Thomas Hardy Audio Books

One of the greatest English tragic novels, TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) is the story of a "pure woman" who is victimized both by conventional morality and its antithesis.

Irritated and drunken, an itinerant farm-worker sells his wife and child to a stranger.Thus begins The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in rural and small-town England in the mid-1800s. In the original subtitle, Hardy called this the story of "a man of character"...

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy's fourth novel and offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished.

Jude the Obscure is the last of Thomas Hardy's novels, begun as a magazine serial and first published in book form in 1895. Its hero Jude Fawley is a lower-class young man who dreams of becoming a scholar.

Clym Yeobright returns home to Egdon Heath, a scattered collection of houses on the isolated Wessex moors, and is caught up in a "love pentagon"…

A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in Thomas Hardy's compelling masterpiece of tragic fiction.

Wessex Tales is a collection of six short stories written by Hardy in the 1880’s. If you’ve never read Hardy they’ll serve as a good introduction to his writing. Though not as comprehensive as his major works they do contain all the ingredients that make him instantly recognisable.

Like all of Hardy's work, The Return of the Native (1878) is passionate and controversial, with themes and sympathies beyond what a good Victorian would ever admit.

The story takes place in a small woodland village called Little Hintock, and concerns the efforts of an honest woodsman, Giles Winterborne, to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury.

Full-cast performance with comprehensive commentary and analysis for any student to fully understand and appreciate the novel. Hardy's world is brought to life in this vivid drama that sets the scene, tells the tale, and puts the characters on trial using theatre-in-education techniques to examine "the leaden gloom of one who has lost all".