Narrator Timothy Ackroyd brings a full complement of accents, intonations, and restraint to this comic romp through Tuscany. Ackroyd's delivery of the numerous laugh-out-loud lines enlivens this comic novel based on the wild premise that Paul Stuart, a successful food writer, faced with no other available rental, makes do with a bulldozer. Author Alexander McCall Smith has a grand time with this excursion through the Italian countryside. The Montalcino setting is irresistible, and the banter between Stuart, the eccentric Scot, and the world-weary Italians--whom Ackroyd captures perfectly--turns this rebound romance into an engaging frolic. The audiobook is sprinkled with witty asides on such topics as Brunello and porcini mushrooms, which add color and flavor to the delicious recipe.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2017
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781501924965
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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