Three talented women—narrator, author, and protagonist—combine forces for this gripping historical novel set in Renaissance Italy. Maggie O’Farrell, author of the award-winning novel HAMNET, here introduces us to Lucrezia de’ Medici of Florence, who married Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara in 1559. Genevieve Gaunt’s captivating performance illuminates the suspenseful tale like gold leaf on a beautiful manuscript. She reads O’Farrell’s world-building descriptions of court and countryside with seductive enunciation and pacing. Her 15-year-old Lucrezia is a tender pawn with brains and spirit. Her baritoned Alfonso is charismatic and chilling. Other characters ranging from servants to nobles are given equally enlightening accents and speech patterns. A thoughtful afterword delivered by the Irish-born O’Farrell explains her novelistic modifications to the few available historical facts.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
Duration: 13 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593628089
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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