Edoardo Ballerini's subtle, fluent narration is perfect for Ozick's subtle, exquisitely fluent narrative voice. The revered storyteller seems to transcend time and place in this long story set in the late 1940s but rooted in the customs and prejudices of an even earlier era. Her aging narrator looks back on his time at a privileged boys' school, where he befriended an outcast boy and himself became an outcast. The narrative hinges not on events, but on shades and degrees of tone and emotion, and on the point-counterpoint of two different stages in the narrator's life. Ozick, our most Jamesian writer, has found her ideal narrator in Ballerini, who shares her grace, sensitivity, and intelligence.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 3 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593397244
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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