Classics

Beowulf

By: Anonymous
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 2 hours 47 minutes

The earliest extant heroic epic in any European vernacular, Beowulf is considered the most important poem in Old English. The title character is a warrior of superhuman strength who accomplishes glorious deeds to honor his king. He also represents the ideal lord and vassal, generous to his own men while fulfilling all the forms of courtesy at... Read more

Bartleby, the Scrivener

A Story of Wall Street

The Piazza Tales

By: Herman Melville
Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
Length: 1 hour 48 minutes

Herman Melville’s tale of corporate discontent, Bartleby, the Scrivener, tells the story of a quiet, hardworking legal copyist who works in an office in the Wall Street area of New York City. The business where he works handles the official financial paperwork of wealthy men. One day, Bartleby’s employer requests he proofread one of the... Read more

Utopia

By: Sir Thomas More
Narrated by: James Adams
Length: 4 hours 10 minutes

In this political work written in 1516, Utopia is the name given by Sir Thomas More to an imaginary island. Book I ofUtopia, a dialogue, presents a perceptive analysis of contemporary social, economic, and moral ills in England. Book II is a narrative describing a country run according to the ideals of the English humanists, where poverty,... Read more

Billy Budd

By: Herman Melville
Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
Length: 3 hours 31 minutes

Billy Budd, an orphaned, illegitimate child suffused with innocence, openness, and natural charisma, has been impressed into service aboard the HMS Bellipotent. He is adored by the crew but for unexplained reasons arouses the antagonism of the ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. Set in 1797,... Read more

The Poison Belt

The Professor Challenger Adventures: Book #2

By: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Narrated by: Fred Williams
Length: 5 hours 30 minutes

Professor Challenger summons his three best friends to come to his country house, each one to bring a cylinder of pure oxygen. When they arrive, the reason for this strange request becomes terrifyingly clear. Professor Challenger has become convinced that the earth is entering a poison belt of ether and that life upon this planet is doomed.In a... Read more

The Secret Adversary

The Tommy and Tuppence Mysteries: Book #1

By: Agatha Christie
Narrated by: Nadia May
Length: 7 hours 48 minutes

Just after World War I, Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley are desperately short of money.With a shortage of job opportunities, they form a partnership, hiring themselves out as “young adventurers, willing to do anything, go anywhere.” In their first dangerous assignment, they must use all their ingenuity to save not only their own lives but... Read more

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

By: George Orwell
Narrated by: Richard Brown
Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works by day in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write. Gordon has published a slim volume of verse and is determined to keep free of the “money world” of safe, lucrative jobs, marriage, and family responsibilities. This world, to Gordon, spells the... Read more

Little Men

The Little Women Series: Book #2

By: Louisa May Alcott
Narrated by: C. M. Hébert
Length: 10 hours 19 minutes

Little Men, written by legendary author Louisa May Alcott, is widely considered to be one of the greatest books of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers.The lovable Jo March, introduced to us in Little Women, is now married, with two sons of her own and an adopted family of twelve boys. And she... Read more

Antic Hay

By: Aldous Huxley
Narrated by: Simon Vance
Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

Theodore Gumbril, a mild young Oxford tutor, has become thoroughly dismayed by the formality of college life and the staid British institutions of learning. An impetuous need for celebration, even rebellion, possesses him. He and his bohemian companions embark on wild and daring bacchanalian adventures that steer them resolutely away from... Read more

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

The Sherlock Holmes Series: Book #1905

By: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard
Length: 10 hours

The one and only Sherlock Holmes is back from the dead and devoting his life once more to examining the criminal complexities of England's capital city.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of many dreadful murders, but the one which astonished and distressed readers the most was when the author, anxious to try something new, killed off Sherlock Holmes.... Read more

The Circular Staircase

By: Mary Roberts Rinehart
Narrated by: Lorna Raver
Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

“This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous.” So begins The Circular Staircase, a book that has been... Read more

Under Western Eyes

By: Joseph Conrad
Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
Length: 11 hours 15 minutes

Hailed as one of Joseph Conrad's finest literary achievements, Under Western Eyes tells the story of a young man unwittingly caught in the political turmoil of pre-revolutionary czarist Russia. It begins with a bomb that kills its intended target, a hated Russian minister of police, along with several innocent bystanders. A young student named... Read more

The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories

By: Rudyard Kipling
Narrated by: Fred Williams
Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

This collection brings together seventeen of Kipling’s early stories, written between 1885 and 1888, when he was working as a journalist in India. Wry comedies of British officialdom alternate with glimpses into the harsh lives of the common soldiers and the Indian poor, revealing Kipling’s legendary powers of observation. The title story, “The... Read more

Les Misérables - Abridged

By: Victor Hugo
Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
Length: 12 hours 4 minutes

Set in the Parisian underworld of the early nineteenth century, Les Misérables follows the adventures of Jean Valjean, once an honest peasant, who was imprisoned for nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving family. A hardened and bitter criminal upon his release, Valjean is transformed when an act of compassion... Read more

The Custom of the Country

By: Edith Wharton
Narrated by: Grace Conlin
Length: 14 hours 29 minutes

One of Edith Wharton’s most acclaimed works, The Custom of the Country is a blistering indictment of materialism, power, and misplaced values. Its heroine, Undine Spragg, is one of the most ruthless characters in all of literature, as selfishly unscrupulous as she is fiercely beautiful. When her family acquires a small fortune, they leave... Read more

The Song of the Lark

The Great Plains Trilogy: Book #2

By: Willa Cather
Narrated by: Christine Williams
Length: 14 hours 45 minutes

In this semiautobiographical portrait of a young artist in the making, Willa Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self. Thea Kronborg, a minister’s daughter in a provincial Colorado town, has dreams and gifts that her humble hometown will not satisfy. With the support of a few allies who recognize her rare... Read more

Main Street

By: Sinclair Lewis
Narrated by: Brian Emerson
Length: 16 hours 29 minutes

When Carol Milford, a young, liberated woman from St. Paul, Minnesota, marries small-town doctor Will Kennicott, she suddenly finds herself transplanted to Gopher Prairie. Horrified by her new home, an ugly backwater community, she decides it's time the town made a few changes.The story of an idealistic young woman's frustrated attempts to... Read more

Ivanhoe

By: Walter Scott
Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
Length: 19 hours 39 minutes

Set in England during Richard I's reign, Sir Walter Scott's fanciful, vivid reinterpretation of medieval life is a successful blend of fact, myth, and romance.Upon returning from the Crusades, where he served with King Richard I, Wilfred of Ivanhoe is met with his father's disapproval, having fallen in love with Rowena, his father's ward. When... Read more

The Deerslayer

The Leatherstocking Tales: Book #1841

By: James Fenimore Cooper
Narrated by: Raymond Todd
Length: 20 hours 42 minutes

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

Matterhorn

A Novel of the Vietnam War

By: Karl Marlantes
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
Length: 21 hours 11 minutes

An incredible publishing story—written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, a New York Times bestseller for sixteen weeks, a National Indie Next, and a USA Today bestseller—Matterhorn has been hailed as a "brilliant account of war" (New York Times Book Review).Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of... Read more