This audiobook is an absolute delight. Rory Kinnear's performance is smart, observant, and incredibly funny. Portraying Charlie, a teenage boy who is wrestling with an unstable family, an uncertain future, and an all-consuming love for Fran, the girl of his dreams, Kinnear walks the line between perfect comedy and astute empathy. His comfort with Charlie's awkwardness and his ability to leap headlong into all kinds of lively dialogue make the plot irresistible. Set against the backdrop of a summer stage production of--what else?--ROMEO AND JULIET, the novel is compassionate and charming. Kinnear takes Nicholls's clever story and brings it to three-dimensional life. No matter how many characters fill a scene, Kinnear gives each one a distinct spotlight. Indeed, SWEET SORROW deserves the same attention from listeners.
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780358274278
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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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