Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Classics

When young David Balfour's father dies and leaves him in poverty, he tracks down his Uncle Ebenezer to seek his inheritance. But his uncle is a mean, nasty man with a dark family secret. David finds himself in terrible danger when he is kidnapped and taken prisoner on board a ship bound for slavery.

“Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.”—Haruki Murakami The father of modern Japanese literature's best-loved novel, in its first new English translation in half a century No collection of Japanese literature is complete without...

Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance.

Warrior-prince Rama is about to be crowned Young King, when he hears the devastating news that his father, king of Ayodhya, has been tricked into banishing him to the forest. His devoted wife, Sita, insists on accompanying him in exile, but the evil 10-headed Lord Ravana has fallen deeply in love with the beautiful princess and steals her away. Aided by Hanuman, mighty captain of the monkeys, Rama sets out across the world to find her and destroy Ravana in a deadly battle.

Penguin Audio presents E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, adapted for listening and now available as a digital audiobook as part of the Penguin English Library series. This abridged version is read by Stephen Fry. 'I had got an idea that everyone here spent their lives in making little...

Beautiful and independent, Arabella has been brought up in rural seclusion by her widowed father. Devoted to reading French romances, the sheltered young woman imagines all sorts of misadventures that can befall a heroine such as herself. As she makes forays into fashionable society in Bath and London, many scrapes and mortifications ensue - all men seem like predators wishing to ravish her, she mistakes a cross-dressing prostitute for a distressed gentlewoman, and she risks her life by throwing herself into the Thames to avoid a potential seducer.

In the second installment of this richly imagined fantasy adventure series, a new threat from within the Library could destroy those who depend upon it the most. The Library of the Unwritten in Hell was saved from total devastation, but hundreds of potential books were destroyed. Former...

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction’s finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio towards their tragic destinies. Part of a series of vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives. Affordable, collectable, quality productions - perfect for on-the-go listening.

In the exotic South American republic of Costaguana, the San Tomé silver mine provides opportunities for untold wealth and power. Yet amid the turbulence and brutality of Latin American politics, everyone associated with it - from the compromised English mine-owner Gould to the grasping businessman Holroyd, from the revolutionary Montero to the loyal and seemingly incorruptible worker Nostromo - becomes somehow irrevocably tainted. Nostromo is a grandiose epic, startlingly modern in its technique.

Penguin Classics presents Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actor Steven Pacey. Do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life - music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world? Tempestuous Eustacia Vye passes her days dreaming of passionate love and the escape it may bring from the small community of Egdon Heath.

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison.

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the 17th century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes 'The Contract' and 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity'.

Jude Fawley, the stonemason excluded not by his wits but by poverty from the world of Christminster privilege, finds fulfilment in his relationship with Sue Bridehead. Both have left earlier marriages. Ironically, when tragedy tests their union it is Sue, the modern emancipated woman, who proves unequal to the challenge. Hardy’s fearless exploration of sexual and social relationships and his prophetic critique of marriage scandalised the late Victorian establishment and marked the end of his career as a novelist. Part of a series of vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, brought to life by award-winning actress Sheridan Smith. Featuring magical sound effects and specially composed music, this promises to delight and enamour children and adults alike. On an ordinary summer's afternoon, Alice tumbles down a hole, and an extraordinary adventure begins.

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, and Vincent Cassel: a rollicking, bawdy, fantastical cycle of 50 fairy tales told by 10 storytellers over 5 days Before the Brothers Grimm, before Charles Perrault, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was...

Brought to you by Penguin. Now a major film directed by Armando Iannucci, starring Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw. This Penguin Classic is performed by Ed Speleers. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Jeremy Tambling. 'The greatest...

In what Henry James called a 'trap for the unwary', The Turn of the Screw tells of a nameless young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. But is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence or something else entirely?

Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest known Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights, but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.

One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just 80 days. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout. Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand - whether train or elephant - overcoming set-backs and always racing against the clock.