Nobody's Boy

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Rémi is eight years old when he learns that the woman he calls Mother found him abandoned as a baby, wrapped in fine linen, on a Paris street. Her husband, back from years away and crippled by an accident, sells the boy to a travelling showman for forty francs. So begins one of the most beloved children's novels ever written in French — and one of the least sentimental.

Signor Vitalis, the old man who buys him, turns out to be neither cruel nor kind but something rarer: a teacher. With a troupe consisting of a monkey and three performing dogs, he takes Rémi across France, teaching him to read, to sing, and to earn. What follows is hunger, a blizzard in the woods, a debtor's prison, a flooded coal mine, and a boy's slow discovery of who he is and where he came from.

Hector Malot published Sans Famille in 1878 and it has never been out of print. Its power comes from refusing to soften anything: the poverty is real, the deaths are permanent, and the kindness, when it arrives, comes from people who have nothing to spare. Generations of French children have grown up on it, and adults who return to it are surprised by how unflinching it is. This is an unabridged recording of a fresh modern translation.

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Release date

Audiobook: 17 October 2026