This compact yet intense fantasy may confuse many listeners, as well as beguile them. British actor Robert Powell narrates the magical story of an English boy, Joe Coppook, who encounters strange folkloric characters who confound him as he wrestles with the nature of time and of good and evil. Powell shows his theatrical skills in his portrayals. Whimsical characters--such as the bog man, the heroes and villains from a 1940s comic book, the rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker, and, of course, Joe--are all expertly brought to life. The language of this fantasy is literary but archaic. The British slang and northern English idioms, plus the mythological references. make this a challenging listen despite its lyrical tone and Powell's dramatic talent.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
Duration: 1 hr, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781797164908
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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