AuthorGeorge Eliot
NarratorJuliet Stevenson
Duration35h 38m
CategoriesAdult Fiction, Classics
Key StageA Level
PublisherNaxos
VersionUnabridged
Dorothea Brooke is a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage with a pedantic scholar. Tertius Lydgate is a charming but tactless doctor. His marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and his pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career. Their interweaving tales reveal a complex tale of idealism, disillusionment, loyalty and frustrated love.
Author: George Eliot
Author George Eliot
Narrator Hannah Gordon
Duration 2h 21m
Our hero, a carpenter, loves Hetty Sorel, but she loves Arthur Donnington, a local squire. The story soon progresses onto powerful themes, such as: who has the right to determine who lives and who dies? A non-judgemental examination of human relationships and nature, Adam Bede has been highly praised for achieving something 'beyond' realism.
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Author: George Eliot
Author George Eliot
Narrator Hannah Gordon
Duration 2h 24m
Dorothea is on a quest to find heroism in ordinary people, an enthralling journey which encompasses both highs and lows. Praised by Virginia Woolf as one of the only novels 'written for grown-up people', Middlemarch is a highly accomplished story, whose characters are involving and intreguing. Dorothea's story interlinks powerfully and tantalisin...
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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: Kenneth Grahame
Author Kenneth Grahame
Narrator Alan Bennett
Duration 1h 17m
When the Water Rat invites the unassuming Mole to spend his first day ever in a boat on the river, and wise Badger comes along for the ride as well, so begins a marvellous season of adventure for the three friends. Mr Toad (he of Toad Hall) completes a happy foursome, but his tendency to get into hot water leads him into some rather hair-raising sc...
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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: 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: 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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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 Eliot
Author George Eliot
Narrator Hannah Gordon
Duration 2h 24m
A family living on the edge of the river struggle with the thought of losing their livelyhood, whilst battling to keep family relationships together. Maggie and Tom, brother and sister, try to save their livelihood as their parents flounder in the face of modernization. Maggie befriends the disabled son of a family rival in an attempt to build bri...
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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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