Narrator Helen Lloyd portrays 91-year-old Gretel Fernsby, who lives in present-day London. Kristin Atherton portrays the young Gretel, daughter of the Nazi commandant of a concentration camp. Lloyd and Atherton alternate chapters revealing events from Gretel's past, which she has kept secret all these years. Both narrators use British accents devoid of German or French inflection. Atherton clips the younger Gretel's sentences, making her sound cold and brusque. As the present-day Gretel is presented with a dilemma involving a neighbor's abused child, Lloyd gradually reveals a character who is filled with guilt, a feeling of complicity, and grief for her role during the Holocaust. While Gretel's memories can be difficult to listen to, the conflict presented by her opportunity for atonement allows Lloyd to shine.
Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593676813
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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