Candidly, some works of fiction--those in which tone, literary style, and sound matter--work very well (maybe better) as audiobooks. The protagonists of this audiobook are superbly portrayed by MacLeod Andrews and Julia Whelan. They are gifted mimics and switch off in this braided tale of loss, hopeless love, and social collapse. Both plumb the depths of the wounded brother and sister Bobby and Alicia Western, who are lost souls in this excursion into the dark, soul-depleting demimonde of Cormac McCarthy. Whelan and MacLeod put authentic voices to the dual protagonists' thoughts and conversations that make the characters materialize--those who are human, anyway. Some actors in this drama are comical figments of one character's imagination--glib vaudevillian creations of a schizophrenic mind.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780739368794
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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