Narrator Stephanie Racine instills an enthusiastic tone of wonder at the transformative quality of books in this tale with a beautiful dreamlike quality. Juliette loves creating stories about the strangers who read on the Paris metro. A deviation from her normal route leads her to a bookstore, and to owner Soliman and his precocious daughter. Juliette falls into the role of a passeur, Soliman's name for the booksellers he hires to match books to new owners. Julia's melancholy is initially replaced by tears and wails of frustration at the enormity of the task. At first, Racine gives her a timid, questioning lilt, but soon Juliette finds comfort in her charming clients and their jovial, knowing voices.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
Duration: 4 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250243003
Publisher: Macmillan 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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