Free audiobooks with matching text for English learners, by CEFR level (A2–C2)
Public-domain English audiobooks paired with their full text, sorted by CEFR level from A2 to C2, with the length and a reason to read each one.
A good way to get through a book in a language you're still learning is to read it and listen to it at once. The audio sets the pace and shows you how words are pronounced. The text lets you see the words the narrator runs together. And when you look up a word, you have the whole sentence in front of you, not a sound that's already gone.
The difficulty is finding a recording and a text that are actually the same book. Plenty of the free "audiobooks with text" online are abridged, retold or dramatised, so the words on the page drift away from what you hear.
Public-domain classics avoid that. Project Gutenberg has the full texts, and LibriVox volunteers have recorded thousands of those same texts word for word. Below are the pairs we'd recommend for each CEFR level, all taken from the free catalog in Readuet. This list covers English. For German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese and Russian, see what to read at each level.
How we assign the CEFR level
The CEFR scale runs from A1 (beginner) to C2 (near-native). It describes learners, not books, so matching a book to a level is a judgement call.
We set each band by hand, one work at a time. We don't run a formula over the text. The question we ask is how hard the language is for a learner, which comes down to four things:
- Vocabulary rarity: how many words are outside the most common few thousand.
- Sentence length and structure: short and direct, or long with clauses inside clauses.
- Archaism: how much 18th- and 19th-century usage you'll run into ("thee", "ere", "I dare say").
- Dialect: phonetically spelled speech, which is hard to read even when the words underneath are simple.
The band is not an age rating and doesn't measure literary depth. Treasure Island is B1 because it reads easily. Moby Dick is C2 because it doesn't.
Some limits you should know about:
- It's an estimate. One band covers the whole book, though dialogue is often easier than the narration around it.
- Older English is harder than it looks. A Victorian novel that uses mostly common words can still be slow going because of its long sentences and formal phrasing.
- Translated works (Andersen, Verne, Dostoyevsky) are rated on the English translation, which is often a 19th-century one.
- There are no A1 books in the catalog yet. Real novels, even children's classics, are hard to follow at A1. The easiest titles below are A2.
- Not every book comes with free read-along in Readuet. As of October 2026 the catalog has about 580 English books and all of them have a band, but narration and read-along are free only on books that are already prepared, marked ⚡ in the app. On the rest, the text is free and the narration comes with a paid plan. The LibriVox recordings themselves are always free at librivox.org.
About the recordings. LibriVox audiobooks are read by volunteers, so the quality varies. Most of the books listed here have a single narrator, and many of those narrators are excellent. A few are group projects where each chapter has a different reader (we point those out below). Listen to the first chapter before you settle in.
English, A2: first full books
There are only a handful of A2 titles, but they're good ones: short chapters, plenty of repetition, and stories you probably already know in your own language.
| Title | Author | Length | Why it's a good pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winnie-the-Pooh | A. A. Milne | 2.9 h | Short, gentle and funny. Each chapter is a self-contained adventure. |
| The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | L. Frank Baum | 3.7 h | Plain, direct prose and a story everybody knows. |
| Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz | L. Frank Baum | 4.4 h | Same style and characters. A natural second book once you've finished Oz. |
| Andersen's Fairy Tales | Hans Christian Andersen | 5.9 h | Short tales you can finish in one sitting. A group recording with several readers. |
| Grimms' Fairy Tales | Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm | 11.1 h | Long overall, but each tale is only a few minutes. Good for a daily habit. |
English, B1: classic adventures that read easily
At B1 you can read real novels written for a general audience. Pick something with a clear plot and not too many characters.
| Title | Author | Length | Why it's a good pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Happy Prince, and Other Tales | Oscar Wilde | 1.7 h | Wilde's fairy tales: simple sentences, beautiful rhythm, very short. |
| Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | 3.0 h | Short, and the wordplay rewards rereading. A group recording with several readers. |
| The Call of the Wild | Jack London | 3.6 h | Fast and concrete, with lots of action and not much description. |
| The Time Machine | H. G. Wells | 3.7 h | A short novel with one narrator telling one story, and an easy way into science fiction. |
| Black Beauty | Anna Sewell | 5.7 h | Simple first-person storytelling with short chapters. |
| Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson | 7.5 h | The classic pirate story. Expect some sailors' slang, but the plot carries you through it. |
Other B1 books in the catalog include The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables.
