The Master of Ballantrae: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Master of Ballantrae, credited to Robert Louis Stevenson, 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 The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland Heir to a noble Scottish house in the mid 18th century, the Master is a charming, clever, and resourceful villain whose daring but ill-advised schemes first alienate his patrimony and at last cost him his life. His younger brother, sweet-tempered and good but dull and unpopular, suffers at the Master's hands until his patience and courage win him limited ascendancy, but he is at last consumed with hatred and driven to madness and death by the strain of his many sufferings. The story is told from the point of view of a loyal servant with the occasional insertion of documents in the words of other eye-witnesses. The episodic plot, although exciting, serves mainly as a structure on which to hang superb character studies. The Master, whom one both admires and hates, bears comparison with Long John Silver, not to mention Milton's Satan, to whom the narrator explicitly likens him. The secondary characters—narrator, father, and wife—are deftly characterized, and (with the exception of the two children) even the minor characters are vivid and memorable. Except for a few highly dialectal passages whose spelling insists on a Scottish burr, the reading eschews any false accent. ( T. A. Copeland)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Master of Ballantrae
• Author credits: Robert Louis Stevenson
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 13
• Listed recording duration: 8:46:26

Catalogue topics

• adventure
• 18th Century
• India
• scotland
• piracy
• american indians
• villains
• fraternal strife

Track guide

1. 00 - Dedication & Preface — 10:32
2. 01 - Chapter 01 — 25:07
3. 02 - Chapter 02 — 34:38
4. 03 - Chapter 03 — 1:08:24
5. 04 - Chapter 04 — 1:13:54
6. 05 - Chapter 05 — 43:13
7. 06 - Chapter 06 — 44:39
8. 07 - Chapter 07 — 8:24
9. 08 - Chapter 08 — 47:08
10. 09 - Chapter 09 — 43:19
11. 10 - Chapter 10 — 41:57
12. 11 - Chapter 11 — 53:24
13. 12 - Chapter 12 — 31:46

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.