Fiction - Literary audiobooks

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 Invisible Circus

By: Jennifer Egan

Narrated by: Madeleine Lambert

Length: 11 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

In Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of eighteen-year-old Phoebe O'Connor.Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and... Read more

Madame Bovary - Abridged

By: Gustave Flaubert

Narrated by: Glenda Jackson

Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, Emma is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She believes she was meant for something more—a life of luxury, leisure, and, above all, true and passionate love. She spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and throws herself headlong into a... Read more

Closing Time - Abridged

By: Joseph Heller

Narrated by: Elliott Gould

Length: 4 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic Catch-22.

In Closing Time, Joseph Heller returns to the characters of Catch-22, now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and... Read more

Shadow Song - Abridged

By: Terry Kay

Narrated by: Terry Kay

Length: 3 hours

Abridged: Yes

It was a wonderful summer, a great memory, the kind of love everybody ought to have. It changed my life -- or almost did -- and I think about it more than I should, but that was a long time ago.

In the summer of 1955, Madison Lee "Bobo" Murphy was a waiter at the Catskills' Pine hill inn, where the eccentric Avrum Feldman became his unlikely... Read more

Forrest Gump - Abridged

By: Winston Groom

Narrated by: Winston Groom

Length: 2 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: Yes

"Bein' a idiot is no box of chocolates," but "at least I ain't led no hum-drum life," says Forrest Gump, the lovable, surprisingly savvy hero of this wonderful comic tale.

When the University of Alabama's football team drafts Forrest and makes him a star, that's only the beginning! He flunks out--and goes on to be a Vietnam war hero, a... Read more

Charms for the Easy Life - Abridged

By: Kaye Gibbons

Narrated by: Kaye Gibbons

Length: 2 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. In a sad and singular era, they are unique among women of their time. For radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy and brilliant daughter Margaret possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that all too... Read more

Second Nature - Abridged

By: Alice Hoffman

Narrated by: Kate Nelligan

Length: 2 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A Simon & Schuster audiobook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every listener. Read more

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge - Abridged

By: Evan Connell

Narrated by: Joanne Woodward & Paul Newman

Length: 5 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is the saga of a clean-cut, “upper-class” couple who increasingly find their post-WWII world and traditional belief systems challenged by a changing society. For Walter Bridge, an ambitious lawyer, and his wife, whose focus is her household, affluence and material comforts create a cocoon of community respectability that... Read more

Down and Out in Paris and London

By: George Orwell

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 6 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Orwell's own experiences inspire this semi-autobiographical novel about a penniless man living in Paris in the early 1930s. The narrator's poverty brings him into contact with strange incidents and characters, which he manages to chronicle with great sensitivity and graphic power. The latter half of the book takes the English narrator to his... Read more

Heart of Darkness

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Richard Thomas

Length: 4 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Heart of Darkness tells of the conflicting drives of two men—Charles Marlow, the captain of a steamboat, and Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious figure who oversees a trading post in Africa. After an arduous journey, Marlow finally encounters Kurtz, and the men come to grips with their differences—and their similarities. Joseph Conrad's most famous work is... Read more

Black Water - Abridged

By: Joyce Oates

Narrated by: Amanda Plummer

Length: 3 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Twenty-six-year-old Kelly Kelleher longs for something interesting to happen to her, so when she meets a senator and he invites her to his hotel room, she says yes. Even though the man is old enough to be her father and even though he has perhaps been drinking too heavily, saying yes is an exciting part of the adventure Kelly is finally going to... Read more

The Three Musketeers - Abridged

By: Alexandre Dumas

Narrated by: Michael York

Length: 6 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: Yes

This swashbuckling epic of intrigue, romance, and swordplay has earned a reputation as one of the most thrilling adventure novels ever written. A young Gascon nobleman, D'Artagnan, makes his way to Paris, hoping to join the Musketeers, a legion of heroes held in high esteem by the king. D'Artagnan quickly proves he has the heart of a Musketeer... Read more

The Adventures of Augie March

By: Saul Bellow

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 22 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

This grand-scale heroic comedy tells the story of the exuberant young Augie, a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Depression.While his neighborhood friends all settle down into their various chosen professions, Augie, as particular as an aristocrat, demands a special destiny. He latches on to a wild succession of occupations, proudly... Read more

The Inklings

By: Humphrey Carpenter

Narrated by: Bernard Mayes

Length: 12 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

During the 1930s at Oxford, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams—remarkable friends, writers, and scholars—met regularly to discuss philosophy and literature and to read aloud from their own works in progress. Calling themselves the Inklings, their circle grew. It was in this company that such classics as The Lord of the Rings,... Read more

Because It is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart - Abridged

By: Joyce Oates

Narrated by: Contance Towers

Length: 3 hours

Abridged: Yes

In the early 1950s— the decade before the Civil rights movement— racial boundaries kept people apart or brought them together in explosive and dramatic ways. Iris Courtney, a young white woman, begins a clandestine relationship with Jinx Fairchild, a Black man who defended her in a fatal street fight with a white man.... Read more

Picturing Will - Abridged

By: Ann Beattie

Narrated by: Ann Beattie

Length: 2 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A complex look at adulthood through the eyes of one remarkable child.Five-year-old Will is the precocious child of Jody and Wayne. Jody is a woman who dreams of becoming a celebrity and is having an affair with a man named Mel, while Wayne is no stranger to infidelity, either. The details of their intertwined lives form an intricate and often... Read more

Vanity Fair

By: William Makepeace Thackeray

Narrated by: Jill Masters

Length: 32 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

"I do not say there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare [as D'Artagnan]. I do say there is none that I love so wholly."
--Robert Louis Stevenson

"The lasting and universal popularity of The Three Musketeers shows that Dumas, by artlessly expressing his own nature in the persons of his heroes, was responding to that craving for action,... Read more

The King Must Die - Abridged

By: Mary Renault

Narrated by: Michael York

Length: 2 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Set in ancient Greece, a powerful novel about Theseus by Mary Renault.This is the story of the young Theseus: Prince of Troizen, King of Eleusis and Athens, and slayer of the Minotaur. Acclaimed novelist Mary Renault weaves myth, legend, history, and fiction into the story of a young hero's search for his destiny and the countless challenges he... Read more

The Scarlet Letter - Abridged

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Michael Learned

Length: 2 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Written in the winter of 1849, The Scarlet Letter unfolds the story of Hester Prynne, a young woman branded as an adulteress in the harsh Puritan world of seventeenth-century New England. As Hester calls on her inner strength to transcend her shame, the scarlet letter ceases to be a stigma and finally becomes Hester's symbol of self-affirmation.... Read more

The Scarlet Letter

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Annie Wauters

Length: 9 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not to tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers -- stern and wild ones -- and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
As she emerges from the prison of a Puritan New England town, Hester Prynne defies the dark gloom... Read more