Katharine McEwan and Bahni Turpin alternate narrating this novel, set in Johannesburg in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto uprising. Using a British–South African accent, McEwan voices the chapters presented from the perspective of a 9-year-old white girl, Robin, who was orphaned during the riots. Turpin uses a believable African-British accent to perform the chapters from the perspective of Beauty, a traditional, though educated, Xhosa, who is searching for her missing daughter and is hired to care for Robin. The narrators’ animated performances and excellent timing cannot compensate for the audiobook’s overall weaknesses: Robin’s precociousness, Beauty’s overexplaining, and the plethora of subplots relating to equality, including racial, religious, LGBTQ, and women’s issues. Moreover, a few mispronunciations and jarring characterizations pull the listener out of the story.
Pub Date: July 11, 2017
Duration: 14 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524775636
Publisher: Penguin 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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