Edoardo Ballerini's sensitive narration of Isabel Allende's lyrical prose touches the heart. He heightens the plight of Victor Dalmau, his mother, and his brother's pregnant widow, Roser. This intense saga spans nearly 60 years, following the Dalmaus as they are caught in the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War, when Franco's Fascists overthrow the government. Ballerini adds drama and emotion as the family flees Spain, endures a brutal trek across the mountains to France, and copes with inhumane conditions in a French concentration camp. Eventually, with the help of poet Pablo Neruda, they escape to Chile, where they live for many years until another repressive government forces them to flee again. Ballerini expertly delivers Allende's reminder of how delicate the boundary is between precious freedom and insidious tyranny. Powerful listening.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593167977
Publisher: Random House 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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