Timothy Ackroyd reprises his clever narration in Alexander McCall Smith's second audiobook about the fictional food writer Paul Stewart. Ackroyd smoothly captures the protagonist's wit and reveals his angst in the verbal equivalent of thought bubbles. His spot-on imitations of French-inflected English from the many local characters give color to this comic novel. His measured and reserved elocutions of Stewart's eccentric and mysterious cousin, Chloe, make her a vivid character. Reputedly married five times, she both helps and manipulates Stewart when she puts him up at her summer rental in a French village, where the owner of the "second-worst restaurant in France" avails himself of Stewart's expertise. Laugh-out-loud funny and splendidly narrated, this petit bijou is enjoyable and fun.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
Duration: 7 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781980031758
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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