Tales of the Five Towns: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Tales of the Five Towns, credited to Arnold Bennett, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Tales of the Five Towns, by Arnold Bennett. Read by Martin Clifton. This is a selection of short stories recounting, with gentle satire and tolerant good humour, the small town provincial life at the end of the nineteenth century, based around the six towns in the county of Staffordshire, England, known as the Potteries. Arnold Bennett chose to fictionalize these towns by changing their names and omitting one (Fenton) as he apparently felt that “Five Towns” was more euphonious than “Six Towns”. The real town names which are thinly disguised in the novel are: Hanley, Longton, Burslem and Tunstal, the fifth, Stoke became “Knype”. Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was born in Hanley, the eldest child of a pawnbroker who subsequently became a solicitor. Bennett’s father wished him to become a solicitor too, but he failed his university entrance examination and instead became a solicitor's clerk, at first in his father's office and, from 1889, in London. He showed early promise as a writer winning a writing competition in a local newspaper as a boy. In London he began to see his writing published in popular magazines and he joined the staff of Woman magazine in 1893. His first novel to be published, A Man from the North, appeared in 1898 and its success allowed him to give up other work to concentrate on writing. His first short story (A Letter Home) was written in 1893 and appears in Tales of the Five Towns. (Summary by Martin Clifton)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Tales of the Five Towns
• Author credits: Arnold Bennett
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 13
• Listed recording duration: 5:39:35

Catalogue topics

• short stories
• potteries

Track guide

1. 01 - His Worship the Goosedriver — 41:17
2. 02 - The Elixir of Youth — 18:30
3. 03 - Mary with the High Hand — 31:59
4. 04 - The Dog — 29:34
5. 05 - A Feud — 42:32
6. 06 - Phantom — 28:33
7. 07 - Tiddy-Fol-Lol — 15:03
8. 08 - The Idiot — 12:30
9. 09 - The Hungarian Rhapsody — 36:54
10. 10 - The Sisters Qita — 12:53
11. 11 - Nocturne at the Majestic — 42:24
12. 12 - Clarice of the Autumn Concerts — 10:50
13. 13 - A Letter Home — 16:45

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.