Five narrators work together to bring us these intertwined stories of love, hope, and loss. The impressive cast--Alana Kerr Collins, Gerard Doyle, Alan Smyth, Vikas Adam, and Tim Gerard Reynolds--trade the stories between them as expertly as a sports team. Adam begins as the voice of Syrian father Farouk, who is desperate to get his family to safety, far from the civil war. In lilting cadences, Doyle, Smyth, and Reynolds take us to Ireland, where Lampy's youth contrasts with John's bitterness at the end of his life. As we switch between these varied lives, we wonder when and how they will intersect. This surprising listen will keep listeners hanging on to the end.
Pub Date: July 17, 2018
Duration: 5 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781538543467
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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