Elizabeth Berg is a charming storyteller, both as author and narrator, in this prequel to THE STORY OF ARTHUR TRULUV. Het soothing, comfortable narration suits this sweet tale about 16-year-old Arthur's coming of age in small-town Missouri in 1947. She portrays Arthur's youthful naïveté, as well as his earnest commitment to patiently pursuing his pretty classmate, Nola. Arthur and his older brother, Frank, exchange secrets and advice during their nighttime conversations in their shared room. When unspeakable tragedy strikes, Arthur finds comfort and advice from empathetic adults in town. Berg delightfully voices the curmudgeonly widow and the beautiful gardener for whom Arthur does weekend chores. Listeners will root for Nola to come to see Arthur the same way they do.
Pub Date: March 21, 2023
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593677629
Publisher: Random House 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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