Stella Bain awakens in a field hospital in Marne, France, in 1916 with no memory of her identity other than her name and the fact that she had been an ambulance driver at the front. Narrator Hope Davis brings an almost painful clarity to Stella’s conviction that she must have done something terrible before she got the shrapnel wounds that hospitalized her. Davis makes each new memory revelation significant. The shock in her voice is palpable when Stella learns who she really is, and she’s completely convincing as memories overwhelm, filling in Stella’s blank spaces. Anita Shreve’s books often begin with an intriguing premise that somehow slides into another, completely different, direction before the conclusion. Here Davis makes Shreve’s plot turns and surprises credible without resorting to melodrama. An engrossing listen.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781619692190
Publisher: Hachette 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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