Laurence Dobiesz's steady, unaffected narration brings precision, dexterity, and conviction to a story built on meticulous detailing. As narrator, he is clearly at home in several European languages and is capable of suggesting a character or a state of mind with a shift in volume or tone. Set in the Carpathians, in a makeshift hospital on the Austro-Russian front in WWI, Mason's epic romance is impressively informed on the geopolitics and the medical and military practices of the time. Here, a steady--and steadying--voice is welcome. The surgeries are grim, and one's heart breaks at the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. You might ask: Haven't Hemingway and Pasternak and Barker already filled this particular shelf of fiction? Even so, the writing is superb, and Dobiesz's subtle and simpatico reading holds you hour by hour, and in suspense until its final minutes.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781478999003
Publisher: Hachette 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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