Like so many Londoners in 1940, Charlotte is experiencing exhaustion and trauma from nightly bombings by the Nazis and the deaths of people she cares about. Four of her recently killed friends still exist in her consciousness, comforting, criticizing, advising, and even amusing her on occasion. Narrator Katherine Manners gives each a clear identity. El, Charlotte's best friend, has a sweet, bemused voice. Charlotte's co-worker sounds chatty and oddly liberated. Charlotte's actress friend is suitably theatrical, and her godmother shows the signs of a life of dissipation. The story is slow initially, but then Charlotte begins to experience threats that are even more terrifying than the bombings. This is a beautifully told story of love, loss, courage, and resilience.
Pub Date: May 2, 2023
Duration: 13 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593740576
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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