Narrator Kate Udall makes James Scott’s disturbing debut novel choice listening. In northern New York in the late nineteenth century, Elspeth Howell and her 12-year-old son, Caleb, set out to find the men who brutally murdered their family. While the two are motivated by revenge, this textured story offers much more. Udall’s performance slowly peels away carefully concealed secrets whose revelations leave no one unscathed. Udall captures the characters’ moral wretchedness in an unforgiving world, the rage and pent-up emotions of mother and son, and the human capacity for cruelty. Not for the squeamish due to some explicit raw descriptions, Scott’s controlled prose and Udall’s understated narration make this an experience that will stay with you long after you remove your earbuds.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
Duration: 12 hrs, 12 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062308726
Publisher: Harper 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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