David Pittu is one of those expert narrators who disappear into a story. You don’t hear him interpreting it, or commenting on it; he becomes part of it. His task here is to portray a young Master of the Universe called Jonah whose ambition, selfishness, and willingness to betray should make you want to kick him down the stairs. But Pittu puts you inside Jonah, makes you feel what he feels, and as his life blows up, what he feels is shattering. Jonah’s tale runs parallel to the story of Judith, an equally driven, traumatized, and complex character whom Pittu inhabits just as fully as he does Jonah. You know they’re going to meet, and you have to know what happens. It’s a bravura performance.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781427236227
Publisher: Macmillan 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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