Sol is a professional cyclist competing in the Tour de France. He is a member of the peloton, whose job is to protect and pace the team leader. Narrator Matthew Lloyd Davies's fine performance is similarly disciplined and unfussy, allowing the characters and story to take center stage. But like the peloton's, Davies's obligations are multiple and various as he switches between accents and temperaments. Sol is thoughtful, conflicted, and loyal. Rafael, the French coach, wheedles as he convinces Sol that doping is necessary and responsible, but he's prone to self-centered outbursts anytime something goes awry. For Fabrice, the team leader, Davies adopts a light accent and imbues his tone with an almost Zen-like love for both the steep ascents and for his teammates.
Pub Date: June 19, 2018
Duration: 8 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781508260028
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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