Emma cover art

Emma

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Emma

By: Alexander McCall Smith
Narrated by: Georgina Terry
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

‘It's comfort reading at its most soothing’ Independent

‘Funny, heartfelt and very readable’ Good Housekeeping

In this reimagined modern classic, prepare to meet a young woman who thinks she knows everything…

Fresh from university, Emma Woodhouse triumphantly arrives home in Norfolk ready to embark on adult life with a splash. Not only has her sister, Isabella, been whisked away on a motorcycle up to London, but her astute governess, Miss Taylor is at a loose end, abandoned in the giant family pile, Hartfield, alongside Emma’s anxiety-ridden father. Someone is needed to rule the roost and young Emma is more than happy to oblige.

And there is plenty to delight her in the buzzing little village of Highbury. At the helm of her own dinner parties and instructing her new little protégée, Harriet Smith, Emma reigns forth. But there is only one person who can play with Emma’s indestructible confidence, her old friend and inscrutable neighbour George Knightley – this time has Emma finally met her match?

©2014 Alexander McCall Smith (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers Limited Classics Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction War & Military Women's Fiction Village Military

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Into the Wilderness cover art
Pride and Prejudice cover art
North and South cover art
Great Expectations cover art
Wives and Daughters cover art
Wuthering Heights cover art
Nicholas Nickleby cover art
Emma [Naxos Edition] cover art
Among Others cover art
Macbeth: A Novel cover art
Wicked cover art
Return to Longbourn cover art
Bring Me Home cover art
Love Song cover art

Critic reviews

‘Entertaining . . . McCall Smith brings such intelligence and wit’ The Daily Mail

‘Funny, heartfelt and very readable’ Good Housekeeping

‘Funny and clever’ Fabulous Magazine

‘Delightful’ Closer

Praise for Alexander McCall Smith:

‘Witty, elegant, gentle, compassionate’
Guardian

‘The kind of simplicity one finds in the best children's stories and a fluency which reflects his practice of writing 4,000 words a day in a stint of four hours… A talent for traditional story telling’ Guardian
All stars
Most relevant  
I did not think this book needed to be written as the original by Jane Austen was as good as it could get. Parts of the story seemed to be rushed and I do not think the modernising worked in many of the characters. Mr Woodhouse was a very inconsistent character and did not really fit into the rest of the book. George Knightly was a bit wet and why did Frank Churchill need to trick Emma into believing he was gay? This book was a travesty really!

Not one of his best!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It was a great book but the reading was quite slow but overall I really enjoyed it q

Amazing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sadly, it was spoilt by poor narration, slow, laborious and with some strange phonic errors.

Disappointed

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An excellent Austen adaptation keeping her wit, cutting tongue and insight in a new modern setting.

Loved it!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Would you try another book written by Alexander McCall Smith or narrated by Georgina Terry?

Yes

Any additional comments?

I love Jane Austen and generally enjoy Alexander McCall Smith's books and so I thought this would be an enjoyable book. But I found it disappointing. At first I wasn't sure I could be bothered to listen to the end, but I did. There is so much about Jane Austen's world that doesn't translate easily into our world (for instance governesses, people who don't need to earn their living) and so it felt contrived and I was only able to feel sympathy for the characters because I knew them from the original book. McCall Smith often seems to over-explain what people are thinking, which made me appreciate all the more how subtle and understated Jane Austen's writing is.

The reading was generally good, except for mispronounciations of quite a few words; I am surprised that this wasn't picked up by an editor.

I couldn't really see the point of this book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Wonderful reworking of Jane Austen's book by a worthy successor to Jane Austen, the urbane and witty Alexander McColl Smith gives a new perspective on a marvelous character named Emma Woodhouse, Dr McColl Smith spares Emma v llittle on her way to enlightenment. The retelling had me in tears at the end. The writer had studied his subject. HIs writing is quite
superb. Jane Austen would not object.

Emma by Alexander McColl Smih

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A fascinating and engaging version of the story (saw latest film at same time). Slightly spoiled by the narrator’s, at times, rather odd pronunciation but her voice was delightfully ‘Emma-like’.

A wonderful ‘take’

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Witty but not a patch on the original. Emma just too horrible to like and I wasn't keen on the narrator.

Average

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Not an homage to Austen. Except for the names & a nodding acquaintance with ‘Emma’ it bears little similarity to the original story. It’s more like Scotland Street in middle England.
Although the narrator has adopted the right cut glass middle class accent, she has a problem with pronunciation of unfamiliar words.
Overall I wasted a credit!

Not worth the effort

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An impossible task really - vaguely amusing at best - but why do it in the first place?

Ridiculous

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews