Narrator Clive Mantle skillfully delivers the story of two brothers, Paul and Serge, and their wives, Claire and Babette, as they dine in a swanky Amsterdam restaurant. From the perspective of Paul, we learn that the couples are grappling with how to handle a horrific act committed by their 15-year-old sons. The situation is complicated by the fact that Serge is a politician. Mantle portrays the individuality of each spouse and captures the tensions surrounding this family crisis. Descriptions of the dining experience and tangential backstories keep listeners in suspense about the malevolent deed for the first three hours of the book. While potentially tiresome in print, this part of the story is made engaging for listeners by the narration. Mantle’s delivery elevates the plot twists, moral dilemmas, and family relationships, making this a feast worth attending.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2013
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: AudioGo
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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