The art of audio narration has rarely been better served than in Haruki Murakami’s brilliant tale featuring two seekers of truth. Sean Barrett and Oliver Le Sueur recount the odysseys of Nakata, an old man who was left simpleminded (but able to speak with cats) by a mysterious WWII event, and Kafka Tamura, a stoic, self-disciplined 15-year-old who runs away from home to escape an Oedipal prophecy. Barrett and Le Sueur turn in superb performances. Their rich characterizations keep this blend of the real and surreal totally engrossing. Philip Gabriel’s excellent translation offers a contemporary feel to Murakami’s lyrical language and magical incidents. Additional kudos must go to Naxos AudioBooks for gorgeous packaging, including an enclosure listing the entire cast with bios. This is must listening.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2006
Duration: 19 hrs
Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks
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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