AuthorGeorge Orwell
NarratorRichard E Grant
Duration9h 1m
CategoriesAdult Fiction, Classics
PublisherCSA Word
VersionUnabridged
Orwell's darkly comic novel centres around the life of Gordon Comstock, onetime advertising copywriter turned bookshop employee and struggling poet. Gordon's disdain for money and artistic compromise preclude his earning enough of a living to escape constant public embarrassment. On top of this, it gives him terrible trouble holding on to his girlfriend. Unwilling to dilute his stubborn stance on capitalistic pursuits, he constantly obsesses "money, money, money, all is money". Gordon's problems mount while his only published volume, Mice, gathers dust on a shelf, and his attempts at a new collection stagnate. Written during Orwell's time living in Notting Hill and set in London during "the year of blight, 1934", the novel is a fine example of Orwell's wit, and a masterpiece of fiction. It also hints towards themes about power and relationships that would colour his later works Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
Author: Emile Zola
Author Emile Zola
Narrator Traci Svensgaard
Duration 6h 41m
In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Th‚rŠse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband's earthy friend, Laurent. But their passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a crime t...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Philip Glenister
Duration 5h 52m
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic dystopian novel by English author George Orwell. Published in 1949, it is set in the eponymous year and focuses on a repressive, totalitarian regime. The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of falsifying records and political literature, thus e...
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Author: Emile Zola
Author Emile Zola
Narrator Leighton Pugh
Duration 19h 55m
Germinal is one of the most striking novels in the French tradition. Widely regarded as Zola's masterpiece, the novel describes the working conditions of French coalminers in the 1860s in harsh and realistic terms it is visceral, graphic and unrelenting. Its strong socialist principles and vivid accounts of the miners' strikes meant that the novel...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Jeremy Northam
Duration 8h 54m
Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and a portrait of disillusionment with his early politics. Orwell's experiences include being shot in the neck by a sniper, and being forced into hiding as factions of the Left battled on the streets of Barcelona. Orwell entered Spain intending to g...
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Down and Out In Paris and London
Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Jeremy Northam
Duration 6h 54m
Orwell was arguably one of the first 'gonzo' journalists. In this unabridged, enlightening and often shocking expose of life on the streets of two of Europe's most romanticised and celebrated cities, Orwell describes in detail the day-to-day life of a 'down-and-out', which involves hunger, filth, derision and often prejudice and violence. Alcohol i...
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Author: Albert Camus
Author Albert Camus
Narrator James Jenner
Duration 11h 2m
In the small coastal city of Oran, Algeria, rats begin rising up from the filth only to die as bloody heaps in the streets. Shortly after, an outbreak of the bubonic plague erupts and envelops the human population. Albert Camus' The Plague is a brilliant and haunting rendering of human perseverance and futility in the face of a relentless terror bo...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Jonathan Oliver
Duration 8h 45m
Coming Up for Air is a moving account of one man's attempt to recapture the innocence of childhood as war gravitates on the horizon.George Bowling is forty-five, married with children, working as a suburban insurance salesman, and desperate to escape London. It's 1939 and the Second World War is imminent. Forseening the chaos it will bring George d...
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Author: Jonathan Swift
Author Jonathan Swift
Narrator Jasper Britton
Duration 35h 15m
Lemuel Gulliver, a slightly staid ship's doctor, relates the tales of his astonishing travels. He encounters the tiny, warring Lilliputians; the giant, sceptical Brobdingnagians; the ludicrously intellectual Laputans; and the idealistic - if rather stolid - Houyhnhnms and their bestial servants, the Yahoos. An immediate best-seller when it was firs...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Andrew Wincott
Duration 12h 20m
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three great powers: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Throughout Oceania 'The Party' rules by the agency of four ministries whose power is absolute. In The Ministry of Truth, which deals in propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine t...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Simon Callow
Duration 3h 11m
The animals in the farmyard decide that working for humans is doing them no favours, so under the leadership of Napoleon, the only Berkshire Boar on the farm, and the other pigs, they drive out the farmer and his cohorts and set about structuring their own society. Based on a list of supposedly animal-friendly rules such as "four legs good, two leg...
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