Joseph O'Connor's graceful, insightful writing is immediately apparent, thanks to Barry McGovern's and Anna Chancellor's outstanding performances. McGovern delivers an acting tour de force, highlighting both the dark underbelly of Victorian London as well as the frequently scratchy, often tender relationship between eccentric, egotistical, world-famous actor Henry Irving and the manager of Irving's famed Lyceum Theatre, the soon-to-be famous author (in his pre-Dracula years) Bram Stoker. Both men's lives circle around an internationally renowned actress of the period, Ellen Terry. Chancellor's lush voice credibly presents Terry's letters, offering clear-eyed assessments of events, as well as her sharp-edged nastiness and witty, affectionate comments. With a firm grip on the theater scene of the 1870s and '80s, O'Connor's engrossing story is wonderfully well served by two superb narrators.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2020
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781690587019
Publisher: Dreamscape
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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