This ensemble performance of Laura Prescott's novel, told from multiple points of view, reimagines from a female perspective one of the great Cold War coups--the smuggling into the West and publication in 1958 of Boris Pasternak's DR. ZHIVAGO. In Washington, the narrators include "The Typists" at CIA headquarters, a young Russian-speaking agent, and a glamorous senior agent suspected of homosexuality. In Russia, the voice is Olga's, Zhivago's Lara, whose sufferings parallel and illuminate the fate of each character in the story. The novel's interacting themes and parallels are wonderfully captured by the accomplished cast, who render these voices with such spirit and comprehension. One caution: The author doesn't identify the narrator of new chapters; it helps to repeat the first quarter minute or so.
Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781984885920
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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