The award-winning production of Othello featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor which sold out its entire run at the Donmar Warehouse and was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 to widespread praise will be released on Naxos AudioBooks on 1 July.

In an enterprising association, director Michael Grandage and Naxos AudioBooks are to bring his stunning realisation of Shakespeare’s great play on jealousy to an international audience.

It will be released on a two-CD set with a DVD containing interviews with the director and members of the cast and production team. It also contains stills from the play which so excited London theatre-goers that tickets were being exchanged for hundreds of pounds on eBay.

The CD/DVD will be available at £13.99. The play will also be on the Naxos AudioBooks Download Shop, but for rights reasons, the DVD will be not included.

Listen/download an exclusive audio sample: Othello (Act 1, scene iii, opening, excerpt, MP3, 2.8 MB)

Further details to come...

Nicolas Soames

UNABRIDGED VERSUS ABRIDGED. It is a discussion as old as audiobooks.
It is partly about simple commerce – unabridged audiobooks can seem high priced, though the hours fly by.

But it is also about convenience: I think there is still a place for abridged texts, for not everyone wants to listen to twenty-eight or thirty hours of a novel.

However, I am glad to say that the advent of downloads, and a greater appreciation of the full work, has seen the audience for unabridged texts on audiobook grow.

This has resulted in trips down memory lane for me, because I find that not only are we doing novels which we did in abridged form in the early years of Naxos AudioBooks, but we are recording them, often, with the same actors – though sometimes a new voice takes up the baton... Read more...

This is the story of a boy’s adventures growing up in a small town on the banks of the Mississippi river over a hundred years ago. The cheerful, adventurous hero plays truant to form a pirate band and, together with his best friend Huckleberry Finn, finds fun and excitement, and buried treasure, along the shores of the great river.

These two stories are the second and third parts of T. H. White’s classic and individual fantasy novel of the Arthurian legend. Arthur has become king, Guinevere and Lancelot (The Ill-Made Knight) fall in love, and the kingdom is threatened from the north. Neville Jason reads with measured authority.

Socially critical and emotionally complex, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is Hardy’s masterpiece. It tells the story of Tess Durbeyfield, forced by her family’s poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles. Violated by the son Alec, her hopes of rebuilding her life with the gentle and bookish Angel Clare founder when he learns of her past. Sensitively read by Anna Bentinck.

To The Lighthouse is a landmark work of English fiction. Virginia Woolf explores perception and meaning in some of the most beautiful prose ever written, minutely detailing the characters’ thoughts and impressions. This unabridged version is read by Juliet Stevenson, whose abridged version has proved one of the enduring sellers of the Naxos AudioBooks catalogue.

When The Magic Began

Nicolette Jones, childrens’ book reviewer for The Sunday Times, discusses classic children’s literature, why it endures in a time of Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling,and introduces some of her favourites through lively and entertaining readings by Teresa Gallagher and Anton Lesser.

John Milton and his English Language

John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature in Oxford University, looks at John Milton and his use of the English Language through the main works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Lycidas, Comus and Samson Agonistes. With exceptional readings from the works by Anton Lesser.

Speak the Speech...

David Timson, director of four Naxos AudioBooks Shakespeare recordings and author of Shakespeare Stories, surveys the changing styles of Shakespeare performance through recordings starting with Henry Irving in the 1890s through to Kenneth Branagh in the twenty-first century.
Notes accompanying this talk as are also available to download.

James Joyce’s Women

Roger Marsh, director of Naxos AudioBooks James Joyce recordings introduces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake with particular emphasis on Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle. With stunning readings by Marcella Riordan.