Ishiguro is after big things in this deceptive novel of ideas, and his ending will haunt you, but he's also created big challenges for his narrator. The story is set in an ancient mythical Britain complete with ogres, pixies, and dragons, where people are beset by a fog that steals their memories. Since the telling is deliberately surreal and dreamlike, David Horovitch can't do much to create clarity or momentum as elderly Axl and Beatrice trudge off on a quest to find their son, whom they remember very partially. Beatrice is the only major female character, and Horovitch could have done more to distinguish the males--Axl, Wiston, Gawain, the evil monks, the devious boatmen--from each other. It's a puzzling, frustrating unforgettable listen.
Pub Date: March 10, 2015
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780739381793
Publisher: Random House 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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