In the decade before the Civil War, Americans staged what was essentially a full dress rehearsal in the West. Neighbors were divided from one another by the single overriding issue of slavery, which rendered Kansas and Missouri a volatile mix of zealotry, violence and hatred. Smiley’s latest novel is a formidable feat of imagination that brings vivid complexity and passion to those turbulent times and regions. Fields’s narration is no less an accomplishment. Characters come powerfully to life in her reading. She makes them feel like they come from somewhere, that they each have histories and backgrounds and were not created out of thin air. This is especially true for Smiley’s heroine, Lidie Newton, who accompanies her new husband, an abolitionist, to the West, where she will lose everything and be tested well beyond her experience. Fields’s Lidie is a clever, spirited woman who makes any number of mistakes, some tragic. But the most moving impression left by Fields’s reading is the earnestness of Lidie’s self-inquiry and her yearning to discern the right path in ambiguous surroundings.
Pub Date: July 5, 2000
Duration: 19 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780375417085
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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