AuthorEdith Nesbit
NarratorPam Ferris
SeriesPsammead, Book 1
Duration2h 45m
CategoriesChildren's Fiction, Classics
Key StageKS2
PublisherPenguin
VersionAbridged
Five children discover a mysterious egg in an old carpet. When it hatches a golden phoenix is brought to life. The phoenix explains that the carpet possesses magic qualities, and so the children embark on a series of fantastic adventures as the carpet transports them to many magical places.
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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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Psammead Series Book 3: The Story of the Amulet
Author: Edith Nesbit
Author Edith Nesbit
Narrator Anna Bentinck
Duration 2h 37m
When Cyril, Robert, Anthea and Jane rescue the magic sand-fairy from a pet shop, they have no idea of the astonishing adventures to come! The children are whisked back in time to exciting and sometimes dangerous places, such as Ancient Babylon and Atlantis, to search out the missing half of the amulet.
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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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Bastable Series Book 2: The Wouldbegoods
Author: Edith Nesbit
Author Edith Nesbit
Narrator Teresa Gallagher
SeriesTreasure Seekers, Book 2
Duration 3h 17m
The sequel to 'The Treasure Seekers' reacquaints us with the six Bastable children, who find all sorts of ways in which to amuse themselves in the country during the summer holidays. The children do their best, but they soon get into trouble when they try to create a jungle in the garden.
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Bastable Series Book 1: The Treasure Seekers
Author: Edith Nesbit
Author Edith Nesbit
Narrator Teresa Gallagher
SeriesTreasure Seekers, Book 1
Duration 2h 15m
Six children decide that the only way to restore the fortunes of their family is to go out and do it themselves. They produce a series of madcap schemes and one after another try them out with varying degrees of success, most resulting in trouble rather than riches. But then one scheme begins to look more promising than the rest.
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