The Red and the Black
A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Julien Sorel is the clever, ambitious son of a carpenter in a small town in France after the fall of Napoleon. He worships the Emperor, but the road to glory through the army is closed, so he chooses the other colour of success: the black of the priest's cassock. Hired as tutor to the children of the mayor, Monsieur de Rênal, he begins an affair with the mayor's wife that is at once a calculation and a genuine love.

From provincial Verrières Julien moves to the seminary of Besançon and then to Paris, as secretary to the powerful Marquis de La Mole, where the proud and restless Mathilde de La Mole becomes both his challenge and his conquest. Every step upward is a battle of wills and appearances in a society that despises him for his birth, until a single letter from his past brings everything crashing down.

Published in 1830, The Red and the Black is one of the founding novels of modern realism, a portrait of ambition, class and hypocrisy under the Restoration that still reads with astonishing freshness. This new translation presents it complete and unabridged.