Everyone wonders if life would be different if they'd made different choices. Narrator Cassandra Campbell portrays dying Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie as she muses on what life would have been like if she'd continued on in Poland as Marya Zorawski, married to a mathematician, never going Paris and the Sorbonne, never meeting Pierre Curie. Telling the story in alternating narratives, Campbell seamlessly switches between Marie imagining the joys and consequences of her life as Marya and a parallel version of Marie's private and very public life with Pierre. Campbell's French accent is impressive, and her Polish accent is flawless. Whichever life is in focus, the emphasis throughout is on choice, hard work, intellectual curiosity, and independence. Campbell makes this original, imaginative novel top-notch listening.
Pub Date: March 23, 2021
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063070363
Publisher: Harper 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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