Saskia Maarleveld and George Newborn provide a dual narration of this intriguing historical fiction with a time-travel twist. German bookstore owner Max Beissinger and German-Jewish violinist Hanna Ginsberg, star-crossed lovers, meet before WWII. Their love lasts far beyond it despite being separated from each other and despite Hanna's postwar amnesia. While the majority of characters are German, both Newbern and Maarleveld use American accents for much of the dialogue, an excellent choice that contrasts nicely with the subtle German accents they give to Hanna and Max. Music connects the threads of time tying the pair together. Scenes of Hanna playing would be enhanced by appropriate background music, although most listeners will be familiar with the classical pieces she is said to be playing.
Pub Date: March 5, 2019
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062908308
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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