Janet Metzger masterfully narrates Poliner’s captivating, nuanced story of a tragedy that strikes at the heart of a close-knit Jewish family. Metzger adopts the perfect tone of reflective meditation from the novel’s portentous first sentence: “The summer of 1948 my brother Davy was killed in an accident with a man who would have given his own life rather than have it happen.” As the author explores the effect of Davy’s death on family members, Metzger’s portrayal of the three sisters who are central to the story is especially deft. Handling the dual challenges of voicing multiple characters and keeping the fragmented time lines distinct, Metzger invites listeners into a sun-soaked world of ocean breezes and populated summer cottages to consider the deep pull that family exerts on our lives.
Pub Date: March 15, 2016
Duration: 12 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781478905301
Publisher: Hachette 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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