Narrator Susan Lyons creates the perfect aura of dreamlike uncertainty to ensnare the listener in this work of historical fiction. Based on the eighteenth-century hoax of Mary Toft, who supposedly gave birth to rabbits, the story unwinds in deliberate moments of action interspersed with philosophical discussions on faith, skepticism, science, and the existence of the Divine. Lyons paces her narration perfectly, making the buildup to the apparent miracle and its unraveling equally tense. She creates appealing voices for the main characters, especially for John Howard, Mary's first surgeon-midwife, and his young apprentice, Zachary. Lyons uses Zachary's wistful, innocent tones as a counterpoint to the greed and self-interest found among many who were drawn in by this fascinating falsehood.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
Duration: 13 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781980055532
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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