Between them, author Colm Tóibín and narrator Meryl Streep have created an audio experience worthy of all the popular awards put together. Winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize, THE TESTAMENT OF MARY delivers what the title suggests—the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth as remembered by his mother. Told in the first person, this testament is a fearsome thing, not always what his followers, faithfully writing down her words, want to hear. But tell it she does—she, Mary/Meryl. What a role. Gorgeously, fluidly, evocatively written. Scenes of celebration, miracle, terror, pain, and redemption are vividly conjured as Streep transmutes herself into the famous first-century mother whose son left long before his death.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
Duration: 3 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781442354944
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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