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: 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: 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: 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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Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Narrator Various
Duration 1h 32m
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Jessica Brown Findlay, Jamael Westman and Sheila Atim. 'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing' Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneer...
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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 Jeremy Northam
Duration 7h 41m
A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. Graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, hunger and unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It c...
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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: Charles Dickens
Author Charles Dickens
Narrator Simon Vance
Duration 31h 21m
The most gorgeously theatrical of all Dickens's novels, Nicholas Nickleby follows the delightful adventures of a hearty young hero in nineteenth-century England. Nicholas, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. His journey is accompanied by some of the most swaggering scoundrels and unforgettable eccent...
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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: Charlotte Bronte
Author Charlotte Bronte
Narrator Charlotte Ritchie
Duration 21h 29m
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Charlotte Ritchie, best known for her roles as Oregon in Channel 4's Fresh Meat, Hannah in the BBC Three comedy Siblings, and as Barbara Gilbert in BBC drama Call the Midwife. With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding sch...
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