Alma Cuervo's polished narration is perfect for this unconventional, dreamlike tale blending folklore and fantasy, seamlessly translated from Spanish. Listeners are drawn into the final day of Bernadeta's life, which takes place in a remote farmhouse in the rugged Guilleries mountains of Catalonia in northeastern Spain. As she lies dying, the voices of her female ancestors, spirits trapped in the house, share their sometimes ribald and sometimes grotesque but always engaging stories. They reach back to the first matriarch, Joana, who made a pact with the devil and cursed generations of women to follow. Cuervo's rich vocal tones, authentic-sounding pronunciation, and impeccable timing draw listeners into each narrative, creating a unique and captivating listen.
Pub Date: June 17, 2025
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798895943755
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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