In this coda to McCarthy's bestselling novel THE PASSENGER, narrators Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini play the parts of troubled mathematical genius Alicia Western and her therapist as she seeks treatment in a mental hospital named Stella Maris. As the story is told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia's treatment, Whelan brings an edge of madness and yearning to her performance of the paranoid schizophrenic. She expresses Alicia's philosophy and scientific theory in the shaky voice of a child in pain. Ballerini shines as her challenged therapist, using his soft but affecting voice to poke and prod until the truth is gently revealed. The story is told only in dialogue, words that challenge our perceptions of life and reality.
Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
Duration: 4 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780739368817
Publisher: Random House 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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