David Dawson is masterful with dialogue, and there can be no better qualification for the narrator of this vast and engrossing audiobook. The saga opens with a group of esthetes at Oxford in the 1940s discovering a beautiful new student called David Sparsholt. The esthetes are privileged, artists and intellectuals, members of a literary Memoir Club. Sparsholt is an engineer from a different class, waiting to join the RAF, and apparently as hetero as they come. Yet two generations later, the effete "Memo" crowd and the Sparsholts remain deeply intertwined. As always with Hollinghurst, the writing is stunning, and the pulse of the story is pervasively homoerotic. Dawson's ear for personality, class, regional speech, and the accents of different periods is uncanny. An impressive performance.
Pub Date: March 13, 2018
Duration: 16 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525589020
Publisher: Random House 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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