Narrator Bernadette Dunne has 19 adults and 6 children to differentiate in this ambitious homage to MRS. DALLOWAY, all without benefit of the seating plan with character notes that print readers can turn to when confusion strikes. The organizing principle is the day and evening of a rehearsal dinner that brings two very different families together. Lacking a centrifugal character like Mrs. Dalloway, this is more a jumble of unrelated dilemmas and mismatched personalities briefly juxtaposed than a coherently plotted novel, yet it offers many pleasures. Dunne's performance is full of color, intelligence, and asperity. Mazur fails to clear the very high bar she has set for herself, but wonderful writing makes it well worthwhile to watch her, and Dunne, fling themselves at it.
Pub Date: July 10, 2018
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780525630777
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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