Penguin Audio

Penguin Audio is the audiobook name used by Penguin Random House, and it turns up on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States it is one of four imprints inside Penguin Random House Audio, next to Random House Audio, Books on Tape and Listening Library, the last of which goes back to 1955. In Britain the company's audio publishing also carries the Penguin Audio name and describes itself as the country's leading audiobook publisher. The label borrows from Penguin Books, the paperback house Allen Lane started in 1935.

The British list is built on a simple pairing of authors with working actors, and it likes to experiment. Michael Sheen narrated Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage. James and the Giant Peach came out in a 3D-audio edition with sound effects commissioned for it. Sylvain Neuvel's Only Human was recorded as a full-cast production. The same UK team also publishes BBC Audio, which brings radio dramatisations such as Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Classics are a second strand. The Penguin Audio Classics series ties recordings to the Penguin Classics catalogue, and the British side has put out around fifty of them, with readers such as Sian Clifford on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Andrew Scott on Dubliners, Natalie Dormer on A Room of One's Own and Ruth Wilson on To the Lighthouse. Crime and Punishment, read by Alex Jennings, belongs to this series. Dostoevsky's novel follows Raskolnikov, a penniless former student in St Petersburg who commits a murder and then has to live inside his own argument for it. The Penguin Audio release runs five hours and fifteen minutes and dates from June 2005, and the Apple Books listing marks it as abridged. Anyone wanting every chapter should check the edition before downloading.

Expect a performance rather than a flat read: on the classics list the voice is an actor's, not the author's. The wider group behind these recordings, Penguin Random House Audio, was named the first Audiobook Publisher of the Year at the London Book Fair International Excellence Awards in 2018.