Dead Souls

The Master and Margarita

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 51 mins)
• By Mikhail Bulgakov
• Narrated By Julian Rhind-Tutt

The Devil comes to Moscow, but he isn't all bad; Pontius Pilate sentences a charismatic leader to his death, but yearns for redemption; and a writer tries to destroy his greatest tale, but discovers that manuscripts don't burn. Multi-layered and entrancing, blending sharp satire with glorious fantasy, The Master and Margarita is ceaselessly inventive and profoundly moving. In its imaginative freedom and raising of eternal human concerns, it is one of the world's great novels.

House of Names

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 45 mins)
• By Colm Tóibín
• Narrated By Juliet Stevenson, Charlie Anson, Pippa Nixon
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

On the day of his daughter's wedding, Agamemnon orders her sacrifice. His daughter is led to her death, and Agamemnon leads his army into battle, where he is rewarded with glorious victory. Three years later he returns home, and his murderous action has set the entire family - mother, brother, sister - on a path of intimate violence as they enter a world of hushed commands and soundless journeys through the palace's dungeons and bedchambers.

4 3 2 1

• UNABRIDGED (37 hrs)
• By Paul Auster
• Narrated By Paul Auster
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On March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four Fergusons made of the same genetic material, four boys who are the same boy, will go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Loves and friendships and intellectual passions contrast.

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

• UNABRIDGED (27 hrs)
• By Thomas Mann
• Narrated By David Rintoul

First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author's former neighbours in his native Lübeck.

Lincoln in the Bardo

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 27 mins)
• By George Saunders
• Narrated By George Saunders, Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, and others
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Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other, for no one but Saunders could conceive it. February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery.

The Brothers Karamazov [Naxos AudioBooks Edition]

• UNABRIDGED (37 hrs and 8 mins)
• By Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Garnett - translator
• Narrated By Constantine Gregory
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a titanic figure among the world's great authors, and The Brothers Karamazov is often hailed as his finest novel. A masterpiece on many levels, it transcends the boundaries of a gripping murder mystery to become a moving account of the battle between love and hate, faith and despair, compassion and cruelty, good and evil.

The Diary of a Provincial Lady

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 22 mins)
• By E. M. Delafield
• Narrated By Georgina Sutton

'Lady B. stays to tea. (Mem.: Bread-and-butter too thick. Speak to Ethel.) We talk some more about bulbs, the Dutch School of Painting, our Vicar's wife, sciatica, and All Quiet on the Western Front. (Query: is it possible to cultivate the art of conversation when living in the country all the year round?)' If the question suggests a qualified answer, there is no doubt that the art of diary writing is alive and well and very, very funny in Devonshire in the 1920s. At least in the hands of E. M. Delafield.

Can You Forgive Her?

• UNABRIDGED (33 hrs and 33 mins)
• By Anthony Trollope
• Narrated By David Shaw-Parker
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Young, attractive and wealthy, Alice Vavasor is a woman in the prime of her life. And yet one question torments her: "What should a woman do with her life?" Torn between the kind but dull Mr. Grey and her dangerous and exciting cousin George, she is prone to constant indecision and uncertainty, much to the detriment of Mr. Grey. Can You Forgive Her? is a crisp and engaging novel, brimming with romance, humor, and pathos. It is the first of six in Trollope's celebrated Palliser series.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 12 mins)
• By Elizabeth Strout
• Narrated By Kimberly Farr
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Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, read by Kimberly Farr. A mother comes to visit her daughter in hospital after having not seen her in many years.

Don Quixote

• UNABRIDGED (36 hrs and 9 mins)
• By Miguel de Cervantes, John Ormsby (translated by)
• Narrated By Roy McMillan
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The most influential work of the entire Spanish literary canon and a founding work of modern Western literature, Don Quixote is also one of the greatest works ever written. Hugely entertaining but also moving at times, this episodic novel is built on the fantasy life of one Alonso Quixano, who lives with his niece and housekeeper in La Mancha. Quixano, obsessed by tales of knight errantry, renames himself 'Don Quixote' and with his faithful servant Sancho Panza, goes on a series of quests.

