This moving audiobook imagining Lady Macbeth's early life receives extraordinary narrations by Angus King and Ell Potter. Ten years before the events of Shakespeare's play, "The Lady," at 15, is forced to marry the brutish Mormaer of Moray. They have a son, "The Boy," who displeases his sadistic father. Macbeth kills Moray in battle, occupies his castle, then falls in love with and marries "The Lady." Once "The Boy" learns who killed his father, his hostility toward Macbeth grows. King portrays "The Boy" with clarity and childlike urgency. Potter, as "The Lady," is soft-spoken, fiercely protective of her son, and passionate about her new husband. Thanks to outstanding performances by King and Potter, this fictionalized backstory will make reading MACBETH even more meaningful.
Pub Date: March 12, 2024
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593826577
Publisher: Penguin 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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