📖 A relaxing read aloud audiobook excerpt — ideal for unwinding, walking, studying, or resting. 🎧 A haunting, emotionally rich reading from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights — storm, drink, and a fateful confession of love and doubt. Perfect for listeners who enjoy atmospheric, gothic storytelling. 🎧 A vivid, darkly comic read aloud from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame — a riotous Feast of Fools, a “grinning match,” and the unforgettable first appearance of Quasimodo. Perfect for listeners who enjoy atmospheric historical Paris, gothic colour, and classic characters brought sharply to life. 🎧 Audiobook Excerpt from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Read by Chapter Breaks – Short Literary Escapes. Classic audio pills for your commute, bedtime unwind, or a break anytime. At Chapter Breaks, we carefully select and curate iconic passages from classic novels — timeless opening chapters, dramatic turning points, or unforgettable finales. Each episode is around 20–30 minutes, designed to let you dip into great literature without the commitment of a full audiobook. Victor Hugo – The Hunchback of Notre-Dame – Chapters 5 & 6 | Quasimodo, Pope of Fools. Grotesque laughter, public spectacle, and the shadow of Notre-Dame’s most famous bellringer. Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (also known as Notre-Dame de Paris) plunges us into fifteenth-century Paris — a city of towers and taverns, saints and scoundrels, where crowds can crown a man in an instant and destroy him just as quickly. At the heart of the novel stands Notre-Dame itself: not merely a setting, but a living presence — stone, bell, and echo — watching over human passion, cruelty, and wonder. In this excerpt from Chapters 5 and 6, the grand hall of the Palais de Justice erupts into carnival chaos. The crowd abandons poetry for spectacle, and a grinning contest begins beneath the broken rose window of a small chapel: face after face appears in a whirlwind of grotesque shapes and animal masks, laughter rising like a furnace. The revelry reaches its climax when one grimace outshines them all — not a mask, but a face — and the “Pope of Fools” is chosen with unanimous cries of Noël! Then comes the shock: the victor’s whole body is a grimace. Enormous head, red bristling hair, a towering hump, twisted limbs — and yet an unsettling strength and vitality. The crowd recognises him at once: Quasimodo, the bellringer of Notre-Dame, feared, mocked, and celebrated all at the same time. Crowned and carried aloft in a motley procession, he moves through the roaring city on the shoulders of men who, only moments earlier, would have spat at his name. And as this riotous coronation spills out into the streets, another fascination steals the last scraps of attention away — a name whispered like a spell from the windows: La Esmeralda. In Hugo’s Paris, the crowd’s gaze is everything: it turns like the sun, dazzling one figure, then abandoning them for the next — and in that turning begins the tragedy and beauty of the novel. We are about to step into the Feast of Fools — into the rose-window aperture where faces become masks, and a single grimace becomes a legend. Let’s open the page together; your chapter break begins now. If you enjoy classic literature, quiet storytelling, and immersive audiobook excerpts, listen, follow and share to help us bring more classics to life!

Music and visuals are in the public domain or licensed via Pictory – full licence available on their website.

📖 A relaxing read aloud audiobook excerpt — ideal for unwinding, walking, studying, or resting.

