Ethan Frome

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. A stranger arrives in a snowbound Massachusetts mill town and asks about the ruined man he saw at the station, and the answer takes him back twenty-four years, to a winter that never really ended.

Ethan Frome is thirty-eight, runs a failing sawmill and a stony farm, and is slowly dying of duty to a wife who has been ill and sour for years. Into that house comes Mattie Silver, Zeena's young cousin, who has nowhere else to go and brings with her a red ribbon and the first warmth the place has known. The two of them are not reckless people; that is exactly what makes the story unbearable. Everything is decided in kitchens, over pickles and a broken dish, with a sled waiting at the top of a hill.

Edith Wharton wrote this in her forties about a place and a class she had only observed from outside, and it is the coldest, tightest thing she ever wrote: a hundred and fifty pages of poverty, silence and one impossible choice, told by a narrator who admits he does not know the half of it.

This unabridged recording keeps Wharton's frame narration and her flat, unforgiving New England idiom exactly as written.