Lucy Scott masterfully delivers this intense account based on a true story. In Croydon, England, in 1964, while answering a domestic disturbance call, police discover an elderly woman in distress and her 37-year-old nephew, unkempt, nearly naked, fearful, and mute. William Tapping hasn't been out of the house in decades. Helen Hansford, an art therapist at Westbury Park Psychiatric Hospital, where William is taken, discovers he is both sane and a talented artist. Scott's performance shines as secrets are slowly revealed. She delivers alternating chapters of past and present, sounding both caring and efficient as Helen; a little smarmy as her married lover, Gil; and completely authentic as the aunts. Clare Chambers's well-crafted prose and Scott's outstanding performance make this beautifully told story ring with truth.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063258259
Publisher: Harper 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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