Xenia, patron saint of St. Petersburg, was born into the Russian upper classes in the early eighteenth century. Thus, when she gave all her material goods to the poor after being widowed in her early 20s, her family questioned her sanity; undaunted, Xenia devoted her life to helping the unfortunate. Narrator Yelena Shmulenson's subtle native accent signals the setting of the novel without distracting listeners from the well-researched details of life in the Russian court and Xenia's prophecies and deeds. Shmulenson's emotional range easily spans the story, from the excitement of balls to the horror of sudden death. Especially impressive is her performance of Xenia's transformation from courtier to holy fool, which allows listeners to decide whether the saint went mad from grief or was truly called by God.
Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062204875
Publisher: Harper 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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