Elegantly clipped and beautifully precise, Jane Carr’s delivery of this innovative story collection, by the author of the Booker Prize-winning WOLF HALL, is simultaneously hypnotic and engaging. She captures the diverse tales with a unifying reserve that frees the listener to embrace and ponder Mantel’s distinctive style. These are challenging stories in both style and content, so Carr’s accessible voice and delivery are well employed throughout the collection. Somehow Carr maintains a brisk pace, yet her momentum makes the words and images even more lively, more real. Whether focused on issues of family tension or something more fantastical—ghost stories? vampires?—Mantel’s words and Carr’s voice combine to create an enriching listening experience. This collection is an excellent introduction to Mantel’s celebrated work. L.B.F. 2015 Audies Winner © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
Duration: 4 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781427251718
Publisher: Macmillan 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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