AuthorThomas Hardy
NarratorAnton Lesser
Duration12h 20m
CategoriesAdult Fiction, Classics
Key StageKS4
PublisherNaxos
VersionUnabridged
In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurks the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper.
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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The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion
Author: Thomas Hardy
Author Thomas Hardy
Narrator Martin Jarvis
Duration 42m
A tale by Hardy, master of human tragedy, about a girl's sacrifice for her long-engagement and her doomed love for a visiting soldier.
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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: 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: 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: Thomas Hardy
Author Thomas Hardy
Narrator Michael Kitchen
Duration 9h 51m
The unhappily married Lady Constantine breaks all the rules of social decorum when she falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an astronomer who is ten years her junior. Her husband's death leaves the lovers free to marry, but the discovery of a legacy forces them apart.
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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: Thomas Hardy
Author Thomas Hardy
Narrator Full Cast
Duration 3h 45m
A new dramatisation of the Thomas Hardy classic, `Tess Of The d'Urbervilles', to be transmitted as the Radio 4 Classic Serial in four hour-long episodes. John Durbeyfield learns that he is descended from the Norman family of d'Urbervilles. He and his wife Joan encourage their daughter Tess to befriend the family of Stoke d'Urbervilles. In doing...
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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: Jerome K Jerome
Author Jerome K Jerome
Narrator Blake Morrison
Duration 7h 33m
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Blake Harrison, star of The Inbetweeners, also known for his role on screen in A Very English Scandal and Todd Margaret, as well as on London's West End in Waitress. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by David Carroll. Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. a...
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