Daniel Philpott's narration is perfectly matched to Barnes's complex fictional account of three critical periods in Dmitri Shostakovich's life. Philpott renders the esteemed composer's interactions with the authoritarian rulers of Soviet Russia, led by Stalin, capturing his struggle with being an unwilling symbol of Soviet artistic expression. Philpott delivers Shostakovich's voice and interior monologues with crisp British diction. One slight quibble: The choice to give Russian authorities menacing accents, while deftly done, seems a curious decision when the protagonist speaks the Queen's English. That said, the listener gets a visceral sense of the composer's long battle with the authorities over his formalist compositions and his reluctance to join the Communist Party.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2016
Duration: 5 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781501936814
Publisher: Recorded Books/ Clipper 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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