Nineteen Eighty-Four
Penguin Modern Classics
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
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Narrated by:
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Peter Capaldi
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By:
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George Orwell
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party.
Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party.
In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow worker, Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 78
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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Bend Sinister
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 89
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 72
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Story4 out of 5 stars 73
The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A fantastic fairytale of fascism
- By Darwin8u on 12-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Stand on Zanzibar
- By: John Brunner, Bruce Sterling - foreword
- Narrated by: Erik Bergmann
- Length: 21 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 339
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 298
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Story4 out of 5 stars 299
Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically - it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him. Society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers and mass-marketed psychedelic drugs.
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5 out of 5 stars
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perfect audio experience
- By Darryl on 03-24-14
By: John Brunner, and others
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The Magus
- By: John Fowles
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 26 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 927
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 817
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Story4 out of 5 stars 826
John Fowles’s The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, and it continues to create tension and concern today.
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4 out of 5 stars
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One of the best novels that I really think I hate.
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-14
By: John Fowles
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Fatelessness
- A Novel
- By: Imre Kertész, Tom Wilkinson - translator
- Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
At the age of 14, György Köves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and, without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn't particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, "You are no Jew." In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, György remains an outsider.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Shockingly Mundane
- By David Anthony Elliott on 01-13-20
By: Imre Kertész, and others
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Nausea (New Directions Paperbook)
- By: Jean-Paul Sartre
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 201
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 176
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 175
Sartre's greatest novel and existentialism's key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Glad to have existed to enjoy reading this book!
- By mohammed on 08-11-21
By: Jean-Paul Sartre
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The Star Diaries
- Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
- By: Stanislaw Lem
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 138
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 120
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Story4 out of 5 stars 120
Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Gulliver in Space
- By Joe Kraus on 12-29-18
By: Stanislaw Lem
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Red Plenty
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 165
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 136
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 137
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Simple review
- By Jay J Peters on 06-24-18
By: Francis Spufford
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The Seventh Function of Language
- By: Laurent Binet, Sam Taylor - translator
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 119
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 103
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Story4 out of 5 stars 100
Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies - struck by a laundry van - after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn't an accident at all? What if Barthes was murdered?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding reader! Excellent choice of victim(s).
- By William on 11-01-17
By: Laurent Binet, and others
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Molloy
- By: Samuel Beckett
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Dermot Crowley
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 273
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 200
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 198
Written initially in French, later translated by the author into English, Molloy is the first book in Dublin-born Samuel Beckett's trilogy. It was published shortly after WWII and marked a new, mature writing style, which was to dominate the remainder of his working life. Molloy is less a novel than a set of two monologues narrated by Molloy and his pursuer, Moran.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Nauseating, boring, hilarious, and magnificent
- By Gene on 02-21-05
By: Samuel Beckett
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Despair
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 112
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 100
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
- By Darwin8u on 10-02-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Keep the Aspidistra Flying
- By: George Orwell
- Narrated by: Richard E. Grant
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 219
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 196
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 192
Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Gordon's Grey World is Colored with Grant
- By Timothy on 09-25-11
By: George Orwell
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I, Robot
- By: Isaac Asimov
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8,203
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 6,393
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6,406
This classic science fiction masterwork by Isaac Asimov weaves stories about robots, humanity, and the deep questions of existence into a novel of shocking intelligence and heart.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Thank you
- By Fredrik on 06-11-04
By: Isaac Asimov
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A Place of Greater Safety
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 33 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 289
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 253
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 252
It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden - and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Disaster
- By Frank Dudley Berry Jr. on 08-01-13
By: Hilary Mantel