A dazzling cast of narrators enhances this stunning novel, which takes place in Rome over 2,000 years. Four stories ask what it means to be a good person. In modern times, Tom, an American biologist, portrayed with sorrow by Jeremy Arthur, is trying to understand how his marriage went wrong. During the Renaissance, Bahni Turpin fluidly captures the beautiful Giulia, who is suffering from an unwanted pregnancy. In the Middle Ages, Felix, a monk, recalls his youthful love of a boy in wistful tones voiced by Graham Halstead. Finally, the saintly Prisca, who lives during the first century, is portrayed by Caitlin Kelly with innocent yet passionate inflections. Throughout, Satan, wickedly voiced by January LaVoy, provides commentary, and descriptions of the city of Rome illuminate the passage of time.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2007
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780061555794
Publisher: Harper 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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