Lauren Groff's gripping new novel is told in two parts, his and hers, which makes it perfect for a dual narration. With one reservation (the same for both narrators, interestingly), the performances are superb. The book examines a long, passionate marriage. First Will Damron performs the story according to Lancelot, known as Lotto, an actor turned playwright whom the fates have blessed in many ways. Julia Whelan delivers Mathilde's version, which stuns with all that Lotto never knew or guessed about his wife, so polished on the outside, so gripped by furies within. Damron gets a small but key character's Anglo-Indian accent deeply wrong, and Whelan falters with a Scottish one, but these flaws stand out mostly because the rest of what they do is so gloriously good.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780698409651
Publisher: Penguin 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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