Lanessa Tremblett narrates Jennifer Croft's intricate story of acclaimed Polish author Irena Rey. Rey invites eight of her translators to her home in the Bialowieza Forest to translate her latest title into their native languages. The translators are known only by their country's names, but after Irena disappears, leaving the group to function alone, their true names and competitive natures are revealed. Tremblett doesn't use different voices for the characters. Her matter-of-fact delivery misses much of the humor and nuance of Croft's wry observations. Trying to locate Irena offers many bizarre, often incredible encounters, which are recorded by "Spanish" and edited by "English." Tremblett never offers the performance one could wish for in this fascinating exploration of art, celebrity, jealousy, and the wonders of nature.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2024
Duration: 12 hrs
Publisher: N/A
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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