French Classics

The French Classics Collection brings together 18 of the greatest works of fiction ever written in French - here collected into one audiobook and all translated into English. Featuring grand epics of love, loss, and survival, as in Les Miserables, to tales of adventure in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and romances such as Madame Bovary, alongside many more grand stories from 17th, 18th, and 19th century France, this collection will whisk you away into other worlds with some of the greatest characters in literature within some of the greatest novels ever written.

Marseille, 1815. Edmond Dantès ramène à bon port, après la mort de son capitaine, le trois-mâts "Le pharaon". Bientôt capitaine de ce bateau et fiancé à la belle Mercédès, il voit ses espérances comblées. Jamais le bonheur n'a été aussi proche. Mais soudain, le soir du repas de fiançailles le rêve se brise. Une dénonciation anonyme, une machination diabolique le sépare de son amour, l'enterre vivant dans un cachot, séparé à jamais du monde des vivants. Edmond Dantès se retrouve prisonnier au château d'If. Qui veut lui nuire ? Pourquoi ?

The greatest revenge story ever written. Edmond Dantès has everything: youth, love, a captain's berth waiting for him on the Pharaon. In a single afternoon, jealousy and conspiracy destroy it all. Falsely accused of Bonapartist treason, he is cast into the dungeon of the Château d'If, where he will spend fourteen years in darkness and despair. But a chance encounter with a dying prisoner reveals an impossible secret — the location of a vast treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. When Dantès finally escapes, he emerges as a new man: wealthy beyond measure, coldly brilliant, ...

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'; so the recording begins and ends with some of Dickens's best-known words, and between those lines is every Briton's view of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, the audiobook tells the story of a French doctor who is imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille in Paris. Upon his release, he moves to London with his daughter, Lucie, whom he had never met.

François-Marie Arouet—Voltaire—perfected the philosophical tale, a literary form embedding profound questions about existence, justice, and human nature within entertaining narratives that made complex ideas accessible while evading censorship through wit and indirection. This volume presents his philosophical tales and essays spanning his career. In "Micromegas" (1752), a giant from Sirius visits Earth and discovers humanity's paradoxical nature: infinitesimal physical size matched against extraordinary intellectual achievement. The tale, among the first works of science fiction, uses...

The unforgettable story of a young English lady and the warrior who saves her from sure death, a woman and a man from different worlds, two bold hearts who find passion in a divided land and swear to love each other forever. “I am so in love with her books every spare minute has been spent reading them since I found the first one! 3 books in and it's this one that is my favorite so far, I love The Raven!”—Melody Banks Raven watches with his younger brother Takooko through the trees near the Susquehanna River as the enemy Mohawk war party heads north in several canoes with their ...

Elizabeth Bennet, l'une des quatre filles d'un hobereau de province anglais, voit arriver dans sa campagne un gentilhomme fortuné. Celui-ci s'intéresse à sa sœur Jane. L'ami du gentilhomme, encore mieux nanti, est peu cordial. Les Bennet ne l'apprécient pas. Mais l'évolution des situations et des circonstances va tout bouleverser et les résultats des joutes amoureuses réserveront bien des surprises.

The novel that changed what fiction could do — now in a landmark critical edition. Emma Bovary is bored. Married to a dull provincial doctor, suffocated by the routines of small-town Normandy, she has fed her imagination on romantic novels and believes that somewhere — in another man's arms, in another city, in another life — the passion and elegance she craves must exist. She is wrong. And that error will destroy her. Gustave Flaubert spent five years writing Madame Bovary, agonizing over every sentence, reading each passage aloud to test its rhythm, discarding pages that any other ...

This annotated edition of The Last of the Mohicans includes: • A 16,500-word critical study, "The Man Who Invented America" • A reckoning with Mark Twain's famous demolition of Cooper • An honest look at Cooper's Indians — idealization and its costs • A full biography of James Fenimore Cooper • Notes on the complete, unabridged 1826 text 1757. The forests of upstate New York, where two empires are at war and a way of life is ending. As the French and their allies close on Fort William Henry, a frontier scout called Hawkeye and his two Mohican companions — Chingachgook and his ...

