Fiction audiobooks page 9

The Innocence of Father Brown

A Chief of Police hosts a dinner party for an American millionaire wishing to will his entire fortune to the Church of France. Jewels that have been stolen and recovered so many times that they're known colloquially by thieves as The Flying Stars. A murder committed by an invisible man. These and many others are the mysteries that are presented to the lovable, bumbling, stumpy Man of God, Father Brown.

The Innocence of Father Brown, by G.K. Chesterton is a collection of eleven stories which marks the debut of this most unusual detective. Chesterton was a contemporary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and it is only natural that his fictional sleuth be compared with the most fa...

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

Its publication soon after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake got readers instantly hooked on the story in which Dorothy and her friends sink into the bowels of the earth, following a devastating earthquake in California. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz is the fourth in the series of books written by American children's author L. Frank Baum.

In this novel, Dorothy visits her Uncle Henry in his California ranch. She, her friends, her cousins and a few pets are traveling in a buggy when the earth suddenly splits open and the entire lot falls into the crack. From here on, a series of adventures follows, with the children having bizarre encounters in the Land of the Mangaboos ...

The Princess and the Goblin

George MacDonald’s fairy stories and fantasy have inspired a number of writers including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and of this popular fairy story, which as you might suspect concerns a little princess plotted against by a race of goblins, G.K. Chesterton said that it “made a difference to my whole existence.”

Bleak House

Over twenty consecutive months, Charles Dickens enthralled readers with his monthly installments of the novel Bleak House, a complex and compelling portrayal of the English judicial system. Serialized in his own magazine, Household Words, between 1852 and 1853, the book is deemed to be his finest work and is his ninth novel.

Using an innovative literary technique known as “free indirect discourse,” where the narrator himself speaks through the medium of one of his main characters, Dickens uses the heroine Esther Summerson and an unidentified narrator as the vehicle for his story.

Esther Summerson is a young woman who is brought up under mysterious ci...

The Age of Reason

A Universalist book, The Age of Reason advocates for the existence of natural religion and challenges the structure of all organized religion. First written and distributed as pamphlets, the book was later published into two parts. Paine puts forward his personal beliefs, debating reason and revelation, while analyzing the Bible and the influence organized religion has on society. Exploring topics including natural religion, criticism of corrupt religious institutions, and distinction between rationality and blind faith in the supernatural, the book presents a guide for the conscious and free spiritual thinkers.

Following the style and influence of the Enlighten...

Edison's Conquest of Mars

Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss, is one of the many science fiction novels published in the nineteenth century. Although science fiction was not at the time thought of as a distinct literary genre, it was a very popular literary form, with almost every fiction magazine regularly publishing science fiction stories and novels. “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” was published in 1898 as an unauthorized sequel to H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, but did not achieve the fame of its predecessor. The book was endorsed by Thomas Edison, the hero of the book — though not by Wells.

Pollyanna Grows Up

Pollyanna, now cured of her crippling spinal injury, and able to walk again, goes to live in Boston with Mrs. Carew, a heart-broken woman searching for her lost nephew. Aunt Polly goes abroad with Pollyanna’s new Uncle, Dr. Chilton. While in Boston, Pollyanna meets new friends and has several interesting adventures…

A startling change in Aunt Polly’s and Pollyanna’s circumstances require Pollyanna to come up with a workable solution. Pollyanna’s solution brings all her new friends from Boston and her old friends in Beldingsville together. Pollyanna also discovers she has to make a choice. Who will win her heart?

Love Among the Chickens

A young, but not too brilliant writer is conscripted by a ne'er-do-well friend to help out on a chicken farm in remote Dorset. While traveling to the country, the writer encounters a lovely young girl and her academician father on the train. He is delighted to discover that she is reading a copy of his latest book. In the countryside, he also discovers that the professor and his daughter are neighbors. However, over dinner one night, he gets into an acrimonious debate with the elderly scholar who storms out, furious with his daughter's potential suitor. Meanwhile the chicken farm seems to be a doomed enterprise...

All this and other zany events form the delightful plot of ...

The Thing from the Lake

To get away from city life periodically, New Yorker Roger Locke purchases an abandoned farm house in rural Connecticut, and with the assistance of his cousin Phillida and her beau Ethan Vere, he sets about fixing up the place.

Immediately however, an unseen mysterious woman begins giving him warnings during nocturnal visits to leave the house at once. Soon he begins hearing strange ominous sounds emanating from the tiny lake at the back of the house coupled with a permeation of sickly odors. An evil presence then begins to visit him during the witching hours of the late night, challenging him to a battle of wits from which there can be only one victor.

Is his mysterious fem...

The Breaking Point
Mary Roberts Rinehart -- "America's Agatha Christie," as she used to be called -- set this story in a New York suburban town, shortly after the end of the first world war. Dick Livingstone is a young, successful doctor, who in the course of events becomes engaged to Elizabeth Wheeler. But there is a mystery about his past, and he thinks himself honor-bound to unravel it before giving himself to her in marriage. In particular, a shock of undetermined origin has wiped out his memory prior to roughly the last decade. Rinehart, who presumably had been reading, or reading about, the then popular Sigmund Freud, plays on what today is called "repressed memory," as she takes Dick into his past, a...