Gilli Messer's luminous narration enlivens this unusual love story. Greenland resident Ilsa Erlund is noted for her work translating French poetry into Greenlandic, although she's never been to France. Asked to translate the works of famed 70-ish French poet Geoffrey "Po" Labaye, Ilse decides to go to Provence to work directly with him. Messer channels Ilse's delight with the beauty of the countryside, her joy at working with the great poet--it's their mutual love of language that binds them--her dismay at the onset of Po's illness, and her swiftly changing feelings for Po's son, Frey. Through Ilse's inevitable comparisons between her life in Greenland and the magic of Provence, Messer's indelible performance makes this something more than a predictable romance.
Pub Date: May 21, 2024
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593822869
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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