English, B2: the big shelf
B2 has the most titles in the catalog. This is where adult classics become manageable. You'll still look words up, but most pages will make sense without them.
| Title | Author | Length | Why it's a good pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Washington Irving | 1.4 h | A complete classic in one evening. The descriptions are rich, so take it slowly. |
| The Importance of Being Earnest | Oscar Wilde | 1.8 h | A comedy that is almost all quick dialogue. A group recording with several readers. |
| A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | 2.7 h | The most approachable Dickens, and short. |
| The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson | 3.1 h | Short and tense. You'll want to know what happens next. |
| A Study in Scarlet | Arthur Conan Doyle | 4.2 h | The first Sherlock Holmes story. Clear prose, and the plot keeps moving. |
| The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 5.0 h | Published in 1925, so the English feels much more modern than the rest of this shelf. |
The B2 shelf also has most of Jane Austen, more Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray. If you want something long, try Pride and Prejudice (13.4 h) or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (11.3 h). Be warned that Huck Finn is written in heavy dialect, which makes it harder than its band suggests.
English, C1: dense prose, big ideas
C1 books have long sentences, a wide vocabulary and narrators who sometimes leave things unsaid.
| Title | Author | Length | Why it's a good pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Modest Proposal | Jonathan Swift | 0.5 h | Thirty minutes of the most famous satire in English. Good for practising irony. |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 4.2 h | Short but dense. Seeing the text while you listen makes Conrad far easier to follow. |
| The Turn of the Screw | Henry James | 5.7 h | A ghost story told in long, winding sentences. Following the syntax is half the challenge. |
| Dubliners | James Joyce | 6.7 h | Fifteen short stories. Read one, review its words, then move on. |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | 7.4 h | Formal, emotional prose, and a story most people know only from films. |
You'll also find Dickens's big novels (Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities), the Brontës, Crime and Punishment and The Odyssey at C1.
English, C2: for when you want a fight
These books are hard for native speakers too. Many are poetry or drama, where word order bends and vocabulary comes from four centuries ago.
| Title | Author | Length | Why it's a good pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| Songs of Innocence and of Experience | William Blake | 0.7 h | Short poems with simple-looking words and deep meaning. Ideal for slow reading. |
| Shakespeare's Sonnets | William Shakespeare | 0.7 h | Fourteen lines at a time. A group recording with several readers. |
| Hamlet | William Shakespeare | 4.1 h | Reading the lines while you hear them is the easiest way into Shakespeare. |
| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | 9.1 h | The style grows more complex as the narrator grows up. |
| Moby Dick | Herman Melville | 24.6 h | The big one: huge vocabulary, a lot of whaling detail, and some unforgettable chapters. |
How to use them
- Choose one level below where you'd like to be. Reading for pleasure works best when you understand most of each page without looking anything up.
- Listen while you read, from the first page. Let the narrator set the pace. If you fall behind, slow the audio down rather than stopping every few seconds.
- Look up only the words that keep appearing. One unknown word per paragraph is normal. If a word turns up for the third time, it's worth learning.
- Review a few minutes a day. Spaced repetition means you see a word again just before you'd forget it. A few minutes every day works better than a long session once a week.
You can do all of this with a Gutenberg ebook, the LibriVox MP3s and a dictionary. Readuet takes care of the fiddly parts. Each catalog book comes with the text and audio already lined up sentence by sentence, so the highlight follows the narrator. Tap any word to get a translation that fits the sentence, and the words you save go into a review queue. The whole catalog is free to read on the free plan, and read-along is free on prepared books, marked ⚡: app.readuet.com.
Frequently asked questions
Are these audiobooks really free?
Yes. The texts come from Project Gutenberg and the recordings from LibriVox, and both are in the public domain. You can download them directly from gutenberg.org and librivox.org, or read them in Readuet on the free plan, with narration on prepared books.
Is the audio the same as the text, word for word?
That's the aim, and it's why we chose them. We match each LibriVox recording to the specific Gutenberg edition it was read from, and we reject abridgements and dramatised readings. Volunteers do sometimes skip or repeat a line, and each recording starts with a short LibriVox announcement. If a book's audio and text drift apart, tell us and we'll pull it.
How accurate are the CEFR levels?
They're careful estimates, not test results. We set each one by hand, based on vocabulary, sentence length, archaic language and dialect. The same book can feel a level easier or harder depending on your native language and on how much older English you've read before.
Why is there nothing at A1?
Complete books are a stretch at A1, even ones written for children, and none of the few we rated A1 is in the catalog yet. If you're just starting out, the A2 books above are the gentlest we can recommend. Short children's stories or graded readers are a better place to begin.
Do I need to understand every word?
No. If you understand most of the words on a page, you can follow the story and still pick up new vocabulary from context. If you're stopping in every sentence, try a book one level lower.