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Martin Chuzzlewit
Martin Chuzzlewit
Jul 2, 2025 7:14 AM

Author:Charles Dickens,Patricia Ingham,John Wells

Martin Chuzzlewit

Penguin Classics presents the audiobook adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit, a tale of inheritiance and destiny and the story Dickens considered his best. Read by John Wells.

The greed of his family has led wealthy old Martin Chuzzlewit to become suspicious and misanthropic, leaving his grandson and namesake to make his own way in the world. And so young Martin sets out from the Wiltshire home of his supposed champion, the scheming architect Pecksniff, to seek his fortune in America. In depicting Martin's journey - an experience that teaches him to question his inherited self-interest and egotism - Dickens created many vividly realized figures: the brutish lout Jonas Chuzzlewit, plotting to gain the family fortune; Martin's optimistic manservant, Mark Tapley; gentle Tom Pinch; and the drunken and corrupt private nurse, Mrs Gamp. With its portrayal of greed, blackmail and murder, and its searing satire on America Dickens's novel is a powerful and blackly comic story of hypocrisy and redemption.

Part of a series of abridged, vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives.

Affordable, collectable, quality productions - perfect for on-the-go listening.

Reviews

A witty, irreverant and elegaic new novel...Haffner is a Quixote of our time

—— New York Times Book Review

A novel where the humour is melancholic, the melancholy mischievous and the talent startling

—— Milan Kundera

In The Escape, you can practically see Bellow’s Augie March, Roth’s Mickey Sabbath and Martin Amis’s John Self applauding, ghost-like, from the margins... The novel fizzes with intelligence, verbal skill and humour

—— Simon Baker , Observer

Beautifully written, poignant and clever... Thirlwell has a genuinely unique insight into humankind

—— The Times

The Escape is one of the best British novels I’ve read this year for one reason; Thirlwell’s prose. At once effervescent and elegant, his narrative voice lifts the novel’s lecherous comedy beyond the sublunary lovers’ antics into a more rarefied sphere

—— Sarah Churchwell , Guardian

A wittily observant young author... Audacious

—— Joyce Carol Oates , New York Review of Books

Witty and engaging, erudite but fleet and sinuous; the questions he asks are lightly posed, his mock grandeur dispersing in a sea of ridiculous incident and comic undercutting… In this playful, eloquent novel, Adam Thirlwell demonstrates that knowing why one acts as one does is rarely the whole answer, or much more than the beginning of a question

—— Alex Clark , Times Literary Supplement

The narrative develops a sense of authenticity that is persuasive enough not to be disturbed, even by the inevitable adventurous sex scene

—— Jane Shilling , Sunday Telegraph

The Escape is an utterly glorious piece of work...Thirlwell has with this superb book also staked a rightful claim as a literary phenomenon

—— The Lady

Thirwell's novel elegantly portrays the ageing Haffner's thrilling attempts to escape from lovers, the mafia, his family and himself

—— Daily Telegraph

The writing is polished and full of allusions

—— Brandon Robshaw , Independent on Sunday
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