Narrator Raphael Corkhill's unwavering enthusiasm amps up this dynamic novel about four people in Paris over the course of a day in 1927. Camille, former maid to Marcel Proust, has a secret. Armenian refugee Souren is a puppeteer with a haunting adolescence. Journalist Jean-Paul hides behind his subjects rather than face his tragic story. Artist Guillaume is desperate with debt, but a chance meeting surprises him for multiple reasons. Corkhill's impeccable French accent easily shifts to butchered French for the speech of tourists. There is a sense of urgency in his fast pace during moments of action, and he evokes emotion in a voice thick with tears and fearful directives. The story's complexity is assisted by distinct character voices.
Pub Date: May 5, 2020
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781250751799
Publisher: Macmillan 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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