French literature may be said to begin with the ninth century "Song of Roland," and it has since then churned out masterpiece after masterpiece in every century right up to the present. Beginning with Balzac and Dumas in the early part of the nineteenth century and proceeding to Sartre and Camus at the midpoint of the twentieth, the stories in this collection showcase the talents of some of the greatest French masters of the short story.

Before marrying, Emma Bovary believed she would enter a life of luxury and passion like the sentimental stories she'd read in her novels and magazines. Now married to an ordinary country doctor her life is not the romantic ideal she imagined and seeks an escape through having extra-marital affairs. This devastating spiral into deceit and despair leads to catastrophic consequences. Emma Bovary continues to be enjoyed to this day because of its profound humanity, still as fresh today as when it was first written.

Partout dans le monde, des millions de petits princes jeunes et vieux connaissent la fabuleuse histoire de l’aviateur qui, au cœur de désert, fit un jour la rencontre d’un étrange petit bonhomme voyageant de planète en planète.

Augustine Guillaume marries a romantic painter and loves him with everything her careful, orderly, bourgeois formation has given her. He leaves her for another woman. She dies of it. Balzac places this story first in the Comédie humaine — an announcement, from the opening pages, of what kind of writer he is. In the five works that follow, the same intelligence examines the same territory from different angles. Émilie de Fontaine, whose pride requires she marry only a nobleman, falls in love with exactly the man her principles demand and, through the application of those principles, ...

"By far one of the best books I have read in a long time!...I stayed up until 2 and 3 in the morning reading this book.”—Judy, Amazon SAVAGE LOVE By sheer will, Lady Rachael Moreover stays alive until one warrior who’s different from the rest steps forward and wins her heart in this thrilling frontier love story. The English Lady is on her way to Philadelphia when she is attacked by the Iroquois chief Broken Horn and his war party who kidnap her and her fiancé, Scottish Viscount Gifford Langston. Broken Horn can’t decide whether to keep this beauty or sell her to the French, who ...

The greatest revenge story ever written — now in a powerful new abridged translation that cuts straight to the heart of the epic Second Edition — Revised and Corrected Translated by Henry Bugalho — philosopher, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Published by Erato Press. You know the story. A young sailor named Edmond Dantès has everything — youth, love, a future. In a single day, jealousy and conspiracy destroy it all. Falsely accused of treason, he is cast into the dungeon of the Château d'If. Fourteen years of darkness. Fourteen years of despair. And then — an ...

#1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry returns with a radiant getaway to remember...

This annotated edition includes: The complete first six volumes of In Search of Lost Time, in C. K. Scott Moncrieff's classic 1922–1930 translation — from Swann's Way through The Sweet Cheat Gone A biographical portrait, honestly framed against what can and cannot be verified about a writer this mythologized An afterword on the argument between Proust and his own translator over the English title — fought out, in Proust's own words, six weeks before his death Full provenance notes and a chronology tracing the novel's translation history to the present day A live table of contents ...

L'action se déroule sous la Régence, période aux mœurs débridées succédant à l'austère fin de règne de Louis XIV. Le jeune chevalier des Grieux rencontre une belle adolescente : Manon Lescaut. Une passion irraisonnée naît entre ces deux très jeunes gens. Leur inconséquence et leur candide immoralité vont projeter le couple dans des aventures qui aboutiront à leur déchéance. Eduqué pour un avenir honorable, des Grieux, par passion amoureuse, ne pourra résister aux penchants licencieux de Manon.

The novel that invented the modern conscience — complete, unabridged, in a new translation that restores Hugo's full voice. Victor Hugo spent seventeen years writing Les Misérables. When it appeared in 1862, readers across Europe and the Americas queued for copies before dawn. It was immediately recognized as something the novel had never been before: not a story about characters, but a judgment on a civilization — a vast, furious, compassionate reckoning with poverty, law, justice, and the question of whether a single human soul can be redeemed by a single act of grace. This is the ...

Jacques the Fatalist stands as one of Denis Diderot's most innovative and philosophically provocative works, a novel that gleefully dismantles the very conventions of storytelling while exploring profound questions about human agency and destiny. Written in the 1770s but not published until after Diderot's death, this remarkable narrative follows the journey of Jacques, a servant, and his unnamed master as they travel through the French countryside, their path interrupted by countless digressions, stories within stories, and the author's own intrusive commentary. The novel's central conceit...