George Sand's scandalous and passionate life is the subject of Berg's gorgeous historical novel. Narrator Emily Sutton-Smith captures Sand's amorous nature as well as her artistic genius. The listener gets a good sense of just how subversive Sand truly was in dressing as a man, smoking cigars, and having one love affair after another with an actress and a number of famous men. This novel also serves as a good overview of the Parisian artistic elite of the time as everyone who was anyone who was not a lover of George Sand was, at least, her acquaintance. The story never becomes a mere cavalcade of artistic heavyweights, however. Berg's poetic prose and Sutton-Smith's strong performance ensure that it remains fascinating and emotionally involving listening.
Pub Date: April 14, 2015
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781491578117
Publisher: Brilliance 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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