Margaret, who is portrayed by Ellen Archer, has chosen to marry the emotionally troubled John, a decision that ultimately kills her dream of a sophisticated London life and leads instead to a dreary small-town existence. Her husband's British urbanity supposedly charmed many--including her--into making accommodations for his failings, yet narrator Robert Fass inexplicably plays John as flatly mid-American. One of the couple's three children, Michael, also comes to battle mental illness. But Fass's Michael is fundamentally a carbon copy of John. However, when Archer voices Michael as he interacts with sister, she captures the anxiety he tries but ultimately fails to control. The premise of IMAGINE ME GONE promises emotional resonance, but misses in narration by the usually fine Fass mean the audiobook only somewhat delivers.
Pub Date: May 3, 2016
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781478987642
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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