Narrator Kim Bretton brings the characters in this novel to life with authentic-sounding voices and emotions. Claire Fuller examines lives on the fringes of society--people who are steeped in poverty, isolation, and secrets. Jeanie and Julius, 51-year-old twins who are still living with their mother, Dot, on an isolated English farm, find their lives thrown into disarray when she unexpectedly dies. Bretton fills Jeanie's voice with anger and impatience as she struggles to hang on to her home, understand the mother she thought she knew, and come to terms with her own sense of self. Julius sounds defensive, confused, and frustrated as he sees his opportunity for a fuller life derailed by responsibilities to Jeanie's needs and secrets exposed after Dot's death. Sadly, Bretton's flat delivery of Jeanie's songs detracts from the atmosphere.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Audible, Inc.
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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