Maggie O'Farrell's imaginative use of Shakespearean apocrypha and recorded facts, combined with Ell Potter's superb performance, is a feast for the ears. The story revolves around an unnamed Latin tutor; his soon-to-be wife, Agnes; and their growing family in 1580s Stratford-upon-Avon. When 11-year-old Hamnet discovers his twin sister, Judith, gravely ill with swellings and fever, he looks for help, but the house is eerily quiet. In vivid memory flashes, a brilliant story unfolds revealing John, Shakespeare's abusive father; Agnes's marriage to the unsuitable, much younger tutor; and their subsequent years together and the devastation wrought by the Black Death. Potter brings an intimate gravitas to details as seemingly insignificant as the journey of a flea and as great as the grief that produced Shakespeare's masterpiece HAMLET.
Pub Date: July 21, 2020
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593212141
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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