Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, Narrated by Rosamund Pike

We all know Pride and Prejudice, if not from reading it at least from the several films and the 1995 BBC television series when Colin Firth, playing the handsome, haughty Fitzwilliam Darcy, made a swooningly sexy appearance in a drenched shirt. If you want to rediscover the novel, however, you couldn’t do better than listen to this audiobook. Rosamund Pike reads with such sensitivity, warmth and humour that she could almost be Elizabeth, that most spirited and likeable of heroines, from whose point of view the story is told.

Mrs Bennet, devoted but ludicrous mother of five daughters who will be penniless after their father’s death, is desperate to find husbands for her children. Jane’s budding relationship with rich Mr Bingley is mysteriously cut off, by the hand, it turns out, of the even richer Mr Darcy who considers her family below his friend’s.