Paradise Lost

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 45 mins)
• By John Milton
• Narrated By Anton Lesser
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In words remarkable for their richness of rhythm and imagery, Milton tells the story of man's creation, fall, and redemption, "to justify the ways of God to men". Here, unabridged, and told with exceptional sensitivity and power by Anton Lesser, is the plight of Adam and Eve, the ambition and vengefulness of Satan and his cohorts.

A Rising Man

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 40 mins)
• By Abir Mukherjee
• Narrated By Simon Bubb
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Captain Sam Wyndham, former Scotland Yard detective, is a new arrival to Calcutta. Desperately seeking a fresh start after his experiences during the Great War, Wyndham has been recruited to head up a new post in the police force. But with barely a moment to acclimatise to his new life or to deal with the ghosts which still haunt him, Wyndham is caught up in a murder investigation that will take him into the dark underbelly of the British Raj.

The Shadow of the Wind

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 38 mins)
• By Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Narrated By Daniel Philpott
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Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'cemetery of lost books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son Daniel one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out 'La Sombra del Viento' by Julian Carax. But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find.

Waiting for Godot

• UNABRIDGED (2 hrs and 2 mins)
• By Samuel Beckett
• Narrated By Sean Barrett, David Burke, Terence Rigby, and others

There is now no doubt that not only is Waiting for Godot the outstanding play of the 20th century, but it is also Samuel Beckett's masterpiece. Yet it is both a popular text to be studied at school and an enigma. The scene is a country road. There is a solitary tree. It is evening. Two tramp-like figures, Vladimir and Estragon, exchange words. Pull off boots. Munch a root vegetable. Two other curious characters enter. And a boy. Time passes. It is all strange yet familiar.

Underworld

• UNABRIDGED (31 hrs and 27 mins)
• By Don DeLillo
• Narrated By Richard Poe
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Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 57 mins)
• By C. G. Jung
• Narrated By James Cameron Stewart

In 1957, four years before his death, Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and psychologist, began writing his life story. But what started as an exercise in autobiography soon morphed into an altogether more profound undertaking.

The Noise of Time

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 41 mins)
• By Julian Barnes
• Narrated By Daniel Philpott
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In May 1937, a man in his early 30s waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to the Big House ever return.

The Way We Live Now

• UNABRIDGED (32 hrs and 25 mins)
• By Anthony Trollope
• Narrated By Timothy West
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In this world of bribes, vendettas, and swindling, in which heiresses are gambled and won, Trollope's characters embody all the vices: Lady Carbury is 'false from head to foot'; her son Felix has 'the instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog'; and Melmotte - the colossal figure who dominates the book - is a 'horrid, big, rich scoundrel...a bloated swindler...a vile city ruffian'. But as vile as he is, he is considered one of Trollope's greatest creations.

Master and Commander: Aubrey-Maturin Series, Book 1

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 54 mins)
• By Patrick O'Brian
• Narrated By Ric Jerrom
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O'Brian's now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship's surgeon and an intelligence agent. It displays the qualities which have put O'Brian far ahead of any of his competitors.

Days Without End

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 58 mins)
• By Sebastian Barry
• Narrated By Aidan Kelly
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Having signed up for the US Army in the 1850s, aged barely 17, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and ultimately the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in, they find these days to be vivid. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America's past.

Nostromo

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 14 mins)
• By Joseph Conrad
• Narrated By Nigel Anthony
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, Nostromo explores the volatile politics and crippling greed surrounding the San Tomé silver mine. The story of power, love, revolutions, loyalty and reward is told with richly evocative description and brilliantly realised characters. But Nostromo is more than an adventure story; it is also a profoundly dark moral fable. Its language is as compellingly resonant as the sea itself; the characters absorbing and complex.

Brave New World

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 5 mins)
• By Aldous Huxley
• Narrated By Michael York

On the 75th anniversary of its publication, this outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today than ever before. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A. F. (After Ford, the deity).

Swann's Way

• UNABRIDGED (21 hrs and 35 mins)
• By Marcel Proust
• Narrated By Neville Jason
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Swann's Way is the first of seven volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It sets the scene with the narrator's memories being famously provoked by the taste of that little cake, the madeleine, accompanied by a cup of lime-flowered tea. It is an unmatched portrait of fin-de-siècle France.

Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion

• ORIGINAL (5 hrs and 59 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Bill Messenger

Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation.

Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself.