Narrator Billie Fulford-Brown delivers this thought-provoking story of empire collapse as imagined by renowned novelist Packer in a cool yet impassioned tone. A frightening future splits society into two camps-- the urban Burghers and the rural Yeomen. Fulford-Brown portrays Doctor Hugo Rustin with empathy and urgency as he makes a mistake that pushes him out of the city and into the countryside, along with his rebellious daughter, Selva, just as the conflict between the Burghers and Yeomen begins. Fulford-Brown uses some British pronunciations, but these shouldn't make the experience less fulfilling. Packer's novel of ideas asks what our societal duties are across segregated classes. Fulford-Brown delivers this vividly imagined world as Packer takes listeners into a troubled future that is all too possible.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250418371
Publisher: Macmillan 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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