Kostova, author of THE HISTORIAN, delivers a convoluted saga spanning decades that allows the four outstanding narrators to shine. American Alexandra Boyd relocates to Sofia, Bulgaria, to teach English. Upon her arrival, a mishap with luggage leaves her with someone else's bag, which contains an ornately carved wooden box filled with cremated remains. Determined to locate the owners and return the box, Alexandra becomes entangled in Bulgarian history ranging from WWII through the Communist takeover in the 1940s to the present. While Kostova's lengthy novel would have been better served with fewer digressions into minutiae, Barrie Kreinik wonderfully carries the bulk of the narrative, while Fred Berman, Barbara Caruso (wonderful as Baba Yana), and George Guidall handle their parts with professional expertise.
Pub Date: April 11, 2017
Duration: 18 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780735286740
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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