Free audiobook classics
Every book below is in the public domain, courtesy of Project Gutenberg and every one is a free audiobook in LoudReader. Download the app, pick a title from the built-in catalog, and press play: natural offline voices read it with word-by-word highlighting, fully on-device and private, your library never leaves your device. LoudReader ships native Mac and iPhone apps, and listening is unlimited on the free tier. These 100 classics are a curated start. The app itself carries the whole 70,000+ book catalog.
Adventure & the Sea
Moby Dick; Or, The Whale
Herman Melville · about 23½ hours
A scarred captain hunts the white whale that took his leg, and pulls his whole crew into the obsession.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · about 51½ hours
Betrayed, buried alive, and back with a fortune: the greatest revenge story ever serialized.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · about 8 hours
Fence-painting cons, graveyard secrets, and buried treasure. American boyhood at its most gloriously disobedient.
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Tobias Smollett · about 16½ hours
One chaotic family road trip across 1770s Britain, told in dueling letters that never agree on anything.
Manon Lescaut
Abbé Prévost · about 7 hours
The banned 1731 confession of a young man who ruined himself, twice over, for an impossible woman.
The Adventures of Roderick Random
Tobias Smollett · about 20½ hours
A penniless Scot is press-ganged into the Georgian navy in a picaresque built from the author's own scars.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · about 11½ hours
A boy, a runaway, and a raft on the Mississippi. America's great river odyssey, told in Huck's own voice.
Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne · about 7½ hours
A gentleman bets his fortune he can circle the globe in eighty days, and the clock starts now.
The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
H. De Vere Stacpoole · about 7 hours
Two shipwrecked children grow up alone in paradise, with no one to tell them what comes next.
Catriona
Robert Louis Stevenson · about 10½ hours
The sequel to Kidnapped: David Balfour risks the gallows to tell the truth, and loses his heart doing it.
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson · about 7½ hours
The treasure map, the black spot, Long John Silver. The pirate story all others are measured against.
Mystery & Detective
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · about 22½ hours
He committed the perfect crime to prove a theory. Now his own mind is the crime scene.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · about 11½ hours
Twelve visitors climb the stairs to Baker Street; twelve impossible cases get solved.
The Secret of Chimneys
Agatha Christie · about 9 hours
A simple courier job drops a charming drifter into murder, stolen jewels, and Balkan intrigue at an English country house.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
Maurice Leblanc · about 6½ hours
France's gentleman thief announces his heists in advance, and pulls them off anyway.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
G. K. Chesterton · about 6½ hours
A poet infiltrates Europe's secret anarchist council, a metaphysical thriller disguised as a spy romp.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Charles Dickens · about 11 hours
Dickens died halfway through this murder mystery. 150 years later, no one knows the ending.
A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle · about 5 hours
Watson meets Holmes, 221B gets its first case, the story that started the most famous partnership in crime fiction.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle · about 7 hours
A family curse, a phantom hound, and Holmes's most famous case out on the fog-bound moor.
The Sign of the Four
Arthur Conan Doyle · about 5 hours
A pearl arrives every year from no one; Sherlock Holmes wants to know why.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie · about 8½ hours
The Christie with the most audacious twist in detective fiction. Go in unspoiled if you can.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie · about 6½ hours
A poisoning behind a bolted door. The case that introduced Hercule Poirot to the world.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · about 11½ hours
Holmes meets Moriarty. Eleven perfect mysteries ending at the Reichenbach Falls.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · about 13½ hours
Back from the dead. Holmes returns, and the game is afoot again in thirteen cases.
The Valley of Fear
Arthur Conan Doyle · about 6½ hours
A faceless corpse in a moated manor, and a trail leading back to Moriarty himself.
The Innocence of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton · about 9 hours
A dumpy priest who out-thinks master criminals. Mysteries solved through the confessional, not the magnifying glass.
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins · about 21 hours
The first great English detective novel, a cursed diamond, a baffled house, a solution like no other.
Gothic & Horror
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · about 8½ hours
The scientist fled his creation, but the creature learned to speak, and it has something to say.
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe · about 32½ hours
The original Gothic blockbuster: an orphaned heiress, a sinister castle, and terrors behind the veil.
Dracula
Bram Stoker · about 16½ hours
The vampire novel that started it all, told in diaries and letters that read like found footage.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson · about 3 hours
A respectable doctor, a monstrous stranger, and a locked door between them: Stevenson's perfect nightmare.
The King in Yellow
Robert W. Chambers · about 8 hours
A forbidden play drives its readers mad, the 1895 classic that seeded a century of cosmic horror.
