Classic Audiobook Collection

First Love by Ivan Turgenev audiobook. Genre: romance The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The 'boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her' story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise. First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to J...

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella L. Bird audiobook. Genre: adventure Isabella Lucy Bird was a 19th century English traveller, writer, and natural historian. She was a sickly child, however, while she was travelling she was almost always healthy. Her first trip, in 1854, took her to America, visiting relatives. Her first book, The Englishwoman in America was published anonymously two years late...

The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson audiobook. Genre: drama Set in late 19th-century Australia, The Getting of Wisdom follows Laura Rambotham, a bright, imaginative country girl sent away from home to attend a strict Melbourne ladies' college. Thrown into an unfamiliar world of rules, gossip, and social hierarchies, Laura is determined to shine - academically, socially, and in the eye...

She by H. Rider Haggard audiobook. Genre: adventure When Cambridge scholar Horace Holly becomes guardian to a newborn boy, Leo Vincey, he also inherits a locked iron box and an ominous instruction: on Leo's twenty-fifth birthday, open it and follow where it leads. Inside lies a mysterious shard of ancient pottery and a letter pointing toward a lost African kingdom and an extraordinary woman who ma...

Anticipations by H. G. Wells audiobook. Genre: science Wells considered this book one of his most important, a natural follow-up to such works as his Man of the Year Million and The Time Machine. His goal was to get people to think and act in new ways. The book starts with a look at how humans get along socially and how they carry out their business ventures. It then discusses how these elements i...

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio audiobook. Genre: history In plague-stricken Florence, a group of ten young nobles-seven women and three men-flee the city for the countryside, hoping to outlast the terror and grief consuming their world. To keep fear and boredom at bay, they agree on a daily ritual: each person will tell a story, and each day will follow a guiding theme chosen by the day's lea...

The House of the Vampire by George Sylvester Viereck audiobook. Genre: horror In early-20th-century New York and its salons of artists, critics, and social climbers, aspiring writer Ernest Fielding is hungry for recognition and a place among the brilliant and the powerful. When he is welcomed into the circle of the refined and unnervingly charismatic Reginald Clarke, Ernest believes he has found a...

The Light Princess by George MacDonald audiobook. Genre: fantasy In a whimsical kingdom where magic and mischief mingle with real consequence, a newborn princess is cursed by a spiteful aunt so that she has no gravity - not only in body, but in spirit. She floats, drifts, and laughs at everything, unable to take life seriously or feel its ordinary weight. Courtiers invent elaborate contraptions to...

The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith audiobook. Genre: comedy For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:00:51) Chapter 2 (00:08:14) Chapter 3 (00:21:21) Chapter 4 (00:34:10) Chapter 5 (00:46:04) Chapter 6 (01:02:33) Chapter 7 (01:12:58) Chapter 8 (01:24:13) Chapter 9 (01:36:05) Chapter 10 (01:43:33) Chapter 11 (01:50:41) Chapter 12 (02:...

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter audiobook. Genre: drama Set in rural Indiana at the edge of the mysterious Limberlost swamp, A Girl of the Limberlost follows Elnora Comstock, a bright, determined teenager aching for an education and a life larger than the hard poverty and silence of her home. Her widowed mother, Katharine, is sharp with grief and refuses to spend money on schoolin...

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky audiobook. Genre: philosophy The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society. The teeming St Petersburg community he enters is far from receptive to an innocent like himself, despite some early success...

The Wisdom of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton audiobook. Genre: mystery For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:33:59) Chapter 2 (01:15:18) Chapter 3 (01:51:01) Chapter 4 (02:31:04) Chapter 5 (03:07:24) Chapter 6 (03:45:07) Chapter 7 (04:17:49) Chapter 8 (05:03:01) Chapter 9 (05:37:54) Chapter 10 (06:09:41) Chapter 11 (06:46:27) Chapter 1...

The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton audiobook. Genre: mystery In The Innocence of Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton introduces an unlikely detective: Father Brown, a quiet Catholic priest with a shabby umbrella, a round face, and a disarming manner that makes criminals underestimate him. Moving through English villages, country houses, and city streets, Father Brown is repeatedly drawn...

