Juliet Stevenson is the ideal narrator for this audiobook. After all, who better to use her immense skills with vocal characterizations and richly nuanced accents? Who else could take a sizable cast, developed with nearly Dickensian detail, and make each voice distinct? Indeed, there are moments when the voices reach near-caricature, but the intensity is not entirely out of place. Stevenson's performance is well paced as the story moves between Mr. Hancock, a lonely merchant whose fortunes shift when he comes into possession of the titular sea creature, and Angelica, a high-class prostitute seeking both freedom and security. The listener follows these parallel tales easily, having been drawn into eighteenth-century London and larger-than-life characters who are trying to keep their heads above water.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
Duration: 17 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062864833
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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