Actor W. Morgan Sheppard narrates this captivating novel of escape, survival, and rediscovery. With few vocal interactions between the characters, this story shares itself through imagery and detailed descriptions of a boy, his thoughts, and his surroundings. Sheppard prompts listeners to follow alongside the boy in an unnamed country as he navigates a deserted grove of olive trees in the moonlight, finds a goatherd in a barren field, and hides from his pursuers during the day. Though the dialogue is spare, Sheppard raises the pitch of his voice when the boy finally speaks up, then lowers his voice to a rasping timbre when portraying the weathered goatherd. Listeners will surely be captivated by this story as they accompany a boy in search of refuge.
Pub Date: July 4, 2017
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524776923
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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