Listeners who love Alexandra Fuller’s memoirs will appreciate this story of a changing Kenya. Katharine McEwan's narration, sprinkled with Swahili phrases, vividly details the various voices of two cultures. She tells Rachel’s story, starting with her return as a young woman after six years in England. McEwan juxtaposes Rachel’s childhood memories with the current turmoil. Her tone softens with wistful remembering, intermingled with the increasing intensity of racial unease that mushrooms into the bloody 1950s Mau Mau Rebellion against the British. Torn between two worlds, Rachel is forced to face ugly realities: brutal violence, broken taboos, and gender power struggles. McEwan draws listeners into these chilling dramas, and as she urgently tells it, nothing remains the same for Rachel or for the nation of Kenya.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
Duration: 12 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524703516
Publisher: Penguin 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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