Narrator Sarah Lambie does double duty in alternating chapters as Hetty, an associate at a natural history museum, and Lucy, the terrified daughter of Major Lockwood of Lockwood Manor. It's WWII, and London is being bombed, so Lockwood offers his country estate to house the museum's collection of mammals. Hetty is sent to live at the manor and watch over the collection. As Hetty, Lambie sounds organized and matter-of-fact, very much the cool, determined professional woman in a male-dominated workplace. As Lucy, Lambie uses an ethereal tone, particularly as Lucy reveals monstrous truths. In this modern gothic, animals disappear, chilling screams pierce the night, and tales of abuse and madness abound. An appropriately horrific conclusion is worthy of the genre's best storytellers. Lambie makes it all exceptional listening.
Pub Date: March 10, 2020
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780358309352
Publisher: HMH Books
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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