Following in the style of his renowned book THE DINNER, Koch's novel is a slow-paced, multilayered story. An aging writer in the Netherlands confronts his fading career and the novel--based on an actual unsolved crime--that rocketed him to fame. Narrator Luke Daniels is in tune with Koch's approach and delivers it effectively, teasing out the distinctiveness of the characters and leaving listeners questioning the unreliable narrators while surrounding them with the rich atmosphere. However, Koch's plodding narrative arrives at its anticlimactic plot twist far too slowly and indirectly, so even Daniels's fine performance can't resuscitate the suspense. It's dead on arrival. Fans of Koch may appreciate this, but those looking for a thrilling audiobook can pass.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781501241178
Publisher: Brilliance 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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