Audiobooks online: genre "Literary Fiction", page 18

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life is one of the last great works completed by Balzac for his huge novel series entitled The Human Comedy. Sections of this book, in various groupings and with various titles, were published between 1838 and 1847. It eventually settled into the four s...

Our Mutual Friend (written in the years 1864–65) is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining psychological insight with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, "money, money, money, and w...

Two Poets (1837) is the first book in Balzac’s Lost Illusions trilogy, which is part of his sweeping set of novels collectively titled La Comédie Humaine. The story is set in post-Napoleonic France, when the new bourgeoisie was jostling for position alongside the old aristocracy....

A frank look at the revolt of the younger generation following World War I, the book follows the Trelawney family. The father looks eagerly forward to his return home after serving an important but harrowing stint in the army. What he finds at home is not what he expects, as his ...

This 1922 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicles the life of Anthony Patch, the only heir of millionaire Adam Patch, his grandfather. Anthony is young, handsome and well-educated. He marries the ravishingly beautiful Gloria, and together they plan for the day that Anthony receiv...

Mrs. Warren's Daughter is a continuation, in novel form, of George Bernard Shaw's controversial play, Mrs. Warren's Profession. In the play, Vivie Warren, an emancipated young woman recently graduated from University, disavows her mother Kitty when she learns that Kitty's fortune...

One of May Sinclair’s “uncanny” stories, this novella explores many of Sinclair’s most treasured themes: the bounds of marriage, the conflict between flesh and spirit, the complexity of human emotions in relation to other humans, the practical everyday implications of philosophic...

Basil Kent marries Jenny Bush, because he believes that is the honourable thing to do after getting her pregnant, but he realizes that he is really in love with Hilda Murray. Grace Castillyon, an established married woman of position, has fallen hopelessly in love with young Reg...

First published in 1915, The Good Soldier might be characterised as a melodrama of English upper class infidelities, cut into little pieces, then retold out of sequence by a narrator who occasionally appears to be half asleep. That is not wholly wrong, yet many have seen in this ...

Wilde's short story about an attempt to uncover the identity of Mr. W. H., the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets, was first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1889. He intended to publish an expanded version of the story as a separate book, a plan that was not realiz...

Young naive sailor Billy Budd is impressed into military service with the British navy in the 1790s, framed for conspiracy to mutiny, summarily convicted in a drum-head court martial, and hanged. Billy Budd is the final published work by Herman Melville, discovered in his persona...

Giovanna and Costantino Ledda are a happily married couple living with their young child in a Sardinian country village close to their extended family. Costantino is wrongly convicted of murdering his wicked uncle and with no way of supporting herself, Giovanna reluctantly divorc...