Dominic Smith creates a remarkable tapestry woven from strands of history, while narrator Greg Lockett turns them into indelible moments for the listener. In 1890s Chicago, Owen Graves, who has always been interested in relics and artifacts, is hired by insurance mogul Hale Gray to go on an expedition to Melanesia--but he must take along Gray's ne'er-do-well son, Jethro. Along with primitive art, Gray wants Owen to bring back natives to exhibit. Lockett subtly reveals Owen's uneasiness at the immorality of such an action. The setting shifts, and Lockett seamlessly depicts the lives of New Guinea native Argus Niu and his sister, Malini. Overall, Lockett offers clear sketches of Chicago, the sea, and the island during this period. Beautifully written and narrated with enthusiasm, this is first-rate historical fiction.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
Duration: 15 hrs, 45 mins
Publisher: Bolinda 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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