attempted this kind of thing since Buchan, only a very few, like Graham Greene, have managed to sustain the tension in the same way. The story's extended chase scene inspired Alfred Hitchcock's... 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

The Island of Dr. Moreau

By: H. G. Wells

Narrated by: Robin Lawson

Length: 4 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

Written in 1896, The Island of Dr. Moreau was an instant sensation that went on to inspire a series of movies. It was meant as a commentary on Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution, which had riveted the world of science and therefore, of science fiction. While gene-splicing and bioengineering are common practices today, readers are... Read more

The Magic World

By: E. Nesbit

Narrated by: Johanna Ward

Length: 6 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

These twelve magical stories contain some of the best things ever written in fairy tales. There are enchanted lands inhabited by kings and queens, princes and princesses who have to outwit wicked fairies and evil magicians. Princess Belinda is condemned to be ugly during the week and beautiful only on Sundays. Kenneth turns into a fish and has... Read more

Middlemarch

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Nadia May

Length: 31 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Dorothea Brooke is a thoughtful and idealistic young woman determined to make a difference with her life. Enamored of a man whom she believes is setting this example, she unwittingly traps herself into a loveless marriage.Her parallel is Tertius Lydgate, a visionary young doctor from the city, whose passionate ambition to spread the new science... Read more

Prester John

By: John Buchan

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

Three young truants from a church meeting on Sunday make their way to a seashore hideaway, where they observe a huge black man muttering incantations and performing weird rites. When the man discovers the children, he chases them with a knife. In defense, Davy Crawfurd flings a rock at him, and they narrowly escape.Years later, young David... 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 Fountainhead

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: Christopher Hurt

Length: 32 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the century’s most challenging novels of ideas, The Fountainhead champions the cause of individualism through the story of a gifted young architect who defies the tyranny of conventional public opinion. The struggle for personal integrity in a world that values conformity above creativity is powerfully illustrated through three... Read more

The Custom of the Country

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Grace Conlin

Length: 14 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

One of Edith Wharton’s most acclaimed works, The Custom of the Country is a blistering indictment of materialism, power, and misplaced values. Its heroine, Undine Spragg, is one of the most ruthless characters in all of literature, as selfishly unscrupulous as she is fiercely beautiful. When her family acquires a small fortune, they leave... 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 Scarlet Letter

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Kristen Underwood

Length: 9 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country," Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe Scarlet Letterreaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact of a single passionate act on the lives of three... Read more

Adam Bede

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 19 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

George Eliot's first full-length novel is the moving, realistic portrait of three people troubled by unwise love.Adam Bede is a hardy young carpenter who cares for his aging mother. His one weakness is the woman he loves blindly: the trifling town beauty, Hetty Sorrel, who delights only in her baubles—and the delusion that the careless Captain... Read more

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

By: James Joyce

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 9 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

In this largely autobiographical coming-of-age story, James Joyce describes the awakening young mind of a middle-class Irish Catholic boy named Stephen Dedalus. The story follows Stephen's development from his early troubled boyhood through an adolescent crisis of faith—partially inspired by the famous "hellfire sermon" preached by Father Arnall... Read more

Lancelot

By: Walker Percy

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 7 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Lancelot Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don’t seem worth remembering—until a visit from an old friend and classmate gives him the opportunity to recount his journey of dark violence.It began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter. That... Read more

Tarzan of the Apes

By: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Narrated by: James Slattery

Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

When a ship’s mutiny forces a young noble English couple out onto the remote African coast, their child is born into the wild. Their deaths a short time later leave the boy alone in the jungle wilderness—until a she-ape adopts him and raises him as her own. Reluctantly accepted into the tribe by its fierce leader, Kerchak, the baby Tarzan must... 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

Martin Chuzzlewit

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 35 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Wealthy and old, Martin Chuzzlewit Sr. is surrounded by greedy relatives hoping to obtain a portion of his estate upon his death. His two descendants, Martin Jr. and Jonas, have been born and bred in the same heritage of selfishness, the Chuzzlewit tradition.Set partly in America, of which Dickens offers a searing satire, this novel follows and... Read more

Tobacco Road

By: Erskine Caldwell

Narrated by: John MacDonald

Length: 5 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual... 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