Dominic Smith's latest fictional dive into the history of an art form makes for a rich audiobook under narrator Edoardo Ballerini's able management. The period is the turn of the twentieth century, the arena the development of the moving picture, and the commercial question whether the technology of the French Lumière brothers or the patents of Thomas Edison will dominate the form. But of course Smith creates narrative power with personalities, not data. Ballerini makes the international cast vivid: the young French director Claude Ballard, his Sarah-Bernhardt-like inamorata, Sabine Montrose, a Brooklyn urchin who becomes a Hollywood producer, and a winning young Australian daredevil who invents the craft of the stuntman. Hold on for the literal cliff-hanger in reel four. It's on fire.
Pub Date: June 4, 2019
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250221339
Publisher: Macmillan 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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