🎧 A wintery, atmospheric read aloud from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol — foggy London streets, a lonely room, and the first shiver of the supernatural. Perfect for listeners who enjoy classic ghost stories, Victorian atmosphere, and Christmas literature with a dark edge. 🎧 Audiobook Excerpt from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.Read by Chapter Breaks – Short Literary Escapes. Classic audio pills for your commute, bedtime unwind, or a break anytime. At Chapter Breaks, we carefully select and curate iconic passages from classic novels — timeless opening chapters, dramatic turning points, or unforgettable finales. Each episode is around 20–30 minutes, designed to let you dip into great literature without the commitment of a full audiobook. Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol – Stave I | Marley’s Ghost. Fog, frost, and a chain heard in the dark. In this excerpt from Stave I, Christmas Eve ends in bitter cold. Scrooge shuts his counting-house with ill will, begrudges his clerk a holiday, and returns to his gloomy chambers through a yard so dark it seems watched by the very Genius of the Weather. Then the ordinary world begins to slip. A familiar door-knocker turns, impossibly, into a face — Jacob Marley’s face — and just as quickly becomes metal again. Inside, the silence deepens, the old rooms settle, and Scrooge tries to anchor himself in routine: gruel by a low fire, ledgers of the mind, and the reassurance of “Humbug!” But the house answers differently. A bell begins to swing. Every bell in the building rings. From the depths below comes the slow, unmistakable clank of a dragging chain — and at last, through the door, steps Marley's Ghost: transparent, death-cold, and bound in iron links forged from the instruments of a life spent in profit. What follows is a warning as bleak as the London fog: regret cannot redeem a life’s missed chances — but Scrooge is offered one last hope. Three Spirits will come. The first at one. And the night is no longer his own. We are about to walk into Dickens’s most famous Christmas haunting — where miserliness meets memory, and a locked door is no protection at all. Let’s open the page together; your chapter break begins now. If you enjoy classic literature, quiet storytelling, and immersive audiobook excerpts, listen, follow and share to help us bring more classics to life!

Music and visuals are in the public domain or licensed via Pictory – full licence available on their website.

📖 A relaxing read aloud audiobook excerpt — ideal for unwinding, walking, studying, or resting. 🎧 A haunting, emotionally rich reading from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights — storm, drink, and a fateful confession of love and doubt. Perfect for listeners who enjoy atmospheric, gothic storytelling. 🎧 Audiobook Excerpt from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights Read by Chapter Breaks – Short Literary Escapes. Classic audio pills for your commute, bedtime unwind, or a break anytime. At Chapter Breaks, we carefully select and curate iconic passages from classic novels — timeless opening chapters, dramatic turning points, or unforgettable finales. Each episode is around 20–30 minutes, designed to let you dip into great literature without the commitment of a full audiobook. Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights – Chapter 9 | Catherine’s Secret. Love, rage, and fate on the storm-swept Yorkshire moors. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a dark, hypnotic tale of love, obsession, and revenge, set between the isolated farmhouse of Wuthering Heights and the calmer world of Thrushcross Grange. Through shifting narrators and generations, the novel explores how fierce passion can twist into cruelty, and how the past refuses to stay buried. It is a story of haunted landscapes, wounded pride, and a love so intense it blurs the line between devotion and destruction. In this extract from Chapter 9, the house is in chaos. Hindley Earnshaw, ravaged by grief and drink, lurches home in a violent fury, turning his son Hareton’s life into a terrifying gamble between rough affection and outright brutality. A moment of drunken carelessness almost ends in tragedy on the stairwell — only for Heathcliff, by instinct alone, to save the child he secretly wished would fall. That accidental rescue twists the knife: Hindley staggers away to his brandy, while Heathcliff is left to brood over a revenge denied. As the storm gathers over the Heights, Cathy slips into the kitchen in distress. There, by the fire, she confides in Nelly the torment at her core: she has accepted Edgar Linton’s proposal, yet in her soul she feels she has chosen wrongly. What follows is one of the most famous passages in English literature — Catherine’s confession that her love for Edgar is like changeable foliage, but her love for Heathcliff is like the eternal rocks beneath, and her declaration, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff.” Unseen, Heathcliff overhears just enough to be shattered, and disappears into the night, while the thunder rolls over the moors and Catherine’s future is sealed. We are about to step into that charged room, into the shifting shadows of the Heights — where love, pride, and destiny begin to take their irreversible shape. Let's open the page together, your chapter break begins now. If you enjoy classic literature, quiet storytelling, and immersive audiobook excerpts, listen, follow and share to help us bring more classics to life!

Music and visuals are in the public domain or licensed via Pictory – full licence available on their website.