This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Black Beauty is the autobiography of a horse, told in his own voice. Born on a pleasant English farm and gently raised by his mother, he is sold again and again as his owners rise and fall: to a country estate where he learns the work of a carriage horse, to a fashionable London stable where the bearing rein is tightened for vanity, to a cab stand where the nights are long and the streets are cruel, and at last to a quiet meadow where kindness finds him once more.
Anna Sewell wrote this book in the last years of her life, largely from her bed, and it was published in 1877, only months before she died. She meant it as a plea for horses, and it became something larger: one of the first novels to speak plainly about how working animals are treated, and one of the most beloved animal stories ever written. Its narrator notices everything -- the good grooms and the careless ones, the small mercies and the needless cruelties -- and reports it without bitterness, which is exactly why it still stings and still moves.
This unabridged reading follows Black Beauty through all four parts and forty-nine chapters, from his first meadow to his final home. It is a book for children and for anyone who has ever looked at an animal and wondered what it was thinking.
Narrated by Alex Mercer.
