Drawn from the enchanting tales told to Kipling as a child in India, Just So Stories reveals the magic of the dawn of the world, when animals could talk and think like people. Cats and dogs, kangaroos and tortoises, hedgehogs and jaguars, whales and leopards, and many others are brought to life in an exotic Eastern landscape of "high and far times ago". Children will discover how the leopard got his spots, the elephant his trunk, and the camel his hump through clever tales that subtly hint at the pitfalls of arrogance and the importance of creativity.

The pages of The Jungle Book are opened, and a wild mongoose fights tooth and nail with deadly cobras.

When two children happen across an ancient shrine, they unintentionally summon an impish sprite named Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow. To their wonderment, the fairy conjures up the past, taking them on ten magical adventures: They visit Roman Britain and the legion guarding Hadrian's Wall, the thirteenth-century court of King John, and Old England from the time of William the Conqueror.

Set in the days of the British Raj, Kipling's finest novel is the exciting and touching tale of an Irish orphan-boy who has lived free in the streets of Lahore before setting out, with a Tibetan Lama, on a spiritual quest. Kim later enrols in the Indian Service and simultaneously embarks on an espionage mission of supreme importance.

The Jungle Book is a series of fables written about wild animals and a boy named Mowgli. Most of the short stories in the collection are about Mowgli, who wanders off into the Indian jungle while being pursued by a vicious tiger, Shere Khan. Shere Khan is lame and cannot catch Mowgli on his first attempt.

The narrator of this timeless adventure story is the lad, Jim Hawkins, whose mother keeps the Admiral Benbow, an inn on the west coast of England in the 18th century. An old buccaneer takes up residence at the inn. He has in his sea chest a map to the hiding place of Captain Flint's treasure. A gang of cutthroats are determined to get his treasure map, and - led by the sinister, blind pirate, Pew - descend on the inn. But Jim Hawkins outwits them, grabs the map, and delivers it to Squire Trelawney. The Squire and his friend Dr. Livessy set off for Treasure Island in the schooner Hispaniola, taking Jim with them. Some of the crew are the squire's faithful servants, but the majority are buccaneers recruited by the one-legged pirate, Long John Silver.

The attempt at murder failed. Risking everything to keep young David Balfour from his just inheritance, his wicked uncle has him kidnapped - comdemning his nephew to seven long years of slavery in the Carolinas. However, on the way, David runs into one of the greatest characters in English Literature: Alan Breck Stuart. These two heroes band together, and before he knows it, David finds himself embroiled in political intrigues that chase him across the wild Scottish Highlands.

They look alike, but they live in very different worlds. Tom Canty, impoverished and abused by his father, is fascinated with royalty. Edward Tudor, heir to the throne of England, is kind and generous but wants to run free and play in the river - just once. How insubstantial their differences truly are becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing - and roles. The pauper finds himself caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wanders horror-stricken through the lower strata of English society.

Widely regarded as the first English novel, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is one of the most popular and influential adventure stories of all time. This classic tale of shipwreck and survival on an uninhabited island was an instant success when first published in 1719, and it has inspired countless imitations.

The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal, a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss.

The Bastable children decide to help their father by seeking their fortune in amazing and amusing ways.

Written in 1819 but set in 12th-century England, Ivanhoe is a tale of love struggling to survive against a violent backdrop of politics and war. Wilfred of Ivanhoe was thrown out of his father's home when he fell in love with his father Cedric's ward, Lady Rowena. Ivanhoe later returns from fighting in the Crusades and is wounded in a jousting tournament. A series of events follows, including the return of King Richard to England, resulting in Ivanhoe's reconciliation with Cedric and his marriage to Rowena.

Life as a ship's boy aboard HMS Dolphin is a dream come true for Jacky Faber. Gone are the days of scavenging for food and fighting for survival on the streets of 18th-century London. Instead, Jacky is becoming a skilled and respected sailor as the crew pursues pirates on the high seas. There's only one problem: Jacky is a girl. And she will have to use every bit of her spirit, wit, and courage to keep the crew from discovering her secret.

When Humphrey Van Weyden finds himself struggling in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay, he thinks the worst that can happen to him is drowning. After he is rescued by the Ghost and its captain, Wolf Larson, Humphrey discovers that there are fates far worse than death. On Larsen's hell-ship, the dilettante hero is forced to slave as cabin boy and humble seaman. And over the seven months' voyage to the sealing grounds off Siberia, he engages in an epic duel with his ruthlessly Nietzschean skipper.

In this, the Henty novel covering the oldest time period of any, listeners will learn much about the domestic life, customs, religion, and military system of ancient Egypt. Amuba, a prince of the Rebu nation on the shores of the Caspian Sea, with his charioteer Jethro, is carried into slavery after losing a battle with the Egyptians. They become servants of the house of Ameres, an Egyptian high priest, and are quite happy there until the priest's son accidentally kills the sacred cat of Bubastes.

