Fiona Hardingham narrates this fictional memoir of orphaned noblewoman Marguerite de la Roque, ward of her cousin, the adventurer and speculator Jean François de la Roque de Roberval. Hardingham's unemotional tone varies subtly to capture Marguerite's and Roberval's aristocratic status. Telling her story as a flashback, Marguerite painstakingly recounts her life of loss, emotional abuse, and unimaginable hardship. After reducing Marguerite to poverty, Roberval goes on a mission to map New France, dragging her along. In a fit of rage, Roberval maroons Marguerite; her maid, Damienne; and his secretary, Auguste, on a rocky island in Labrador in 1542, where they languish until they're rescued in 1544. Just as Marguerite is challenged in this audiobook, Hardingham's lackluster pacing challenges the listener's patience.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593946480
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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