Baker’s exceptional novel offers an original look at Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and Emma Fielding’s performance is quietly appealing. While the Bennets, the Bingleys, and the Darcys cavort upstairs in well-appointed drawing rooms, Baker opens up the world below stairs. Fielding turns characters into genuine individuals—from housemaids Sarah and Polly to housekeeper Mrs. Hill, the mysterious newly hired servant, James, and the Bingleys’ black footman, Ptolemy. Sarah is the heart of this tale of morning-to-night drudgery, chilblains, sweat, blood, and backaches. She laments, "If Elizabeth had the washing of her own petticoats‚ she'd most likely be a sight more careful with them." Fielding’s fine portrayals offer moments of hope and awakening for the characters and, for listeners, bittersweet awareness of Sarah’s life and the lives of her downstairs family.
Pub Date: 2013
Duration: 13 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780804149419
Publisher: Random House 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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