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche audiobook. Genre: philosophy In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche launches a provocative investigation into the hidden motives behind moral beliefs and the cultural assumptions people treat as timeless truths. Written as a series of sharp, energetic sections rather than a single linear argument, the book challenges readers to question ideas such...

Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer audiobook. Genre: biography A detailed biography of Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of such things as the telephone, the microphone, the electric motor, the storage battery, and the electric light. In the words of the authors, 'It is designed in these pages to bring the reader face to face with Edison; to glance at an interesting childhood and a you...

The Grell Mystery by Frank Froest audiobook. Genre: mystery On a rain-swept London night, American millionaire-adventurer Robert Grell leaves the comfort of his club for a secret appointment, just days before his society wedding to Lady Eileen Meredith. By morning, Grell is at the center of a scandalous puzzle: a man has been found murdered in the study of Grell's home, yet the dead man is not who...

Cathay by Ezra Pound audiobook. Genre: poetry The Cathay poems appeared in a slim volume in 1915. They are, in effect, Ezra Pound’s English translations/interpretations from notebooks written by the Japanese scholar Ernest Fenollosa. Pound, not knowing any Chinese or Japanese at all, promptly created a new and somewhat complex style of translation, as he had done with words from several other lang...

Flatland - A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott audiobook. Genre: scifi In the perfectly ordered world of Flatland, everything and everyone is a geometric shape, and your place in society is literally defined by the number of sides you have. A Square, a respectable middle-class professional, lives a predictable life governed by rigid rules, sharp prejudices, and an unquestioned fait...

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe audiobook. Genre: horror When young Arthur Gordon Pym, a restless teenager in Nantucket, convinces his friend Augustus Barnard to help him stow away on a whaling voyage, he expects adventure - not a descent into terror. Hidden in the cramped hold of the Grampus, Pym is plunged into darkness, hunger, and delirium as the ship lurches...

Last Days of Pompeii by Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton audiobook. Genre: history Last Days of Pompeii is a novel written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1834. Once a very widely read book and now relatively neglected, it culminates in the cataclysmic destruction of the city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The novel uses its characters to contrast the decadent culture of first-century Ro...

The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit audiobook. Genre: fantasy In The Book of Dragons, Edith Nesbit gathers a sparkling set of fantasy tales in which dragons are not distant legends but troublesome, tempting, and often very funny neighbors to the human world. Across these stories, curious children, stubborn adults, would-be heroes, and unlucky families stumble into encounters with beasts that breat...

The Trail of the Axe by Ridgwell Cullum audiobook. Genre: adventure Dave ran a lumber mill in western Canada. There are some workers within his organization who he trusts implicitly, some who he doesn't trust at all, and some who he is unsure about. But Dave is basically a trusting soul. Most of the folks in Malkern liked him, as he had been a major factor in shaping the village and in providing e...

Five Children and It by E. Nesbit audiobook. Genre: fantasy When Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother are sent to the countryside for a quiet holiday, they expect ordinary days of picnics, sandy lanes, and small adventures. Instead, a chance discovery in a gravel pit introduces them to a strange, grumpy creature with long whiskers and extraordinary powers: a Psammead, an ancient san...

32 Caliber by Donald McGibeny audiobook. Genre: mystery In Donald McGibeny's brisk, pulp-era thriller 32 Caliber, attorney Warren Thompson (called Bupps by his friends) expects an easy life of club lunches, court appointments, and quiet evenings with the Indianapolis set. That calm shatters when his closest friend and law partner, Jim Felderson, is blindsided by his wife Helen's sudden decision to...

The Ghost Breaker by Charles Goddard audiobook. Genre: mystery A fast-talking blend of thrills, laughs, and old-world romance, The Ghost Breaker follows Warren Jarvis, a Kentucky gentleman who has brought a dangerous feud with him all the way to Manhattan. After a predawn gunfight in a hotel corridor, Warren finds himself hiding in the suite of Maria Theresa, a proud Spanish princess with troubles...