From the opening lines of this audiobook, listeners are transported to Salt Winds, a crumbling, secluded house on the edge of a marsh in England. The location becomes a character as narrator Helen Lloyd weaves the past and present of Virginia Wrathmell. The story begins in 2015, when elderly Virginia believes she has received a sign that tells her to take her own life in the marsh. The story flashes back to 1939, when the recently adopted 10-year-old first arrived at Salt Winds. From there, Lloyd takes listeners back and forth as the tragedies and mysteries surrounding Salt Winds unfold. Despite a pace that drags at times, Lloyd brings Brooks's descriptive writing to life. She makes certain the story's atmosphere is palpable as Virginia attempts to untangle her history and right past wrongs.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
Duration: 8 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781721332922
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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