Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Tom Jones

Author: Henry Fielding

Narrator: Nigel Davenport

Format: Abridged

Length: 2 hrs and 23 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-19-12

Publisher: The Copyright Group

Genres: Classics, British Literature

Publisher's Summary:

Tom Jones is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential English novels. It is certainly the funniest. Tom Jones, the hero of the book, is introduced to the reader as the ward of a liberal Somerset squire. Tom is a generous but slightly wild and feckless country boy with a weakness for young women. Misfortune, followed by many spirited adventures as he travels to London to seek his fortune, teach him a sort of wisdom to go with his essential good-heartedness.

Members Reviews:

Delightful and entertaining

314. The History of Tom Jones: a foundling by Henry Fielding (Novel-Audible/E Book-Fiction) 5* I read along with the Audible of the novel which I found a highly delightful and entertaining experience.

The narrator, Bill Homewood, who performed the audio version of the work was excellent doing the various characters as well as the invisible narrator (author) of the story. The Synopsis is as follows:

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squireâthough he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, Tom Jones is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.

It is rather brilliant, and there is no lack of shenanigans as we follow Jones through his history and the reader never knows when and where the author will abruptly go off on a tangent, told in a most eloquent manner, end with a flourish and no doubt tossed his quill down and took a bow. I am either taken in by some farce or thoroughly enchanted by this author. As Fielding is rather the loquacious writer this read comes in Audible time at almost 38 hours or roughly 1,000 pages but worth every minute spent on it.

The book itself is five stars!

This is a review of the Oxford Classic Kindle edition.

The book itself is one of the greatest novels ever written; this is maybe the third time I've read it. Fielding is a master of irony, by which I mean genuine irony, not the mean sarcasm that often passes for irony these days. Fielding is never mean-spirited. His irony is generous and his humor is benevolent. His characters are three-dimensional, never all good or all bad. Before reading this, I had been re-reading several Dickens novels, and the contrast is enormous. A Dickens villain is a villain to the core, and his heroes (and especially his heroines) are saints. Tom instead is a young man with many faults, but a great heart. Sophia, his beloved, is a genuinely good person, but she's got a certain fiery spirit, and has her moments of doubt and remorse.

I advise you to read every word of this novel. It's divided into books, and the first chapter of each book is an address to the reader, expounding Fielding's theories on literature and on human nature. An impatient reader might be tempted to skip these, but that would mean missing a lot of worthwhile and enjoyable reading.

I have some quibbles with the Kindle edition. There were some mistakes in the passage from print to pixels, but they were not excessive.