Classics audiobooks

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

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 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

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

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

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

Hard Times

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 11 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Originally written for Dickens’ weekly magazine, Household Words, this short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The “eminently practical” Thomas Gradgrind believes... Read more

A Country Doctor

By: Sarah Orne Jewett

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Length: 8 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Though not as well known as the writers she influenced, Sarah Orne Jewett remains one of the most important American novelists of the late nineteenth century. A Country Doctor, Jewett’s first novel, is a luminous portrayal of rural Maine and a look at the author’s own world. In it, Nan’s struggle to choose between marriage and a career as a... Read more

The Cave Girl

By: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

"In an instant there sloughed from the heart and mind and soul of Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones every particle of civilization and culture and refinement that had required countless ages in the building, stripping him naked, age on age, down to the primordial beast that had begot his first human progenitor. He saw red as he leaped for the throat of... Read more

Tales of the Alhambra

By: Washington Irving

Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard

Length: 8 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Written in 1831, Washington Irving’s dreamlike description of the Alhambra, the beautiful Moorish castle that defined the height of Moorish civilization, and of the surrounding territory of Granada remains one of the most romantic and entertaining travelogues ever written of this region in Spain.Enhanced here with exquisite Spanish guitar music,... Read more

The Shadow-Line

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: William Sutherland

Length: 4 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Written at the start of the Great War, when his son Borys was at the Western Front, The Shadow-Line is Conrad's supreme effort to open man's eyes to the meaning of war through the stimulus of art. In many ways an autobiographical narrative, this masterpiece relates the story of a young and inexperienced sea captain whose first command finds him... Read more

Poor People

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrated by: John Lescault & Julia Emlen

Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Both a masterpiece of Russian populist writing and a parody of the entire genre, Poor People is an early example of Dostoevsky’s genius.Written as a series of letters, Poor People is the tragic tale of a petty clerk and his impossible love for a young girl. Longing to help her and her family, he sells everything he can, but his kindness leads... Read more

Wives and Daughters

By: Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 25 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Set in nineteenth-century England, Wives and Daughters centers on the story of the youthful Molly Gibson, raised by her doctor father. When he remarries, a new stepsister enters Molly’s quiet life, the loveable but worldly and troubling Cynthia. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and... Read more

Cranford

By: Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 6 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Cranford is Elizabeth Gaskell’s gently comic picture of life and manners in an English country village during the 1830s. It describes the small adventures in the lives of two middle-aged sisters in reduced circumstances, Matilda and Deborah Jenkyns, who do their best to maintain their standards of propriety, decency, and kindness. At the center... Read more

The Lost Girl

By: D. H. Lawrence

Narrated by: Johanna Ward

Length: 15 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Perhaps D. H. Lawrence’s most beautiful, thoroughly contemporary love story, The Lost Girl charts the journey of a woman caught between two worlds and two lives: one mired in convention in industrial England, the other promising sensual liberation in the vibrant landscape of Italy. Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a widowed Midlands draper,... Read more

The Talisman

By: Walter Scott

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 11 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Encamped in the Holy Land, the crusaders are torn by the dissensions and jealousies of their leaders. The army’s impotence is accentuated by the illness of their chief, Richard I of England. Meanwhile, a poor but doughty Scottish crusader known as Sir Kenneth, on a mission far from the camp, encounters a Saracen Emir. After an inconclusive... Read more

The Deerslayer

By: James Fenimore Cooper

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

Length: 20 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Set during the French and Indian Wars, The Deerslayer vividly captures the violence and rugged beauty of the American frontier. In the wilds of New York, where tensions rage between tribal Indians and white pioneers, a white hunter known as Deerslayer is initiated into the moral codes of wilderness society. When he and his loyal Mohican friend... Read more

The Christmas Stories

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 4 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

No writer is more identified with the modern idea of Christmas than Charles Dickens. In some ways, Dickens helped define the holiday that we now celebrate by immortalizing it as a time of warmth and sharing, with an emphasis on family and friends.Dickens wrote all the stories presented here during the 1850s as contributions to the special... Read more

The Other House

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 7 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

This terse and startling novel is the story of a struggle for possession—and of its devastating consequences. Three women seek to secure the affections of one man, while he, in turn, tries to satisfy them all. But in the middle of this contest of wills stands his unwitting and vulnerable young daughter. The conclusion of The Other House makes it... Read more

Under Drake’s Flag

By: G. A. Henty

Narrated by: Fred Williams

Length: 12 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

In the days when England and Spain struggled for the supremacy of the sea, a young lad sails with Sir Francis Drake, the daring sixteenth-century privateer, in this action-packed story based on true historical events. Drake’s superb navigational skill enabled him to outrun or outmaneuver his incessant pursuers. He escaped so often and so... Read more

Daisy Miller

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Susan O’Malley

Length: 2 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

“What the European male fails to understand is that the American Girl is innocent by definition, mythically innocent; and that her purity depends upon nothing she says or does…”—Leslie FiedlerWhen Frederick, an American expatriate traveling in Europe, meets the newly rich Miller family from New York, he is charmed by the daughter, Daisy, and her... Read more

Miss Mapp

By: E. F. Benson

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 8 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

Miss Elizabeth Mapp, magnificent grande dame and heiress, is always on the lookout lest her neighbors fall outside the bounds of perfect, exemplary manners. Opera glasses and notebook in hand, she gazes out her window, ever the vigilant sentinel. But her tightly controlled world is soon beset on all sides by interlopers, first in the... Read more

Sherlock Holmes Theatre - Abridged

By: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Gillette & Yuri...

Narrated by: Martin Jarvis, Kristoffer Tabori & a full cast

Length: 4 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Blackstone is pleased to present the first ever audio recordings of the only two Holmes plays written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This specially commissioned production by the Hollywood Theater of the Ear is a unique, must-have audio for all Sherlockians.In Sherlock Holmes, Professor Moriarity, the Napoleon of crime, plots with would-be... Read more

The Vicar of Wakefield - Abridged

By: Oliver Goldsmith

Narrated by: David Thorn & a supporting cast

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The story opens in the country parsonage of Dr. Primrose, a kindly man who has a good heart, a good family, and a good income. Suddenly, his idyllic life is cruelly devastated by a series of misfortunes, and he ends up in prison. Yet, despite all this calamity and injustice, the vicar never loses sight of Christian morality, a conviction which... Read more