Free audiobook classics
These books are listed as public domain in the USA by Project Gutenberg. Check the edition, translation and copyright rules where you live. Hear an opening sample, then download a permitted ebook to listen in LoudReader. Speech is generated locally without uploading the book for narration. The app runs on iPhone and iPad, and on compatible Apple Silicon Macs as an iPad app. These 100 classics are a curated starting point; the app also offers online browsing and downloading from the larger Gutenberg catalogue.
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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
Lilliput and Brobdingnag in a school abridgement. Choose the full text for all four voyages.
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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