David Lodge’s biographical novel chronicles the prolific life of H.G. Wells, writer of more than 100 books, lover of more than 100 women, and strident Fabian to boot. Narrator Steven Crossley is faithful to the text, giving Wells a tone that is confident and convinced of his own moral righteousness—although he does not have Wells’s high-pitched voice, for which we are grateful, given the length of this production. Crossley inhabits a myriad of characters with authentic accents, including Wells’s long-suffering and fascinating second wife, Jane; American novelist and critic Henry James; journalist Rebecca West; and Russian (and possible spy) Moura Budberg. Lodge employs the awkward storytelling device of Wells interviewing himself in old age. Crossley is even able to distinguish between the interrogative voice of conscience and the defensive elderly interviewee.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2011
Duration: 20 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781464000980
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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