LibriVox Audiobooks

Pygmalion (1913) is a play by George Bernard Shaw based on the Greek myth of the same name. It tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics (based on phonetician Henry Sweet), who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can successfully pass off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak with an upper class accent and training her in etiquette...

A selection of poems in the Lancashire dialect by the foremost exponent of the form. A printer by training, Edwin Waugh left his trade for secretarial work and began his literary career in 1852. His first dialect poem, 'Come whoam to thi' childer and me', was written at the Clarence Hotel, Manchester, on 10 June 1856 and published in the Manchester Examiner the following day...

Persuasion is a regency Cinderella-esque tale of a young woman, the beautiful Anne Elliot, who is persuaded from marrying the Naval officer of her heart. It is now almost nine years since she rejected him. Bonaparte has abdicated and England's sailors return home covered in glory. Fredrick Wentworth is now a rich and highly eligible sea captain and the two are curiously thrown together. Will their forgotten affection blossom anew? Or has the captain found another? (

Alice’s adventures in Wonderland is probably one of the most well known and popular children's novels in the English language. Written in 1865 by Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson, better known by his pen name ‘Lewis Carrol’. Lewis, a mathematician, poet, photographer and inventor, tells a surreal fantasy tale, of Alice, who visits a world of unnatural logic after following a very smart White Rabbit, down a rabbit hole...

Published in 1859, On Liberty details Mill's view that individuals should be left wholly free to engage in any activity, thought or belief that does not harm others. Simple though it sounds, it is a position that challenges our ideas on the very nature of government and society, and sheds light on some of the key issues we face today. A key text of political philosophy, On Liberty has been continuously in print since its first publication. (Summary by David Barnes)

Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-Regency England; she also creates a lively comedy of manners among her characters.
Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like...

Few things, even in literature, can really be said to be unique — but Moby Dick is truly unlike anything written before or since. The novel is nominally about the obsessive hunt by the crazed Captain Ahab of the book’s eponymous white whale. But interspersed in that story are digressions, paradoxes, philosophical riffs on whaling and life, and a display of techniques so advanced for its time that some have referred to the 1851 Moby Dick as the first “modern” novel...

In Books 3 and 4 of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes elaborates on the political philosophy set forth in the first two books, by considering the nature of a Christian commonwealth. Book 3 begins with a wealth of biblical scholarship, directed at establishing the authority of Scripture while at the same time undermining modern claims to supernatural revelation that would subvert civil law...

Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly called Leviathan, is a book written in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes. It is titled after the biblical Leviathan. The book concerns the structure of society (as represented figuratively by the frontispiece, showing the state giant made up of individuals), as is evidenced by the full title. In the book, Thomas Hobbes argues for a social contract and rule by a sovereign...

This is book 1 of 5. An ex-convict breaks parole and starts a new life as a righteous man, but is pursued by a police inspector. Along the way, the ex-convict joins a revolution, adopts a daughter, and beats people up. Hooray. (Summary by smileyman457)