British narrator Mark Meadows puts listeners in the mind and world of Sirius, a superintelligent fox terrier who starts his global journey in 1930s Berlin. Meadows takes on different voices and accents for the wide array of characters, even the nonhuman. His German-accented reading can make some names hard to discern but lends a strong sense of place. The setting changes to Hollywood, where Sirius becomes a movie star, employing subtle acting techniques made wittier with Meadows's narration. As the story turns from a lark to a thriller, he then recounts a series of events that return Sirius to Germany and Hitler himself. Meadows's dialogue conveys the ugliness of Nazi racism, the speech patterns of cinema idols, and non-famous characters made recognizable throughout the story, all leading to a satisfying conclusion.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781508227311
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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