AuthorHerman Melville
NarratorBill Bailey
Duration4h 45m
CategoriesAdult Fiction, Classics
Key StageKS4
PublisherNaxos
VersionAbridged
'Moby Dick' follows the fortunes of Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod, a 19th century whaling ship. The Pequod is on its last voyage in pursuit of Moby Dick, the great white whale which has been Ahab's bitter adversary for many years. This classic story of high adventure, manic obsession and metaphysical speculation is packed with drama, and draws heavily on the author's own experiences on the high seas.
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: 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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Bartleby the Scrivener and Other Stories
Author: Herman Melville
Author Herman Melville
Narrator William Roberts
Duration 2h 38m
Melville's 'Bartleby' is a classic American short story, a strange tale of an assiduous copyist whose catch-phrase is 'I would prefer not to'. It is joined here by two other stories from 'The Piazza Tales', Melville's idiosyncratic collection: 'The Lightning-Rod Man' and 'The Bell Tower'.
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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: 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: Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Author Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Narrator Richard E. Grant
Duration 2h 12m
He is the Little Prince, the mysterious, innocent and beautiful boy who appears to a pilot stranded in the desert and makes an extraordinary request. He has captured the hearts of millions of readers around the world since his story first appeared in 1943, written down by an aristocratic French aviator who soon after disappeared during a flight acr...
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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: Herman Melville
Author Herman Melville
Narrator Christopher Timothy
Duration 2h 20m
The action is set within the claustrophobic confines of a British man-of-war ship in the summer of 1797. Here live the crew of the HMS Indomitable, many of them pressed into service against their will. Billy Budd, however, enjoys naval life. But the evil master-at-arms, Claggart, loathes his fresh-faced innocence and accuses him of mutiny. From th...
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Author: Herman Melville
Author Herman Melville
Narrator Bob Sessions
Duration 2h 10m
A nautical yarn that encompasses adventure, thrills and spills on the high seas. Not to foget a certain massive whale! Captain Nemo is hell-bent on catching the famous gargantuan whale, who cost him one of his legs on a previous voyage. With disregard for his safety or that of his crew, he persues the beast with an obsession tantamount to madness.
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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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