Six narrators read this novel, whose principal characters meet at a cross-dressing Paris club at the end of the Jazz Age. Although each switch in narrator immediately signals a change in point of view, listeners still may have some difficulty keeping track of the shifting time frames, especially because this story of love, betrayal, and survival in the underbelly of the city derives from several fictitious sources, such as letters, a biography, and memoirs . More off-putting, however, is the uneven performances; for example, some of the French accents seem stereotypical; whereas, the Hungarian photographer, who is at the hub of the audiobook, has no accent at all. This novel, which is loosely based on real events from the 1930s and ‘40s, is better enjoyed in print.
Pub Date: April 22, 2014
Duration: 18 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062331847
Publisher: Harper 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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