Listen free for 30 days
-
Thomas Hardy
- The Time-Torn Man
- Narrated by: David Shaw-Parker, Jill Balcon
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Abridged Audiobook
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Art & Literature
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Listen with a free trial
Buy Now for £19.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Desperate Remedies
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 17 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After the untimely death of their parents, Cytheria and Owen Graye must go out into the world and fend for themselves. Cytheria's journey leads her to the dark and mysterious household of Miss Aldclyffe, a capricious and eccentric woman, who steers Cytheria into a love affair with her charismatic steward, Aeneous Manston. All is not what it seems, and Cytheria finds herself entangled in a violent web of lust, murder, deception, and blackmail.
-
Samuel Pepys
- The Unequalled Self
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Jill Balcon
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Samuel Pepys kept a diary in which he wrote with astonishing candour about the life he saw around him in London in the 1660s, and about his private desires and ambitions. The diary was kept for fewer than 10 years of his long life: Claire Tomalin tells the whole story of the Fleet Street tailor's son who made himself rich and powerful, an MP and adviser to royalty.
-
-
massively abridged
- By t on 05-04-19
-
Charles Dickens
- A Life
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Charles Dickens: A Life, the major new biography from the highly acclaimed Claire Tomalin, published for the 200th anniversary of his birth. Read by the actor Alex Jennings.
-
-
As lively a story as a good novel
- By Kirstine on 27-01-12
-
The Young H.G. Wells
- Changing the World
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his 20s and 30s, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first 40 years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other.
-
-
The Amazing H G Wells
- By Ken P on 03-01-22
-
A Life of My Own
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Dame Penelope Wilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin. As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success. Now she turns to look at her own life. This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin.
-
-
Her autobiography as good as her biographies
- By Rachel Redford on 22-09-17
-
Richard Burton Reads the Poetry of Thomas Hardy
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Richard Burton
- Length: 40 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Richard Burton, the multi-award winning actor, reads the finest work of Thomas Hardy.
-
-
Applause, plus Names of Poems
- By Simon Jude on 02-01-20
-
Desperate Remedies
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 17 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After the untimely death of their parents, Cytheria and Owen Graye must go out into the world and fend for themselves. Cytheria's journey leads her to the dark and mysterious household of Miss Aldclyffe, a capricious and eccentric woman, who steers Cytheria into a love affair with her charismatic steward, Aeneous Manston. All is not what it seems, and Cytheria finds herself entangled in a violent web of lust, murder, deception, and blackmail.
-
Samuel Pepys
- The Unequalled Self
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Jill Balcon
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Samuel Pepys kept a diary in which he wrote with astonishing candour about the life he saw around him in London in the 1660s, and about his private desires and ambitions. The diary was kept for fewer than 10 years of his long life: Claire Tomalin tells the whole story of the Fleet Street tailor's son who made himself rich and powerful, an MP and adviser to royalty.
-
-
massively abridged
- By t on 05-04-19
-
Charles Dickens
- A Life
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Charles Dickens: A Life, the major new biography from the highly acclaimed Claire Tomalin, published for the 200th anniversary of his birth. Read by the actor Alex Jennings.
-
-
As lively a story as a good novel
- By Kirstine on 27-01-12
-
The Young H.G. Wells
- Changing the World
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his 20s and 30s, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first 40 years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other.
-
-
The Amazing H G Wells
- By Ken P on 03-01-22
-
A Life of My Own
- By: Claire Tomalin
- Narrated by: Dame Penelope Wilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin. As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success. Now she turns to look at her own life. This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin.
-
-
Her autobiography as good as her biographies
- By Rachel Redford on 22-09-17
-
Richard Burton Reads the Poetry of Thomas Hardy
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Richard Burton
- Length: 40 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Richard Burton, the multi-award winning actor, reads the finest work of Thomas Hardy.
-
-
Applause, plus Names of Poems
- By Simon Jude on 02-01-20
-
The Chosen
- who pays the price of a writer's fame?
- By: Elizabeth Lowry
- Narrated by: Philip Bird
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One Wednesday morning, Thomas Hardy, an old man in ragged trousers, entombed by paper and increasingly estranged from his wife, Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she has gone. The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words, leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives ended up as enemies to each other. He, his family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he had been in a relationship, all assumed that he would be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.
-
-
The Return of the First Wife
- By Rachel Redford on 22-04-22
-
A Pair of Blue Eyes
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hardy's third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, follows the story of Elfride Swancourt. The daughter of the rector of Endelstow, a sparse, sea-swept parish in Cornwall, Elfride is caught between two suitors of very different backgrounds: Stephen Smith, a young architect restoring the old parish church; and the respectable, older man of London society, Henry Knight. The blue-eyed and high-spirited protagonist must untangle the conflicting messages of her heart and her mind.
-
-
Brilliant novel but awful reading put me off.
- By Carrie Meeber on 16-01-22
-
Jude the Obscure (AmazonClassics Edition)
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Alex Wyndham
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Working-class Jude Fawley longs to be a scholar. But after scheming local girl Arabella Donn traps him in marriage, Jude finds his university dreams drifting away. When his wife abandons him, a window of opportunity opens, and Jude moves to Christminster to work as a stonemason - his eye still on his studies. Then he falls in love with the modern-minded Sue Bridehead, and his descent into scandal, tragedy, and ruin truly begins. Shunned by society and the church, the outcasts find themselves on the brink of despair.
-
Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Anton Lesser
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Michael Henchard, drunk at a country fair, sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas. The following day, in despair and remorse, he forswears alcohol and sets out to redeem himself. In time, he becomes a respected merchant and eventually the mayor of the town. But Fate is not to be so easily appeased, and Henchard finds his past actions resonate through and destroy his plans for the future.
