Narrator Alix Dunmore's warm, lush voice escorts listeners through the dark streets and alleys of Istanbul as they enter 35-year-old Peri's life. Peri is headed to an elegant dinner party when a thief steals her purse. She fends off the attacker, and in the scuffle, a long forgotten photograph falls from her purse. Dunmore slips in and out of Peri's present and past. Her delivery of snarky comments is spot-on as Peri considers the posh guests and their inane conversations at the party. Even as she sits at dinner, the photo nags at her, taking her back to her Oxford days, three friends, and a betrayal. Dunmore's genteel, artful, and real performance brings Turkey's political and spiritual schisms front and center while shining a light on women's oppression.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2017
Duration: 11 hrs
Publisher: Audible, Inc./ Brilliance
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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