AuthorGeorge Orwell
NarratorJonathan Oliver
Duration8h 45m
CategoriesAdult Fiction, Classics
PublisherSNR Audio
VersionUnabridged
Coming Up for Air is a moving account of one man's attempt to recapture the innocence of childhood as war gravitates on the horizon.
George Bowling is forty-five, married with children, working as a suburban insurance salesman, and desperate to escape London. It's 1939 and the Second World War is imminent. Forseening the chaos it will bring George decides to escape to the smaller life of his childhood, to the village of Lower Binfield where everything is quiet and peaceful. But his journey may bring nothing more than chaos, confusion, and disillusionment.
Published in 1939, Coming Up for Air captures anxiety of a population awaiting war, the tension between tradition and progress, and is seen by many as the thematic precursor to both 1984 and Animal Farm.
Author: Jerome K Jerome
Author Jerome K Jerome
Narrator Blake Morrison
Duration 7h 33m
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Blake Harrison, star of The Inbetweeners, also known for his role on screen in A Very English Scandal and Todd Margaret, as well as on London's West End in Waitress. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by David Carroll. Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. a...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Richard E Grant
Duration 9h 1m
Orwell's darkly comic novel centres around the life of Gordon Comstock, onetime advertising copywriter turned bookshop employee and struggling poet. Gordon's disdain for money and artistic compromise preclude his earning enough of a living to escape constant public embarrassment. On top of this, it gives him terrible trouble holding on to his girlf...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Jeremy Northam
Duration 7h 41m
A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. Graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, hunger and unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It c...
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Author: Albert Camus
Author Albert Camus
Narrator James Jenner
Duration 11h 2m
In the small coastal city of Oran, Algeria, rats begin rising up from the filth only to die as bloody heaps in the streets. Shortly after, an outbreak of the bubonic plague erupts and envelops the human population. Albert Camus' The Plague is a brilliant and haunting rendering of human perseverance and futility in the face of a relentless terror bo...
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Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Narrator Various
Duration 1h 32m
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Jessica Brown Findlay, Jamael Westman and Sheila Atim. 'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing' Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneer...
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Author: Kenneth Grahame
Author Kenneth Grahame
Narrator Alan Bennett
Duration 1h 17m
When the Water Rat invites the unassuming Mole to spend his first day ever in a boat on the river, and wise Badger comes along for the ride as well, so begins a marvellous season of adventure for the three friends. Mr Toad (he of Toad Hall) completes a happy foursome, but his tendency to get into hot water leads him into some rather hair-raising sc...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Simon Callow
Duration 3h 11m
The animals in the farmyard decide that working for humans is doing them no favours, so under the leadership of Napoleon, the only Berkshire Boar on the farm, and the other pigs, they drive out the farmer and his cohorts and set about structuring their own society. Based on a list of supposedly animal-friendly rules such as "four legs good, two leg...
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Author: George Orwell
Author George Orwell
Narrator Andrew Wincott
Duration 12h 20m
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three great powers: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Throughout Oceania 'The Party' rules by the agency of four ministries whose power is absolute. In The Ministry of Truth, which deals in propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine t...
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Author: Emile Zola
Author Emile Zola
Narrator Leighton Pugh
Duration 19h 55m
Germinal is one of the most striking novels in the French tradition. Widely regarded as Zola's masterpiece, the novel describes the working conditions of French coalminers in the 1860s in harsh and realistic terms it is visceral, graphic and unrelenting. Its strong socialist principles and vivid accounts of the miners' strikes meant that the novel...
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Author: Charlotte Bronte
Author Charlotte Bronte
Narrator Charlotte Ritchie
Duration 21h 29m
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Charlotte Ritchie, best known for her roles as Oregon in Channel 4's Fresh Meat, Hannah in the BBC Three comedy Siblings, and as Barbara Gilbert in BBC drama Call the Midwife. With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding sch...
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