Naxos Audiobooks

Charming, vibrant, witty and edifying, The Life of Samuel Johnson is a work of great obsession and boundless reverence. The literary critic Samuel Johnson was 54 when he first encountered Boswell; the friendship that developed spawned one of the...

An old man, enchanted by tales of knightly courage, puts on his rusty armour and sets out on a quest of his own. For him, the world is filled with giants, knights and a peerless mistress. Others, such as his earthy squire Sancho Panza, see windmills,...

Anna Karenina is beautiful, married to a successful man, and has a son whom she adores. But a chance meeting at a train station in Moscow sets her passionate heart alight, and she is defenceless in the face of Count Vronsky’s adoration. Having defied...

First published in 1908, The Wind in the Willows belongs to a golden age of children’s book. These charming tales of the riverbank, describing the adventures of Ratty, Mole, Badger and their irrepressible but conceited friend, Toad of Toad Hall, have...

Little Women, closely based on Louisa M. Alcott’s own experience of family life, was first published in 1869 and has never lost its extraordinary power to move and delight: from the heartrending story of gentle Beth to the humorous adventures of...

War and Peace is one of the greatest monuments in world literature. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, it examines the relationship between the individual and the relentless march of history. Here are the universal themes of...

The intensely personal David Copperfield (widely regarded to be the most autobiographical of the author’s novels) is one of Dickens’ greatest works. We follow David Copperfield from birth and miserable childhood to inevitable tragedies, until he...

This remarkable poem, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, was Spenser's finest achievement. The first epic poem in modern English, The Faerie Queene combines dramatic narratives of chivalrous adventure with exquisite and picturesque episodes of pageantry....

Fiona Shaw gives a wonderfully fresh reading of Carroll’s classic tale, making his fantastical characters thoroughly believable through an impression of voices. Vivid sound effects together with music by Delius, Parry and Bruckner complete this...

Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen’s most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is ‘handsome, clever and rich’ and has ‘a disposition to think too well of herself’....

At the heart of these stories, as with all the best of Lovecraft’s work, is the belief that the Earth was once inhabited by powerful and evil gods, just waiting for the chance to recolonise their planet. Cthulhu is one such god, lurking deep beneath...

This is the second in the famous trilogy of novels written by Samuel Beckett in the late 1940s. An old man is dying in a room. His bowl of soup comes, his pots are emptied. He waits to die. And while he waits, he constructs stories, mainly to pass the...

Anne Elliot has grieved for seven years over the loss of her first and only love, Captain Frederick Wentworth. When their paths finally cross again, Anne finds herself slighted and all traces of their former intimacy gone. As the pair continue to...

A century after it first appeared, Crime and Punishment remains one of the most gripping psychological thrillers. A poverty-striken young man, seeing his family making sacrifices for him, is faced with an opportunity to solve his financial problems...

Kay and his foster-brother (known as the Wart) are living in the glorious castle of Sir Ector amid the wild and beautiful Forest Sauvage. But they are given a tutor – the magician Merlyn. And so begins one of the most inventive and charming retellings...

This is one of the great recordings of a great play. John Gielgud stars as Ernest and Edith Evans gives her indomitable performance as Lady Bracknell in this classic radio recording from 1951. Performance styles may have changed, but this is an...

A story of spiritual awakening, St. Augustine's Confessions is a fascinating look at the life of an eminent Christian thinker. Widely seen as one of the first Western autobiographies ever written, it chronicles the life and religious struggles of...

The Life of William Butler Yeats is a remarkable one – poet, playwright, essayist, politician, occultist, astrologer, founder of a national theatre, voluminous correspondent, lover, husband and father. It was a life that extended to a packed,...

A maritime classic from the master pen of Herman Melville. Written some forty years after Moby Dick, Melville’s Billy Budd is a moving tale of good versus evil. Set aboard a British navy ship at the end of the eighteenth century, a young, innocent...

Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy’s fourth novel, gaining significant popularity and critical attention. It tells of Gabriel, an up-and-coming shepherd, who falls in love with a proud and vain young beauty Bathsheba, who refuses his offer of...

The tragedy of King Lear receives an outstanding performance in an all-star cast led by Britain’s senior classical actor, Paul Scofield. He is joined by Alec McCowen as Gloucester, Kenneth Branagh as The Fool, Harriet Walter as Gonerill, Sara...

The first European novel, and one of the greatest, is a marvellously comic study of delusion and its consequences: Don Quixote, the old gentleman of La Mancha, takes to the road in search of adventure and remains undaunted in the face of repeated...

Two Years Before the Mast is Richard Henry Dana Jr’s captivating account of life as a common sailor on board a merchant ship in the early 1830s. Initially an attempt to remedy the author’s eye fatigue, the two-year voyage from Boston to California had...

Flann O’Brien’s most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder. Weird, satirical, and very funny, its popularity has suddenly increased after the novel was featured in the hit television...

Charming, vibrant, witty and edifying, The Life of Samuel Johnson is a work of great obsession and boundless reverence. The literary critic Samuel Johnson was 54 when he first encountered Boswell; the friendship that developed spawned one of the...

An old man, enchanted by tales of knightly courage, puts on his rusty armour and sets out on a quest of his own. For him, the world is filled with giants, knights and a peerless mistress. Others, such as his earthy squire Sancho Panza, see windmills,...

Anna Karenina is beautiful, married to a successful man, and has a son whom she adores. But a chance meeting at a train station in Moscow sets her passionate heart alight, and she is defenceless in the face of Count Vronsky’s adoration. Having defied...

First published in 1908, The Wind in the Willows belongs to a golden age of children’s book. These charming tales of the riverbank, describing the adventures of Ratty, Mole, Badger and their irrepressible but conceited friend, Toad of Toad Hall, have...

Little Women, closely based on Louisa M. Alcott’s own experience of family life, was first published in 1869 and has never lost its extraordinary power to move and delight: from the heartrending story of gentle Beth to the humorous adventures of...

War and Peace is one of the greatest monuments in world literature. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, it examines the relationship between the individual and the relentless march of history. Here are the universal themes of...

The intensely personal David Copperfield (widely regarded to be the most autobiographical of the author’s novels) is one of Dickens’ greatest works. We follow David Copperfield from birth and miserable childhood to inevitable tragedies, until he...

This remarkable poem, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, was Spenser's finest achievement. The first epic poem in modern English, The Faerie Queene combines dramatic narratives of chivalrous adventure with exquisite and picturesque episodes of pageantry....

Fiona Shaw gives a wonderfully fresh reading of Carroll’s classic tale, making his fantastical characters thoroughly believable through an impression of voices. Vivid sound effects together with music by Delius, Parry and Bruckner complete this...