Fiction - Literary audiobooks

The Privileges

By: Jonathan Dee

Narrated by: David Aaron Baker

Length: 9 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Jonathan Dee is the critically acclaimed author of Palladio. With The Privileges, Dee crafts a "suspenseful, melancholy, and acidly funny tale" (Booklist). In it, ambitious couple Adam and Cynthia Morey marry straight out of college and have two children. Then Adam, unfulfilled with his job at a private investment firm, becomes involved in... Read more

Best Friends Forever

By: Jennifer Weiner

Narrated by: James Colby & Nicole Poole

Length: 12 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

From New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner comes "a smart, witty fairy tale for grownups" (Maureen Corrigan, NPR).

Addie Downs and Valerie Adler will be best friends forever. That’s what Addie believes after Valerie moves across the street when they’re both nine years old. But in the wake of betrayal during their teenage years, Val is... Read more

The Empty Family

By: Colm Toibin

Narrated by: Colm Toibin, Terry Donnelly, John Keating, Jeff...

Length: 8 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

The bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín, returns with a stunning collection of stories—“a book that’s both a perfect introduction to Tóibín and, for longtime fans, a bracing pleasure” (The Seattle Times).

Critics praised Brooklyn as a “beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in the 1950s.” In The... Read more

Gods of Newport

By: John Jakes

Narrated by: Jack Garrett

Length: 12 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

In the late nineteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island, was a cauldron of money, excess, and unapologetic greed, where reputations were made and lost in a whirlwind of parties and fancied slights. But amid the glamour of yacht races, tennis matches, and costume balls raged undeclared class warfare, scandalous doings, even madness.

In 1893,... Read more

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Narrated by: Richard Brown

Length: 5 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union, this is the story of labor camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov and his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of Communist oppression. Based on the author’s own experience in the gulags, where he spent nearly a decade as punishment for making derogatory... Read more

Ellen Foster

By: Kaye Gibbons

Narrated by: Ruth Ann Phimister

Length: 3 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy."

So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise,... Read more

Thieves of Manhattan

By: Adam Langer

Narrated by: Rich Orlow

Length: 8 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls The Thieves of Manhattan a "delicious satire of the literary world." Here Adam Langer introduces Ian Minoit-an aspiring writer who just can't seem to get published. When Ian's successful girlfriend leaves him for the talentless hack Blade Markham-whose acclaimed memoir Ian is convinced is a fake-he... Read more

Guy Not Taken

By: Jennifer Weiner

Narrated by: Jordan Bridges & Mary Catherine Garrison

Length: 7 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Jennifer Weiner's talent shines like never before in this collection of short stories, following the tender, often hilarious, progress of love and relationships over the course of a lifetime.

We meet Marlie Davidow, home alone with her new baby late one night, when she wanders onto her ex's online wedding registry and wonders what if she had... Read more

The Lake of Dreams

By: Kim Edwards

Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee

Length: 16 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

From Kim Edwards, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper's Daughter, an arresting novel of one family's secret history

Imbued with all the lyricism, compassion, and suspense of her bestselling novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards’s The Lake of Dreams is a powerful family drama and an unforgettable story of... Read more

The Snow Goose

By: Paul Gallico

Narrated by: Steven Mackintosh, Georgia Groome, Deborah Find...

Length: 57 minutes

Abridged: No

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Paul Gallico’s ‘The Snow Goose’ by Nick Warburton, starring Steven Mackintosh. When 'Open Book' asked various authors to champion a favourite neglected classic on the programme, Michael Morpurgo chose 'The Snow Goose'; perhaps no surprise, with his own story 'War Horse' depicting a friendship between a... Read more

Agnes Grey

By: Anne Bronte

Narrated by: Anne Flosnik

Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Written when women—and workers generally—had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequities of the rigid class system in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess. Pampered and protected at home, she is unprepared... Read more

The Sea-Wolf

By: Jack London

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 11 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

When Humphrey Van Weyden finds himself struggling in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay, he thinks the worst that can happen to him is drowning. After he is rescued by the Ghost and its captain, Wolf Larson, Humphrey discovers that there are fates far worse than death. On Larsen's hell-ship, the dilettante hero is forced to slave as cabin... Read more

The Very Best of O. Henry

By: O. Henry

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

O. Henry, the pseudonym of the American writer William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), is best known for writing stories full of wit, wordplay, and warm characterizations, and particularly for their clever twist endings. This volume contains twenty of O. Henry's best and best-loved stories. They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well... Read more

The Big Money

By: John Dos Passos

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 19 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

The Big Money completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" (Time). Here we come back to America after the war and find a nation on the upswing. Industrialism booms.... Read more

Main Street

By: Sinclair Lewis

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 18 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

This classic by Sinclair Lewis shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire. Main Street attacks the conformity and dullness of early-twentieth-century midwestern village life in the story of Carol Milford, the city girl who marries the town doctor. Her efforts to bring culture to the prairie village are met... Read more

The Rainbow

By: D. H. Lawrence

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 18 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in the rural midlands of England, The Rainbow revolves around three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than sixty years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow and adopts her daughter as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupt. Suffused... Read more

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 30 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is closely modelled on the eighteenth-century novels that Charles Dickens loved as a child, such as Robinson Crusoe, in which the fortunes of a hero shape the plot. The likeable young Nicholas, left penniless on the death of his father, sets off in search of better prospects. His meandering route to... Read more

The Long Walk Home

By: Val Wood

Narrated by: Anne Dover

Length: 11 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to you by Penguin.


At only thirteen, Mikey Quinn is arrested for stealing a rabbit to feed his family. Despite his age, he's shown no mercy by the wealthy lawyer who sends him to prison. He returns home to find that his mother has died and his younger siblings taken into the workhouse.

With only his determination, Mikey makes his way to... Read more

Bitter in the Mouth

By: Monique Truong

Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda

Length: 10 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

Booklist calls author Monique Truong a "gifted storyteller." Here Truong pens a mesmerizing tale starring Linda Hammerick, a woman with a truly unique gift-the ability to experience words through taste. The word "disappoint" always leaves a bad taste in Linda's mouth, like burnt toast. And this taste is particularly powerful around her family.... Read more

The Ascent Of Rum Doodle

By: W E Bowman

Narrated by: Terry Wale

Length: 4 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to you by Penguin.

First published in 1956, The Ascent of Rum Doodle quickly became established as a mountaineering classic. As an outrageously funny spoof about the ascent of a 40,000-and-a-half-foot peak, many thought it inspired by the 1953 conquest of Everest. But Bowman had drawn on the flavour and tone of earlier adventures, of Bill... Read more

Chloe's Song

By: Leslie Thomas

Narrated by: Lyndsay Sandison

Length: 11 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to you by Penguin.

The new tale of love and life, rich with humour and pathos, from our best loved storyteller. From the prison cell where Chloe Smith, 43, is awaiting trial for the merciful murder of the only man who ever loved her with honesty, she recalls the men in her life who lied to her. She remembers her adored father, who drank... Read more

Great Expectations

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 18 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations—until he is inexplicably elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters—including a terrifying convict named Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Havisham, and her beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, Great... Read more

Invisible Man

By: Ralph Ellison

Narrated by: Joe Morton

Length: 18 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching--yet always with... Read more

The Virginian

By: Owen Wister

Narrated by: John Pruden

Length: 14 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

A strong, silent stranger rides into the lawless lands of the western frontier, battles horse thieves, deals with unyielding scoundrels, and wins the heart of a schoolmarm. Owen Wister's 1902 classic—the first great novel of the American West—is rich in moral drama and vernacular wit. His hero—like knights of old—lives by an enduring code of... Read more