This beautifully written collection of nine linked stories set in Russia from the 1930s to the present is marred by the stilted performances of Beata Pozniak and Rustam Kasymov. Although listeners will have no trouble understanding their accents, both narrators read in a halting manner, pausing in unexpected places, disrupting the flow of the prose. The sections read by Mark Bramhall provide a welcome relief to the overly deliberate narration of the bulk of the audiobook. The stories follow the lives of four families over several generations as they attempt to cope with the changing Russian political atmosphere. The sometimes surprising connections among the characters are found through shared experiences, locales, and art. This powerful look at the Russian spirit is best experienced in print. C.B.L.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781101924716
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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