Fiction - Literary audiobooks

White Blood

By: James Fleming

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 12 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

The son of an English father and a Russian mother, Charlie Doig is a big man—big in stature, in spirit, and in sexual appetites. A naturalist, he roughs it around the world collecting specimens for museums. In 1914, he is on a mission for the Academy of Science in Russia when war breaks out. His pay is stopped and his companion goes off to... Read more

Aegypt

By: John Crowley

Narrated by: John Crowley

Length: 15 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Is there more than one history of the world?In the 1970s, historian Pierce Moffett, newly jilted and jobless, gets off a bus in the Faraway Hills and steps unawares into a story that has been awaiting him there. He has moved to the New England countryside to write a book, driven by an idea he dare not believe—that the physical laws of the... Read more

The Life before Her Eyes

By: Laura Kasischke

Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie

Length: 7 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Diana stands before the mirror, preening with her best friend, Maureen. Suddenly, a classmate enters holding a gun, and seventeen-year-old Diana sees her life dance before her eyes. In a moment, the future she was just imagining is sealed by a horrific decision she is forced to make.The novel takes us through Diana’s uncertain steps into... Read more

The Last King of Scotland

By: Giles Foden

Narrated by: Mirron Willis

Length: 13 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his Maserati, has hit a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, obsessed with all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. So begins a fateful dalliance with the... Read more

Bleak House

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 32 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

Bleak House opens in a London shrouded by fog—a fog that swirls most densely about the Court of Chancery, where the obscure case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce lies lost in endless litigation, slowly devouring an inheritance in legal costs.Against this ominous background, Dickens’ rich tapestry of a novel weaves together the fortunes and desires of... Read more

The Secret of Lost Things

By: Sheridan Hay

Narrated by: Vanessa Benjamin

Length: 11 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

Eighteen years old and completely alone, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than a love of books and eagerness to explore the city she’s read so much about. She begins her search for independence with appealing enthusiasm, and the moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff... Read more

Mildred Pierce

By: James M. Cain

Narrated by: Christine Williams

Length: 10 hours

Abridged: No

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain... Read more

What Was She Thinking?

By: Zoë Heller

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

A complex psychological portrait framed as a wicked satire, a story of passion and repression, mercy and betrayalSchoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a bitter, lonely life as a self-made careerist. Sheba Hart is the ethereal, inexperienced new pottery teacher at St. George’s school. When Barbara hears of Sheba’s problems in the classroom, her... Read more

Barchester Towers

By: Anthony Trollope

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 18 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

This magnificent sequel to The Warden satirizes the struggle for ascendancy among the clergy of a cathedral city as they contend for each newly vacant post within the archdiocese.The contest for power is between Archdeacon Grantly and his followers, who favor high-church tendencies, and the new bishop and his followers, with their distinctly... Read more

Returning to Earth

By: Jim Harrison

Narrated by: Traci Svendsgaard, Tom Weiner, Ray Porter, Rich...

Length: 7 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

In this sequel to Harrison's True North, Donald Burkett, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. While his wife, Cynthia, transcribes, Donald begins dictating his family history for the benefit of their children, stories that he never before has shared. As old crimes, dreams, wounds, and sacred moments are revived... Read more

Messer Marco Polo

By: Donn Byrne

Narrated by: Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

Length: 2 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Imagine the kingdom of Asia sifted through the Celtic imagination. Messer Marco Polo is the fictionalized account of the travels of Marco Polo as told by Malichi Campbell, an Ulsterman.Young Marco Polo meets Kubla Khan, the King of Siam, and Saint Paul, and he falls in love with the beautiful Golden Bells. After her magicians save him from death... Read more

The Castle of Otranto

By: Horace Walpole

Narrated by: Tony Jay

Length: 3 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

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

Thérèse Raquin

By: Émile Zola

Narrated by: Traci Svendsgaard

Length: 6 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend, Laurent. But their passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a... Read more

The Cossacks

By: Leo Tolstoy

Narrated by: David Thorn

Length: 7 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Olenin is an aimless young nobleman who is disenchanted with city life. Taking a post as a Cadet in the army, he finds himself assigned to the remote Cossack outpost in the Caucasus. It is here, among the Tatars, the Chechens, and the Old Believers, that he will fall in love with a beautiful Cossack girl. The only problem is that she is promised... Read more

The Tortilla Curtain

By: T. C. Boyle

Narrated by: T. C. Boyle

Length: 11 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

In this explosive and timely novel, T. C. Boyle explores an issue at the forefront of the political arena. He confronts the controversy over illegal immigration head-on, illuminating through a poignant, gripping story the people on both sides of the issue: the haves and the have-nots.In Southern California’s Topanga Canyon, two couples live in... Read more

The Martian Child

By: David Gerrold

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 4 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Gerrold, a science fiction writer from California, adopts a son who has been classified as "unadoptable" due to his violent emotional outbursts resulting from abuse. Another side-effect of his turbulent early years is that he believes himself to be a Martian. Gerrold begins the long, involving work of trying to earn the acceptance of Dennis, a... Read more

The Light That Failed

By: Rudyard Kipling

Narrated by: David Thorn, Stuart Bennett, Kevin Kennedy, Mar...

Length: 8 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Dick Heldar is a war correspondent and an artist, well known for the drawings he sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious artist and reencounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. Then he learns that a minor problem with his eyes is... Read more

The Warden

By: Anthony Trollope

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 7 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

The Warden is the first of the six classic Chronicles of Barsetshire novels, Trollope's best-loved and most famous work.Anthony Trollope's classic novel centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity, whose charitable income far exceeds the purpose for which it was intended. On discovering this, young John Bold turns his... Read more

The Summer He Didn’t Die

By: Jim Harrison

Narrated by: Lloyd James & Marguerite Gavin

Length: 8 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Celebrated author Jim Harrison, whose robust, tender, and deeply felt books have made their mark on the American literary landscape, here delivers a collection of three novellas infused with all the wisdom and generous spirit that have made him a master writer.In the title novella, “The Summer He Didn’t Die,” Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan... Read more

Hunting Unicorns

By: Bella Pollen

Narrated by: Christopher Cazenove & Gabrielle de Cuir

Length: 9 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

The patrician Bevan family clings to British tradition while wrestling with taxes, tree blight, and family skeletons.Rory, the youngest son, runs a business that rents out mansions for weddings and tours to help the owners pay upkeep on their dilapidated estates. Enter Maggie, an American TV journalist hoping to find something disreputable to... Read more

The Time in Between

By: David Bergen

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Haunted by a horrible memory from the war, alone since his grown children moved out, Vietnam vet Charles Boatman returns to Vietnam after the war.Ada and her brother Jon follow their missing father to Vietnam. Their search for him tears them apart in ways they never could have guessed, and Vietnam finds its way in. Shifting between Charles’ and... Read more

The Finishing School

By: Muriel Spark

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 3 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

College Sunrise is a vaguely disreputable finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he works, somewhat falteringly, on his novel. Into his creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress on... Read more

Lady Susan

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: a full cast

Length: 2 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Jane Austen’s earliest known serious work, Lady Susan is a short, epistolary novel that portrays a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction.Lady Susan, a clever and ruthless widow, determines that her daughter is going to marry a man whom both detest. She sets her own sights on... Read more

Flowering Wilderness

By: John Galsworthy

Narrated by: David Case

Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

John Galsworthy devoted virtually his entire professional career to creating the fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians, the Forsytes. He made their lives and times, loves and losses, and fortunes and deaths so real that readers accused him of including real individuals whom they knew as the characters in his... Read more