Graham Halstead is the featured narrator of this tale of ghosts, past and present, who haunt Nick Beron and Hannah Rampe, the newest caretakers of the Wright Historic House in Hibernia, New York. Halstead delivers this ghostly tale in a low tone that rises and falls with the characters' emotional stress. Little by little, the ghosts make their appearances, particularly to Hannah, who slowly loses touch with reality. In addition, Halstead captures Nick, who eventually finds himself also wrestling with reality and the ghosts that haunt him. While Halstead performs the bulk of the story, the rest of the cast read diary entries written in notebooks by past inhabitants, now ghosts, of Wright House. Insanity, loss, and sorrow are woven seamlessly into this haunting tale in which the present is a transitory thing.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780525590026
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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