The famously convoluted narrative voice of Henry James sounds once again in John Banville's outstanding sequel to James's PORTRAIT OF A LADY. The work is brought to the audiobook format with equal expertise by narrator Amy Finegan. More tour de force than pastiche, Banville's story picks up the same cast and storyline as the original, and the same elegant nineteenth-century milieu locked between dynamism and repression. Finegan conveys this subtle opposition in the voices of a score of complex and conflicted characters, and in her sure passage through the snares and quagmires of Jamesian syntax. Only in the dialogue of her heroine does she, to this ear, somewhat let listeners down, channeling a voice that is more uncertain, more timid, than the character whom James, or rather Banville, has conceived. But that's a mere quibble with a performance that exceeds all expectations.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
Duration: 12 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780525588214
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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