Gunnar Cauthery's articulate and nuanced narration of this novelized biography of author Thomas Mann melds perfectly with Irish novelist Colm Tóibín's approach to Mann--he seems captivated, measured, and mildly perplexed. Mann, the author of such famed novels as A DEATH IN VENICE, was a happily married father of six. He was also bisexual at a time when public homosexuality would have ruined his career and might have landed him in jail. Tóibín's book follows the arc of the Manns' family life from Germany through America and back to Europe, examining what drove the intense yet repressed writer, his remarkable wife, and his unsettled children. Cauthery's crisp, warm voice carries listeners easily through the narrative, and his thoughtful characterizations populate the conversations with individuals, adding to the pleasures of Tóibín's writing.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
Duration: 16 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781797122304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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