The Monk: A Romance
M. G. Lewis · about 15½ hours
The scandal of 1796: Madrid's holiest monk begins a spectacular, supernatural fall from grace.
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom
Tobias Smollett · about 18½ hours
A conman 'Count' cheats his way across Europe in the rare classic told from the villain's side.
The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance
Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer · about 45 hours
The original Sweeney Todd, the Victorian penny dreadful where the demon barber of Fleet Street first drew blood.
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · about 5 hours
A governess, two perfect children, and the dead who won't stay away. Literature's most argued-over ghost story.
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins · about 26½ hours
A midnight encounter, a stolen identity, and Victorian fiction's most charming villain.
The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux · about 9½ hours
Five cellars beneath the Paris Opera, a lake, a mask. The original is stranger than the musical.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · about 8½ hours
He stays young; the portrait keeps score. Gothic horror written entirely in epigrams.
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Thuvia, Maid of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs · about 5½ hours
A kidnapped Martian princess, a framed hero, and a city defended by armies imagined into existence.
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Jules Verne · about 9½ hours
A coded message, an extinct volcano, and a professor mad enough to climb down it.
Undine
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué · about 4 hours
A water spirit marries a knight to gain a soul. The German fairy tale that taught mermaids to break hearts.
Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World
Jonathan Swift · about 6 hours
Tiny emperors, giant kings, and talking horses. The most savage satire ever disguised as adventure.
The House on the Borderland
William Hope Hodgson · about 5½ hours
A lone house, a pit full of swine-things, and a vision of the universe dying. Cosmic horror's origin point.
Children's Classics
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll · about 3 hours
Down the rabbit hole into the maddest, most quotable afternoon in children's literature.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum · about 4½ hours
The original American fairy tale: a girl, a cyclone, and a road of yellow brick.
Grimms' Fairy Tales
Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm · about 10½ hours
The original fairy tales, darker, stranger, and built to be heard, not read.
Peter Pan: Peter and Wendy
J. M. Barrie · about 5½ hours
The boy who wouldn't grow up, funnier and far sadder than any adaptation dares to be.
Romance & Society
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · about 14½ hours
The sharpest heroine in English fiction meets the proudest man in the county, and the sparks are all verbal.
Middlemarch
George Eliot · about 34½ hours
A whole town's ambitions, marriages, and secrets, woven into the novel many call England's greatest.
The Blue Castle
L. M. Montgomery · about 8 hours
Told she has a year to live, a browbeaten spinster finally starts living, and it's glorious.
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
Charlotte Brontë · about 20 hours
A penniless governess, a brooding employer, and a secret that laughs in the halls of Thornfield.
Little Women; Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy
Louisa May Alcott · about 20½ hours
Four sisters, one absent father, and the most beloved American family in fiction.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen · about 13½ hours
Two sisters, two ways of loving: one guards her heart, one leads with it, and both pay the price.
The Enchanted April
Elizabeth von Arnim · about 9 hours
Four unhappy strangers rent an Italian castle for April, and the holiday quietly rearranges all their lives.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · about 5½ hours
One summer, one green light across the bay, and the most beautiful doomed illusion in American fiction.
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway · about 9½ hours
Love and war on the Italian front. Hemingway's spare, devastating masterpiece of a separate peace.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · about 13 hours
Heathcliff and Catherine on the Yorkshire moors, the most ferocious love-and-revenge story in English.
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · about 5 hours
The 1774 novel of doomed obsession so intense it started a fashion craze, and got itself banned.
I Am a Woman
Ann Bannon · about 8½ hours
A 1959 pulp paperback that became a landmark: one woman's arrival in Greenwich Village, and to herself.
Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor
R. D. Blackmore · about 28 hours
A farmer's son loves the daughter of the outlaws who killed his father. Romance on the wild moor.
The Red Lily
Anatole France · about 8½ hours
In Florence, a Parisian society woman finds real love at last, and discovers it cannot forgive her past.
Camille (La Dame aux Camélias)
Alexandre Dumas fils · about 7 hours
The doomed romance behind La Traviata: a Parisian courtesan, a jealous young lover, and a sacrifice he learns of too late.
Love and Freindship
Jane Austen · about 4 hours
Teenage Jane Austen, already merciless, a parody where heroines faint on principle.
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Thomas Hardy · about 14½ hours
Two men love the same woman, and her one small secret becomes Hardy's quiet tragedy.
Lady Audley's Secret
M. E. Braddon · about 16 hours
The perfect Victorian wife has a secret, and an idle barrister can't stop pulling the thread.
Historical Fiction
Twenty Years After
Alexandre Dumas · about 27½ hours
The musketeers reunite, older and wiser, and the son of their greatest enemy is hunting them.
