Fiction - Literary audiobooks

Pasadena

By: David Ebershoff

Narrated by: Lorna Raver

Length: 20 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

This sweeping, richly imagined novel charts the rapid transformation of Southern California from frontier to suburb during the first half of the twentieth century. At the story's center is Linda Stamp, a fisher girl born in 1903 on a coastal farm in San Diego's North County, and the three men who upend her life and vie for her affection: her... Read more

Other People

By: Sol Stein

Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin

Length: 10 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

What does a man know about love? This is the story of three very different men in love with the same woman. It is also the story of that woman, Francine Widmer: twenty-seven, beautiful, intelligent, resourceful, and insistent on running her own life.Suddenly, control of Francine’s life is torn apart when she is raped. Finding the doctors and... Read more

The Rich Are Different

By: Susan Howatch

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 28 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

Dinah Slade is a young Englishwoman of immense vitality, great sensual power, and fierce ambition. When the handsome and powerful Paul Van Zale commits the imprudence of falling in love with her, her life and desires become intertwined with the fate of his great American banking family. Among the new acquaintances she makes is Paul’s wife, with... Read more

Loitering with Intent

By: Muriel Spark

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 4 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

"How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century," Fleur Talbot rejoices. Loitering about London in 1949, with intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur finds a job "on the grubby edge of the literary world," as secretary to the odd Autobiographical Association. Are they a group of mad egomaniacs, hilariously writing... Read more

Sister Carrie

By: Theodore Dreiser

Narrated by: C. M. Hébert

Length: 17 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

When small-town girl Carrie Meeber sets out for Chicago, she is equipped with nothing but a few dollars, a certain unspoiled beauty and charm, and a pitiful lack of preparation for the complex moral choices she will face. Adrift in an indifferent city, she struggles from the sweatshop to stage success and inspires an obsessive love in a married... Read more

A Beggar in Jerusalem

By: Elie Wiesel

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 6 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

In the days following the Six-Day War, a survivor of the Holocaust visits the reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall in the Old City, he encounters the beggars and madmen that congregate there every evening, who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present.Weaving together myth and mystery, parable and... Read more

When We Were Orphans

By: Kazuo Ishiguro

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 10 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

A masterful novel from one of the most admired writers of our time.Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-20th-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when both his mother and father disappear under suspicious circumstances. He grows up to become a renowned detective, and more than 20 years later, returns to Shanghai to solve the... Read more

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

By: Trevanian

Narrated by: Leonardo Leoncavallo

Length: 15 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching coming-of-age novel set in 1930s America.

Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and his spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned—again—by his father, a charming con artist. With no money and nowhere else... Read more

A Tale of Two Cities - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Ian Richardson

Length: 6 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: Yes

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the... Read more

Crime and Punishment - Abridged

By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Narrated by: Alex Jennings

Length: 5 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police... Read more

Moby-Dick - Abridged

By: Herman Melville

Narrated by: William Hootkins

Length: 6 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Moby-Dick is one of the great epics in all of literature. Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale drives the narrative at a relentless pace, while Ishmael's meditations on whales and whaling, on the sublime indifference of nature, and on the grimy physical details of the extraction of oil provide a reflective counterpoint to the headlong... Read more

Great Expectations - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Hugh Laurie

Length: 2 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The orphan Pip’s terrifying encounter with an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, and his mysterious summons to the house of Miss Havisham and her cold, beautiful ward Estella, form the prelude to his “great expectations.” How Pip comes into a fortune, what he does with it, and what he discovers through his secret benefactor are the ingredients... Read more

Heart of Darkness - Abridged

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Joss Ackland

Length: 3 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: Yes

‘The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.’ At the peak of European Imperialism, steamboat captain Charles Marlow travels deep into the African Congo on his way... Read more

Ivanhoe - Abridged

By: Sir Walter Scott

Narrated by: Brian Cox

Length: 3 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Set in the 12th century, during the reign of Richard the Lionheart, Ivanhoe tells of the love of Wilfred of Ivanhoe for the Lady Rowena, his father Cedric’s ward. Cedric intends Rowena for the oafish Athelstane, and banishes his son. 'The love of battle is the food upon which we live – the dust of the mêlée is the breath of... Read more

The Scarlet Letter - Abridged

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Elizabeth McGovern

Length: 3 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: Yes

'Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.' A tale of sin, punishment and atonement, The Scarlet Letter exposes the moral rigidity of a 17th-Century Puritan New England community when faced with the illegitimate child of a young mother. Regarded as the first real... Read more

Cent éléphants sur un brin d'herbe - Abridged

By: Le Dalaï Lama

Narrated by: Jean Leclerc

Length: 1 hour 13 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Sur le ton chaleureux et confidentiel qui lui est naturel même en présence de nombreux interlocuteurs, le Dalaï-lama livre le fruit de ses réflexions sur l'homme, l'environnement, sur la société, les institutions, la politique, les religions. Que propose-t-il ? "Quel est votre secret ?", lui demande-t-on partout où il est invité. "Sagesse,... Read more

Kidnapped - Abridged

By: Robert Louis Stevenson

Narrated by: Tom Conti

Length: 2 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The classic adventure story of kidnap, shipwreck, murder and pursuit as young David Balfour tries to claim the inheritance he has been cheated out of. ‘I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.’ Orphaned as a young teenager, Lowlander... Read more

Far from the Madding Crowd - Abridged

By: Thomas Hardy

Narrated by: Martin Shaw

Length: 2 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Hardy’s classic ‘pastoral tale’ of wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, the faithful shepherd, the lonely widower and the dashing but faithless soldier. An immediate success when it was first published in 1874, Thomas Hardy’s ‘pastoral tale’ of the wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene, her... Read more

Lord Jim - Abridged

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Joss Ackland

Length: 2 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: Yes

‘Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!’ Jim is a well-bred young romantic who takes to the seas with hopes of adventure and the aspiration to prove his mettle. When the boat he sails in threatens to sink, Jim abandons ship in fear in order to... Read more

Gulliver’s Travels - Abridged

By: Jonathan Swift

Narrated by: Martin Shaw

Length: 3 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Swift’s scornful satire, written “to vex the world rather than divert it”, takes a caustic look at those most contemporary concerns irrational prejudice, social inequality, ivory tower elitism and the correct way to open a boiled egg. 'I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little... Read more

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

By: Dai Sijie

Narrated by: B.D. Wong

Length: 7 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Following his runaway best seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie gives us a delightful new tale of East meets West: an adventure both wry and uplifting about a love of dreams and the dream of love, and the power of reading to sustain and inspire the spirit.

After years of studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to... Read more

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street - Abridged

By: Trevanian

Narrated by: Tom Bosely

Length: 5 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching coming-of-age novel set in 1930s America.

Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and his spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned—again—by his father, a charming con artist. With no money and nowhere else... Read more

A Long Way Down

By: Nick Hornby

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 8 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times-bestselling author Nick Hornby mines the hearts and psyches of four lost souls who connect just when they've reached the end of the line. A Long Way Down is now a major motion picture from Magnolia Pictures starring Pierce Brosnan, Toni Collette, Aaron Paul, and Imogen Poots.

Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come... Read more

Specimen Days

By: Michael Cunningham

Narrated by: Alan Cumming

Length: 4 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

A highly anticipated, bold new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours—three linked visionary narratives set in the ever-mysterious, turbulent city of New York

In each section of Michael Cunningham's new book, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost... Read more