Narrator Roger May's voice immediately draws listeners into this story. He narrates as if he knows something we can't wait to hear. Local lore has it that the church bells in Butangen, Norway, were cast in memory of conjoined twins. Whenever the town is in danger, the "Sister Bells" ring on their own. The clash between old and new comes when the new pastor contracts to have the ancient church razed and replaced with a new church. What will happen to the "Sister Bells"? May delivers common-sense explanations and superstitions with equal ease. Strange, sometimes deadly, events occur as the church is dismantled, and May handles all with aplomb. Lars Mytting's bestseller in Norway is made even better on audio by May's expressive performance.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2020
Duration: 15 hrs, 15 mins
Publisher: Bolinda 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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