Listeners will be fascinated by the origin story of the Sawtelle family, featured in THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE. In 1919, John Sawtelle; his wife, Mary; their friends; and their dogs set out to create a life in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Richard Poe paints pictures of the locations, the wide range of memorable characters, and their adventures. At times funny, at times dark, and moving throughout, the story builds relationships among the characters and the dogs while weaving in historical occurrences of the time. Poe's distinctive characters, tone, and pacing perfectly reflect the storyline. Though the plot begins slowly, listeners will be grateful for the time spent getting to know the earlier generation of the Sawtelle family.
Pub Date: June 11, 2024
Duration: 37 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9798212192286
Publisher: Blackstone 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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