Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, may be mostly forgotten now, but narrator Kathleen Gati brings her to life in this audiobook. The audiobook tells her story through her fictional journals. Narrator Mark Bramhall is equally fine as the fictionalized lawyer who brings Svetlana to the U.S. The novel is mostly true to history, with a few changed names, and the narrators are so convincing that listeners may have to remind themselves that these are not the real historical figures. Gati, in particular, portrays a woman who is difficult, changeable, and passionate—with few constants in her life other than the tangled threads of her impossible family. It is a bravura performance, balanced by Bramhall's calm, restrained, even repressed, portrayal of Svetlana’s lawyer.
Pub Date: April 30, 2019
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781984847423
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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