Linshaw’s voice remains steady through this meditation on forgiveness and the human spirit.
In this elegantly crafted novel, narrator Charles Linshaw deftly uses the author’s heightened prose to illuminate the haunted beauty of eastern Pennsylvania’s coal country during the Depression. However, there is more than a hint of foreboding in Linshaw’s voice as this crushing tale of a 1929 mining disaster and its only survivor unfolds. After watching his fellow miners die one by one and crawling through the narrowest rock fissure, a 13-years-old son of Slovak immigrants is saddled with the impossible weight of memory and guilt—simply for surviving. He faces nothing but failure—at college, in his marriage, and even at war (he becomes a conscientious objector during WWII).
Linshaw’s voice remains steady through this meditation on forgiveness and the human spirit.Pub Date: May 9, 2026
Duration: 5 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798228820463
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Review Posted Online: June 23, 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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