Jeremy Irons has narrated 9 audiobooks on Listento.it by 15 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 3,900 ratings. The most-rated is The Alchemist.
The Alchemist
Summary
Paulo Coelho's enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world. This story, dazzling in its simplicity and wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an Alchemist, all of whom point Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a meditation on the treasures found within. Lush, evocative, and deeply humane, the story of Santiago is art eternal testament to the transforming power of our dreams and the importance of listening to our hearts.
©1988 Paulo Coelho (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers
Lolita
Summary
When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the 20th century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story that is shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration, along with heartbreak and mordant wit, abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. But most of all, it is a meditation on love - as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
(P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Brideshead Revisited
Summary
The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece - a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.
©1945 Evelyn Waugh (P)2015 Hachette Audio
Manuscript Found in Accra
Summary
The latest novel from the number-one internationally best-selling author of The Alchemist. There is nothing wrong with anxiety. Although we cannot control God’s time, it is part of the human condition to want to receive the thing we are waiting for as quickly as possible. Or to drive away whatever is causing our fear.... Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it - just as we have learned to live with storms. July 14, 1099. Jerusalem awaits the invasion of the crusaders who have surrounded the city’s gates. There, inside the ancient city’s walls, men and women of every age and every faith have gathered to hear the wise words of a mysterious man known only as the Copt. He has summoned the townspeople to address their fears with truth: “Tomorrow, harmony will become discord. Joy will be replaced by grief. Peace will give way to war....None of us can know what tomorrow will hold, because each day has its good and its bad moments. So, when you ask your questions, forget about the troops outside and the fear inside. Our task is not to leave a record of what happened on this date for those who will inherit the Earth; history will take care of that. Therefore, we will speak about our daily lives, about the difficulties we have had to face.” The people begin with questions about defeat, struggle, and the nature of their enemies; they contemplate the will to change and the virtues of loyalty and solitude; and they ultimately turn to questions of beauty, love, wisdom, sex, elegance, and what the future holds. “What is success?” poses the Copt. “It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace.” Now, these many centuries later, the wise man’s answers are a record of the human values that have endured throughout time. And, in Paulo Coelho’s hands, The Manuscript Found in Accra reveals that who we are, what we fear, and what we hope for the future come from the knowledge and belief that can be found within us, and not from the adversity that surrounds us.
©2013 Paulo Coelho (P)2013 Random House Audio
The Poems of T. S. Eliot
Summary
Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Jeremy Irons' perceptive reading illuminates the poetry of T. S. Eliot in all its complexity. Major poems range from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' through the post-war desolation of 'The Waste Land' and the spiritual struggle of 'Ash-Wednesday', to the enduring charm of 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'. The Spectator praised Jeremy Irons' interpretation as 'so accessible, reading Eliot as if finding his words for the first time, grappling with them, relishing them, using them to express feelings that we all share as we struggle to accept, to recognise or relinquish'. Dame Eileen Atkins also appears alongside Jeremy Irons in the reading of 'The Waste Land'. UPDATED EDITION WITH POEM TITLES FOR EASY NAVIGATION.
©2015 BBC (P)2016 BBC
Song of the Unicorn
Summary
A musical journey through Medieval Times. When a young queen falls mysteriously ill, her children are sent deep into the forest in search of her only cure: The legendary unicorn. The great magician Merlin helps them on their quest. With riddles and the unicorn’s song, the children travel to the magical isle of Avalon. There, they must decide what can truly cure their mother - King Arthur’s powerful sister, Morgan-le-Fay, or the healing touch of the unicorn. More than two dozen excerpts of pre-Baroque music, including traditional English songs like Greensleeves and Early One Morning, Gregorian Chant, Celtic songs, wild Medieval dances plus a journey into the future of music with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and beyond.
©1999 The Children & Group Under Exclusive Licence to Linus Entertainment (P)2020 The Children & Group Under Exclusive Licence to Linus Entertainment
Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
Summary
Here is a collection of the Oscar Wilde's famous fairy tales, read by a cast of leading British actors. Additional narrators include Geoffrey Palmer O.B.E., Sir Donald Sinden, and Elaine Stritch. Music: 'Reverie De Sebastian' by Steve Davies.
©2010 WHITEROOM MUSIC LTD (P)2010 WHITEROOM MUSIC LTD
Words That Burn
Summary
Following the success of Catching LIfe by the Throat, Josephine Hart compiles more poetry from the like of such poets as Milton, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Frost and Lowell. Read by a dazzling cast of actors including Eileen Atkins, Nancy Carroll, Alan Cox, Charles Dance, Joanna David, Lindsay Duncan, Edward Fox, Emilia Fox, Robert Hardy, Tom Hollander, Jeremy Irons, Felicity Kendal, Elizabeth McGovern, Mark Strong, Dominic West, Greg Wise.
©2008 Josephine Hart (P)2008 Hachette Digital
Storytime with the Stars
Summary
Children of all ages will delight in listening to these four original stories performed by Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Golden Globe-winning celebrities. Grammy and multi-time Emmy winner Betty White starts off this collection reading Mary Sheldon's A Day at the Zoo, the story of Lizzy and her troublesome friend Eric on the day they finally get to visit the zoo. Golden Globe-winning actress Sharon Stone performs Dancing in the Park, the story of a dancer named Claudia who is determined to cheer up a sad little boy in the park. Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Golden Globe winner Jeremy Irons gives a lively performance of Ari Meyers' The Triumphant Beautiful Egg, the account of an egg-painting rabbit whose self-proclaimed masterpiece goes unappreciated. Lastly, 11-time Grammy Award-winning recording artist Linda Ronstadt performs Kate Folb's Spanish for Natalie, in which two girls from different cultural backgrounds find out they have a lot in common.
©1992 Mary Sheldon / 1996 Annie Reiner / 1996 Ari Meyers / 1996 Kate Folb (P)2017 Phoenix Books