The Turn of the Screw

A young governess takes her first post at Bly, a remote English country house, with simple instructions: care for two orphaned children and never bother their uncle in London. The children, Miles and Flora, are beautiful and strangely perfect. Then the governess begins to see figures on the grounds (a man on the tower, a woman across the lake) and learns that two former servants, now dead, once held an unwholesome influence over her charges. She becomes convinced the dead have come back for the children. The question that has divided readers for over a century: is she protecting them, or is the horror coming from somewhere else entirely?

Henry James builds the dread sentence by sentence, never once showing his hand. It is the rare ghost story that gets scarier the more you think about it, and as a voice in your ear, its slow tightening is almost unbearable in the best way.

At roughly 43,200 words, The Turn of the Screw runs about 5 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

1. Install LoudReader on iPhone or iPad, or its iPad app on a compatible Apple Silicon Mac.
2. Search for “The Turn of the Screw” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

Speech is generated locally without uploading the book for narration. Download the book and check your chosen voice before travelling offline. Available voices depend on your device; check the in-app voice list. Try every available voice for your first 8 hours of listening. Afterwards, keep a free English voice selection and unlimited book listening. No LoudReader account or word quota.