Richard Burnip performs this moody, disturbing tale with skill and polish but does little to alleviate its excessively monotone atmosphere. A Catholic family with a learning-disabled boy makes an annual pilgrimage along with their priest and some other parishioners to a shrine at an isolated Cambrian seacoast spot called the Loney. They are intent on a miracle for the disabled boy, but passionately as they believe in unseen forces, they are unable to recognize undercurrents of threat and weirdness that surround them at the Loney. Every story needs foreground, middleground, and background, but the sameness of Burnip's performance of men and women, adults and children, flattens these dimensions. Still the story greatly rewards attention. It is original, mysterious and powerful, and quite haunting.
Pub Date: May 10, 2016
Duration: 11 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781504719186
Publisher: Blackstone 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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