This highly entertaining audio book, read by star actor Timothy West, was first conceived during a rainy summer holiday in the Highlands of Scotland in an attempt to amuse the author's step-son.  Treasure Island began with the map - young Lloyd Osbourne had drawn a crude version of an island and Stevenson, looking over the boy’s shoulder began to elaborate, christening various curves and smudges the famed names of Skeleton Island, Spyglass Hill and finally adding the three red crosses marking the buried treasure. From this gentlest of beginnings has come one of the fiercest and best loved novels of piracy and fortune in the history of literature. It is Lloyd’s lasting legacy that he insisted there be no girls in the story!

It tells the story of Jim Hawkins who having acquired a map to the vast treasure of the fabled Captain Flint, sets out with a sponsor, Squire Trelawney, who has been tricked into crewing up his ship with the remaining members of the notorious Flint’s band of pirates. Mutiny, maroonings and treasure follow, with the wonderful character of Long John Silver, not only providing a truly sophisticated analysis of the fact that morality is never simple but also forever fixing peg legs and parrots as the only uniform of the true buccaneer.

The distinguished Edward Fox delights us with the engrossing story of the downfall of Septimus Harding, the gentle and respected warden of Barchester Cathedral, in The Warden the first of Anthony Trollope’s hugely successful Barchester Chronicles. This exclusive and unabridged audio book is available in MP3 or iPod audiobook format for you to download immediately.

It was a nightmare from which he was furious to have been woken which triggered Robert Louis Stevenson’s most successful and famous work. Having been stirred from what he termed “a fine bogey tale” Stevenson set about putting his nightmare onto paper. It reputedly took him only three days to write but the story of a split personality, warring with itself between righteousness and immorality is as much a part of modern thought as it became in 1885.

The story of the upright and moral Dr Jekyll and his horrific and uncontrollable other within has been seen as an allegory for the chronic duality of the Victorian Era with its insistence on outward respectability and its underbelly of vice and exploitation. History has it that the first draft of the novella was burnt by Stevenson in response to his wife’s criticisms, possibly about the explicitly sexual nature of the wild Mr Hyde’s nocturnal exploits, and the chilling vagueness of the final version’s descriptions of his pursuits adds to the Victorian nature of the story as much as to the horror of the man.

Download Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and receive A Lodging for the Night by Robert Louis Stevenson FREE!

Classical actor and James Bond villain Toby Stephens brings his brooding intensity to Joseph Conrad’s terrifying and exhilarating exploration of evil that served as the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now. This unabridged audio book sees Conrad’s iconic characters, Marlow and Kurtz, on a journey to the very depths of human nature.

It follows Marlow as he recounts, from dusk through to late night, his adventure into the Congo transporting ivory, and his more pressing assignment - to return Kurtz in a cover up, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary.

Heart of Darkness is available in MP3 or iPod audiobook format for you to download immediately.

The ultimate tale of bullying and how to survive it, Thomas Hughes’ hugely successful novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays charts a young boy’s tough but formative years at Rugby School and his battle with the great schoolboy baddie - Flashman. This unabridged classic audio book is brought to robust life in the lively and exhilarating reading exclusively recorded for us by Hugh Bonneville and available in MP3 or iPod audiobook format for you to download immediately.

Unlike his other seasonal stories, The Cricket on the Hearth is not a supernatural tale, but one of the perfect domestic scene with which Dickens was so obsessed throughout his writing. It is all here, the warmth of home, the loving little woman, the children, the food and the laughter all rolled into one very warming story

Ever since its publication, The Cricket on the Hearth has been the subject of dramatisation, including this latest audiobook download version from Silksoundbooks read by George Cole.