Oscar Wilde (Author)
,
Ben Barnes (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Ben Barnes, star of the film adaptation of Dorian Gray, also known for his roles in Westworld and The Chronicles of Narnia. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Robert Mighall.
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succès de scandale and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to fascinate and disturb.
Virginia Woolf (Author)
,
Natalie Dormer (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Natalie Dormer, best known for her standout role as Queen Margaery in Game of Thrones, as well as her roles in The Hunger Games and Captain America: The First Avenger.
A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing writing on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.
Thomas Hardy (Author)
,
Sian Clifford (Read by)
,
Margaret Higonnet (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Sian Clifford, star of Fleabag and Vanity Fair. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Margaret R. Higonnet.
When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy's novels.
(c) 1891, Thomas Hardy (P) 2019 Penguin Audio
H G Wells (Author)
,
David Harewood (Read by)
,
Brian Aldiss (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin.
Shortlisted for the Best Solo Narration Award at the New York Festival Radio Awards 2020.
This Penguin Classic is performed by the critically acclaimed actor David Harewood, one of the stars of the television series Homeland. Harewood is also known for his roles in award-winning productions The Night Manager and Blood Diamond. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Brian Aldiss' read by Roy McMillan.
The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. At first, naïve locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag - only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat-ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge. Soon the whole of human civilisation is under threat, as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroy all in their path with black gas and burning rays, and feast on the warm blood of trapped, still-living human prey. The forces of the Earth, however, may prove harder to beat than they at first appear.
The War of the Worlds has been the subject of countless adaptations, including an Orson Welles radio drama which caused mass panic when it was broadcast, with listeners confusing it for a news broadcast heralding alien invasion; a musical version by Jeff Wayne; and, most recently, Steven Spielberg's 2005 film version, starring Tom Cruise.
H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was a professional writer and journalist. Among his most popular works are The Time Machine (1895); The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), filmed with Bela Lugosi in 1932, and again in 1996 with Marlon Brando; The Invisible Man (1897); The War of the Worlds (1898); and The First Men in the Moon (1901), which predicted the first lunar landings.
Mary Shelley (Author)
,
Peter Noble (Read by)
,
Colin Salmon (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Colin Salmon known for his starring roles in Resident Evil and Alien Vs Predator. He is also known for his role as Charles Robinson alongside Pierce Brosnan's James Bond. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Maurice Hindle, read by Peter Noble.
A terrifying vision of scientific progress without moral limits, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein leads the reader on an unsettling journey from the sublime beauty of the Swiss alps to the desolate waste of the arctic circle.
Obsessed with the idea of creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material with which to fashion a new being, shocking his creation to life with electricity. But this botched creature, rejected by its creator and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy Frankenstein and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Lord Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of Gothic horror, and Frankenstein's monster an instantly-recognisable symbol of the limits of human creativity.
John Tenniel (Illustrator)
,
Lewis Carroll (Author)
,
Katie Leung (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Katie Leung, star of the Harry Potter films. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Hugh Haughton.
Conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Carroll's college, the dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down. Following the white rabbit into his warren, Alice falls into a world where croquet is played with hedgehogs and flamingos, a baby turns into a pig, time runs amok at a the Mad Hatter's tea-party, a chaotic game of chess makes Alice a Queen and the Mock Turtle and Gryphon dance the Lobster Quadrille. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling wordplay, unforgettable characters, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for a lost childhood. Original and experimental, adapted into countless film and television versions as Alice in Wonderland, the Alice books give readers a window on both child and adult worlds.
Lafcadio Hearn (Author)
,
Paul Murray (Edited by)
,
Eleanor Matsuura (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Eleanor Matsuura, known for AMC's The Walking Dead and Spooks. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Paul Murray.
In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out to be frogs, paintings come alive, deadly spectral brides haunt the living and a samurai delivers the baby of a Shinto goddess with mystical help. Here are all the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore: 'rokuro-kubi', whose heads separate from their bodies at night; 'jikininki', or flesh-eating goblins; and terrifying faceless 'mujina' who haunt lonely neighbourhoods. Lafcadio Hearn, a master storyteller, drew on traditional Japanese folklore, infused with memories of his own haunted childhood in Ireland, to create these chilling tales. They are today regarded in Japan as classics in their own right.
Virginia Woolf (Author)
,
Ruth Wilson (Read by)
,
Hermione Lee (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Ruth Wilson, star of Luther, Mrs Wilson and His Dark Materials. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Hermione Lee.
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
