Blending fact and fiction, the story of 17-year-old Maggie Murphy, one of the few steerage passengers on the Titanic to survive, is beautifully narrated by Connor Kelly-Eiding and Alana Kerr. Maggie is reluctant to leave her home, but she must travel with her aunt and a group of Irish emigrés going to America for a better life. As Maggie experiences the horror and tragedy of the doomed ship, she swears never to reveal what happened that night. The two gifted narrators take listeners from Maggie’s voyage in 1912 to the year 1982, when she finally reveals her “important” story to her great-granddaughter, Grace. Maggie’s lovely young-girl’s voice, with its soft Irish lilt, is a flawless fit, while Grace’s more modern inflections and aggressive American persona are pitch-perfect.
Pub Date: April 1, 2014
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062344533
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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