-
-
The Mayor of Casterbridge
- By Bill on 04-09-12
-
The Restless Republic
- Britain Without a Crown
- By: Anna Keay
- Narrated by: Lucy Tregear
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a raw January afternoon, the Stuart king, Charles I, was executed for treason. Within weeks, the English monarchy had been abolished and the ‘useless and dangerous’ House of Lords discarded. The people, it was announced, were now the sovereign force in the land. What this meant, and where it would lead, no one knew. The Restless Republic is the story of the extraordinary decade that followed.
-
-
very interesting
- By Anonymous User on 12-03-22
-
How to Create the Perfect Wife
- By: Wendy Moore
- Narrated by: Daniel Pirrie
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the story of how Thomas Day, a young man of means, decided he could never marry a woman with brains, spirit or fortune. Instead, he adopted two orphan girls from a Foundling Hospital, and set about educating them to become the meek, docile women he considered marriage material. Unsurprisingly, Day's marriage plans did not run smoothly.
-
Louisa May Alcott
- The Woman Behind Little Women
- By: Harriet Reisen
- Narrated by: Harriet Reisen
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; and the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain.
-
-
Excellent book, poor narration
- By Clare on 21-10-12
-
Constable in Love
- By: Martin Gayford
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When John Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of a Suffolk country neighbour, he little knew how long it would take to make her his wife. The impediment to their marriage was simple: ‘that necessary article, cash’. He was a painter without sufficient funds to support the daughter of a prominent London lawyer, and both he and her formidable grandfather disapproved of the match.
-
Margaret Fuller
- A New American Life
- By: Megan Marshall
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 19 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
-
Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl
- By: Carl Rollyson
- Narrated by: Kathleen Godwin
- Length: 19 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The biography's new title emphasizes that Rebecca West was a prophet - one not always appreciated in her own day. As early as 1917, she understood where the world was headed and realized that the revolution in Russia held out false hope. Because she took this view as a socialist, those on the left scorned her as an apostate, whereas she understood that Communism would result in a disaster for the British left.
-
Facades
- By: John Pearson
- Narrated by: Frazer Douglas
- Length: 28 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell were the children of possibly the most selfish and mismatched couple in the annals of the British aristocracy. They became in the 1920s, in Cyril Connolly's words, 'a dazzling monument to the English scene... had they not been there a whole area of life would have been missing.' John Pearson describes the public and private life of this strangest and most flamboyant of literary families.
-
-
Absolutely fascinating
- By Mary on 07-11-18
-
Joy
- Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis
- By: Abigail Santamaria
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis' memoir, A Grief Observed. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to your ears in the fullness and depth she deserves. A poet and radical, Davidman was a frequent contributor to the communist vehicle New Masses and an active member of New York literary circles in the 1930s and '40s.
-
-
I love Joy Davidman.
- By MamikieMatatso on 28-01-22
Summary
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin, read by Jill Balcon and David Shaw-Parker.
Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the 20th-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; and he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats.
In the hands of Whitbread Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin, author of the best-selling books Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come vividly alive.
Critic reviews
"An extraordinary story, beautifully told. Tomalin is the most empathetic of biographers." (Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday)
"Another triumph for a biographer who goes from strength to strength." (Melvyn Bragg, Guardian, Books of the Year)
"Tomalin provides an object lesson in how to write a life." (Economist)
More from the same
What listeners say about Thomas Hardy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Alan
- 17-07-20
Excellent
A wonderful biography of an extraordinary writer. As always, Claire Tomalin is both a lucid and sensitive narrator of the life, and an insightful and passionate interpreter of the work. This will send many readers back to the great novels and collections of poetry. A shame we don't have an unabridged reading, but this is a well-edited and very entertaining abridgement.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Chris
- 17-08-19
Excellent biography
Very much enjoyed reading this excellent biography. Before reading I didn’t know much about Hardy and had only read one of his novels (now planning to read more ...). This was a good introduction. Only downside is that it had the feel of being extensively abridged - why not just give us the full version? There was a lot of focus on his first wife as compared with other influences on his work - not sure if that was down to the author or the abridging for audio but it did feel a little excessive at times
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Tanya Hitchcock
- 16-07-19
Beautifully written
This is a beautifully written, well-rounded account of Thomas Hardy’s life. The chronological events are skilfully interwoven with his often troubled and conflicted inner world. Excerpts from his poetry embellish the work, reminding us of the genius of one of our greatest writers.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Christine lee
- 20-09-18
Plese let me introduce you to Claire Tomalin
After reading Tomalin's fabulous Memoir ( and recommending it) I wanted to read a biography from her
so chose Hardy as I know/knew so little about him except for having loved the movies made of his novels.
What a shame I have waited so long - I am going to move right on to "Tess"
and "Return of the Native" and probably everything I can that Hardy wrote. A late life discovery to
enhance my days. Wonderful. Wonderful.
5 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Seam
- 31-12-21
Everything you need to know about Hardy
An engrossing account that vividly relates the novels and poems to Hardy's inner life, his childhood, the events of his era, and his relationship with his first wife Emma.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- A L Bishop
- 11-04-21
Fascinating and beautifully read
A wonderful account of Hardy's life, putting his works into the context of his life and the times. Beautifully read and hugely engaging.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Drone Boy
- 16-12-20
Great Novelist But A Boring Life
I have to disagree with the majority of reviewers on this one. However prolific a biographer Tomalin is, Hardy lived a fairy average, dull, life, and this biography failed to satisfy my curiosity about Hardy's subjectivity and his philosophy of writing. I listened to and enjoyed her biographies of Dickens and Bronte, but Hardy and his satellites came across dry, middle-class, windbags. Having said this, its the only Hardy biography on audible, so half an eye is better than no eye.