This audiobook blends mystery with themes of friendship and mortality in an interesting way. Narrator Paula Wilcox gives Florence, an elderly woman, a British accent and an appropriate voice that is equal parts sweet and grouchy, depending on whom she's speaking to. While she waits for assistance following a fall, her memory flashes back to past events with her friend Elsie. After a short while, Wilcox's capable performance becomes fatiguing, too precious on top of the story's lagging plot. That's not to say this audiobook doesn't have its moments. Humor and suspense are well presented, and not all revelations are predictable. This performance may be a perfect listen for those willing to surrender to sentimentality and patient enough to wait for the story to unfold.
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781508260394
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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