Actor Rory Kinnear, so memorable as King Henry IV in “The Hollow Crown” series, assumes an equal challenge in conveying the sly humor and grim comedy of McEwan’s tour de force. Based on the Hamlet story and told by an unborn fetus, this is a novel of voice and perspective. As the unborn listens to his mother and uncle plot his father’s murder, he offers a commentary that ranges into history and social values, ethics and philosophy. His worried consciousness filters a helter-skelter of broadcasts and conversations and secondhand contacts with the world, and a fearful contemplation of his own impending future. Short, fast-paced, expertly rendered by a voice it seems written for, this is a flawless production, and pure entertainment.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2016
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781501935633
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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