A stark and driven conversation with the listener.
British actor Rory Alexander narrates this dark and mesmerizing psychological and philosophical thriller that reimagines the Faustian bargain. It’s the mid-1980s when Kristian, a promising Norwegian art student, arrives in London and sets his sights on becoming a world-renowned photographer. Alexander is never afraid to sound caustic, unbearable, and sometimes downright unlikable as the vain and self-absorbed photographer belittles his fellow students and distances himself from his family. After Kristian meets a mysterious Dutch artist who helps him out of a questionable legal predicament, his prospects brighten. Years later, Kristian has everything he ever wanted, and Alexander’s voice reflects the moment he realizes what he paid to get there.
A stark and driven conversation with the listener.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
Duration: 19 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217163649
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: March 25, 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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