A gifted narrator can often salvage a mediocre text, but given a finely written novel, as Simon Vance has here, the result is a showcase of the unique pleasures and sublime artistry of audiobook listening. Set in one of the most remote corners of the world, Shields's medical thriller is based on an outbreak of bubonic plague in Manchuria in 1910. The voices and accents are diverse, and Vance is a master at rendering character and at maintaining narrative pace and momentum. Most outstanding, however, are the eloquent descriptions of the bleak Eastern landscape and the ragtag communities clustered around the Trans-Siberian Railway. While the narrative is chilling and gripping, Shields's prose is incandescent, and her narrator is one of the most gifted and accomplished working today.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781478905318
Publisher: Hachette 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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