Narrator Bronson Pinchot's empathetic tone enhances this bittersweet novel. The story carries listeners back and forth in time between the joy of Sam Lattimore's life with his wife, Elizabeth, and his attempts to rebuild in the wake of her grisly murder. Pinchot’s somber, grounded tone roots listeners firmly in Sam's perspective, and his embodiment of Elizabeth's plaintive voice and spirited personality exemplifies the playfulness and passion that give the couple’s relationship its strength. Pinchot never misses a beat in this complex work, creating an elegant cohesiveness with a breadth of characterizations and a solid grasp of Norman's imagery. Drawing a vibrant picture against the backdrop of Sam's grief, Pinchot’s narration helps give listeners hope for his future.
Pub Date: May 13, 2014
Duration: 7 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781482987782
Publisher: Blackstone 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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