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens · about 15 hours
Love, revolution, and the guillotine. Dickens's most tightly wound and quotable novel.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · about 62 hours
Five families, one invasion, sixty hours. The audiobook is how you finally conquer it.
Literary Fiction
A Room with a View
E. M. Forster · about 7½ hours
A proper English girl goes to Florence, swaps hotel rooms, and accidentally lets real life in.
Carmen
Prosper Mérimée · about 3 hours
The novella behind the opera: a soldier, a free spirit, and an obsession with only one way out.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · about 38 hours
Three brothers, one murdered father, and the fiercest argument about God and guilt ever staged as a crime novel.
Cranford
Elizabeth Gaskell · about 8 hours
A little town ruled by indomitable elderly ladies, one of the warmest, funniest comfort reads in English.
History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Henry Fielding · about 37½ hours
A foundling with a good heart and terrible judgment tumbles across England in fiction's first great comic epic.
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
Philip Sidney · about 37 hours
An oracle, two disguised princes, and a whole royal family in love with the wrong people. The Elizabethan romance that taught English fiction how to play.
Paul Clifford
Edward Bulwer-Lytton · about 20½ hours
'It was a dark and stormy night', and the gallant-highwayman novel behind the famous line is actually fun.
Myth, Legend & Epic
The Lady of the Lake
Walter Scott · about 9½ hours
A lost huntsman, an outlaw's daughter, and a Highland clan summoned to war: Scott's verse romance at full gallop.
Four Arthurian Romances
Chrétien de Troyes · about 19½ hours
The twelfth-century poems that invented Camelot as we know it, including Lancelot and Guinevere's forbidden love.
The Odyssey
Homer · about 13½ hours
The original epic voyage: one cunning man against monsters, gods, and ten years of very bad luck.
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
Joseph Bédier · about 3 hours
The love potion, the king's bride, the knight who drank by mistake. The medieval legend behind them all.
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
Howard Pyle · about 11½ hours
The definitive Robin Hood, disguises, archery contests, and the Sheriff humiliated on repeat.
Poetry & Drama
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare · about 3 hours
Two households, an ancient grudge, and a love affair that burns through Verona in five days.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare · about 104½ hours
The complete Shakespeare, words written for the ear, finally back where they belong.
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · about 1 hour
Forty-four sonnets tracking one of literature's few great love stories that came true.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · about 2 hours
One enchanted night, four mismatched lovers, a mischievous fairy, and a weaver with a donkey's head.
As You Like It
William Shakespeare · about 3 hours
Rosalind, exiled and disguised as a man, teaches the man she loves how to woo her.
Biography, Memoir & Letters
The Confessions of St. Augustine
Saint Augustine of Hippo · about 11½ hours
The first great autobiography in Western literature, a brilliant, restless man confessing everything directly to God.
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin · about 8½ hours
The runaway apprentice who invented American self-improvement explains, wryly, how he built himself.
Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain · about 15½ hours
Twain's own steamboat years, how a boy memorized twelve hundred miles of river and lost a world worth mourning.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Frederick Douglass · about 4½ hours
The fugitive who taught himself to read, then wrote the book that helped bring down American slavery.
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Suetonius · about 26½ hours
Ancient Rome's twelve most powerful men, profiled by a biographer who kept all the scandalous parts in.
Autobiography of a Yogi
Paramahansa Yogananda · about 18 hours
The 1946 spiritual classic that carried yoga to the West, told by a seeker with a sense of humor.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African: Written By Himself
Olaudah Equiano · about 9 hours
Kidnapped as a boy, he bought his own freedom and wrote the book that fueled a movement.
The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus
Tacitus · about 6 hours
Rome's sharpest historian on the edge of empire: a general's life in Britain, and the tribes beyond the Rhine.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Harriet A. Jacobs · about 9 hours
Seven years hidden in a crawl space above a porch: one woman's true account of out-waiting slavery.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys · about 126 hours
The 1660s (plague, fire, and office gossip) narrated live by history's most candid diarist.
De Profundis
Oscar Wilde · about 2 hours
Oscar Wilde's prison letter to the man who ruined him. His wittiest voice, stripped bare.
Philosophy & Ideas
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius · about 8 hours
A Roman emperor's private notes to himself, still the most practical self-help ever written.
Biographia Literaria
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · about 16 hours
Coleridge explains imagination itself. The most brilliant talker of his age, in full flow.
Anarchism and Other Essays
Emma Goldman · about 8 hours
"The most dangerous woman in America" makes her case. Fiery essays built for the ear.
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