Audiobooks online: genre "Literary Fiction", page 18

Written in an era of cheap, formulaic romantic fiction, the nuanced, seditious, quietly erotic novels of May Sinclair stand out like literature from another era entirely. There is romance in “Anne Severn & the Fieldings,” but it’s romance of the best and profoundest kind, set in ...

The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society. The teeming St Petersburg community he enters is far from recept...

Liza of Lambeth focuses on the challenges of life facing Liza, an 18 year old factory girl who lives in the poverty of the slums of 1890s London. The main plot is driven by Liza's affections and the consequences these have for her. Based on W Somerset Maugham's experiences as a...

Humphrey Scriven is a fine, genial, mercantile man, left widowed to raise three daughters and a son. Two of the daughters marry well although happiness is not enduring. The other defers her marriage, knowing her father disapproves of her choice. The son is a disappointment to his...

In 1896 HG Wells produced the Island of Doctor Moreau. After a fateful shipwreck, a chance rescue, and offer of safe harbor, Edward Prendick must contend with a dark science. A man of science, Prendick must wrestle with the ethics of its passions. His inner struggle is illuminate...

Daisy Miller is an 1878 novella by Henry James first appearing in Cornhill Magazine in June–July 1879, and in book form the following year. It portrays the courtship of the beautiful American girl Daisy Miller by Frederick Winterbourne, a sophisticated compatriot of hers. His pur...

Maude is a novella by Christina Rossetti, written in 1850 but published posthumously in 1897. Considered by scholars to be semi-autobiographical, the protagonist is 15-year-old Maude Foster, a quiet and serious girl who writes poetry that explores the tensions between religious d...

When orphaned Oliver Twist asks for more food, the workhouse board are horrified and immediately pack him off to work for an undertaker, who treats him badly. Oliver runs away and finds himself in the streets of London, where he meets the Artful Dodger and is lured into a gang of...

The town traveller is himself a British salesman, living in a lower class part of London in the Victorian era. The story depicts his interactions with his neighbors, and thus brings us images and vocabulary of personal exchanges, street scenes and practices of that time and class...

Hjalmar Johanson (novel, 1926) is a boyish unworldly Swedish body builder come to Walpole’s fictional cathedral town of Polchester. His name is “simplified” by the townsfolk to Harmer John. He is attracted to Polchester by the cathedral. He has a vision of transforming the town a...

"The Rover: A weekly magazine of tales, poetry and engravings, original and selected" was a magazine started in 1843 by Seba Smith and Lawrence Labree. The editors aimed at a high quality standard in their selection of short stories and poetry. Every half-year, the 26 weekly issu...

THE HEPTAMERON (here Volume 4 of 5), first published posthumously in 1558, is divided into seven complete days containing 10 stories each, and an eighth day containing only 2 stories. The stories, many of which deal with love and infidelity, resulted in "accusations of looseness"...