Rudyard Kipling's Kim is the story of Kimball O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, who spends his childhood as a vagabond in Lahore. With an old Tibetan lama, he travels through India, enthralled by the "roaring whirl" of the landscape and cities of richly colored bazaars and immense diversity of people. The novel is a masterpiece of careful organization and skillfully manipulated narrative techniques.

Kipling's masterpiece Kim is his final and most famous work and one of the first and greatest espionage stories ever written. It explores the life of Kimball O'Hara, an Irish orphan who spends his childhood as a vagrant in Lahore. When he befriends an aged Tibetan lama his life is transformed as he is requested to accompany him on a mysterious quest to find the legendary River of the Arrow and achieve Enlightenment.

Few books have so affected radical social changes as The Jungle, first published serially in 1906. Exposing unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry in Chicago, Sinclair's novel gripped Americans by the stomach, contributing to the passage of the first Food and Drug Act. If you’ve never read this classic novel, don't be put off by its gruesome reputation. Upton Sinclair was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who could turn even an exposé into a tender and moving novel.

"Captains Courageous" is an adventure novel. The book's title comes from the ballad "Mary Ambree", which starts, "When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt". Protagonist Harvey Cheyne, Jr., is the son of a wealthy railroad magnate and his wife, in San Diego, California. Washed overboard from a transatlantic steamship and rescued by fishermen off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Harvey can neither persuade them to take him quickly to port, nor convince them of his wealth.

When an eccentric Englishman named Phileas Fogg makes a daring wager that he can circle the globe in just eighty days, it’s the beginning of a breathlessly-paced world tour. With his devoted servant Passepartout at his side, Fogg sets off on an adventurous journey filled with amazing encounters and wild mishaps. Pursued all the way by the bumbling Detective Fix, who believes the two travelers are bank robbers on the run, Fogg and Passepartout must use every means of transportation known to 19th-century man - including a hot-air balloon, a locomotive, and an elephant - to win the bet.

In a time of shifting loyalties and trecherous alliances, young Dick Shelton is betrayed by his brutal guardian. Intent on rescuing the woman he loves, Dick joins forces with a mysterious fellowship intent on dispensing their own brand of justice.Through one trap after another, each choice Dick makes begins to have dire consequences—not only for himself, but for the fate of England!

Have you ever wondered how and why the animals came to be as they are? In these magical tales, drawn from stories he heard as a child in India as well as on folk traditions he later collected all over the world, Rudyard Kipling gives some wonderfully imaginative explanations.

Leo Tolstoy is quite simply one of the greatest writers to ever set pen to paper. Immortalized by such epic novels as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's genius was also readily apparent in his short fiction. The Death of Ivan Ilych follows the career of the unremarkable title character, who does not question his desire to live an "easy, agreeable, gay and always decorous" life, until he is lying on his death bed.

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these "souls" as collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Nikolai Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types.

Harvey Cheyne, the pampered son of an American millionaire, is swept overboard from the deck of a liner and picked up by a small fishing boat, one of several trawling the Grand Banks. He is rapidly confronted by the harsh realities of life and comes to terms with himself amid the hard labour and morality of the redoubtable New England fishermen.

As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, the scholar Suetonius had access to the imperial archives and used them (along with eyewitness accounts) to produce one of the most colorful biographical works in history. The Twelve Caesars chronicles the public careers and private lives of the men who wielded absolute power over Rome, from the foundation of the empire under Julius Caesar and Augustus, to the decline into depravity and civil war under Nero and the recovery that came with his successors.

Young Harvey Cheyne is rich, spoiled, prejudiced, and totally lacking in the real experiences of life. When the fifteen-year-old is accidentally washed overboard a great ocean liner headed for Europe, he is picked up by a fisherman and brought aboard the fishing schooner We're Here. Harvey's stories of privilege and wealth mean nothing aboard this hard-working vessel, and the boy receives many lessons in self-reliance, values, and hard-bitten reality—"things every man must know, blind, drunk, or asleep."

After the Robinsons - a minister, his wife, and their 4 young sons - are shipwrecked on a desert island, they must adapt to their new environment, which includes exotic birds and animals, but none of the comforts they enjoyed in their native Switzerland. Without modern conveniences or even clocks and calendars, the Robinsons must use common sense to build a home, find food, and tame the island's wild animals.

At the turn of the century, the short story form gained enormous popularity. Against the frozen Alaskan landscape of "To Build a Fire", a miner struggles to survive the splintering whiteness of sub-zero temperatures. "Isle of Voices" captures the Hawaii of old, where magic transports a young man to an island of powerful spirits. "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" pits a mongoose against a cobra in the steamy beauty of an Indian garden. Recorded Books’ award-winning narrators turn these stories into absorbing productions.

The attempt at murder failed. Risking everything to keep young David Balfour from his just inheritance, his wicked uncle has him kidnapped - comdemning his nephew to seven long years of slavery in the Carolinas. However, on the way, David runs into one of the greatest characters in English Literature: Alan Breck Stuart. These two heroes band together, and before he knows it, David finds himself embroiled in political intrigues that chase him across the wild Scottish Highlands.