Karl O’Brian Williams narrates the wildly entertaining saga of a Jamaican family in this gothic historical fiction. In a distinct Jamaican accent, Williams sets off the story of Abel Paisley, who faked his own death and assumed the identity of his friend, Stanford Solomon, who had died in an accident. Then Williams continues the circuitous story, narrating an obscure timeline going back to Jamaica’s years of slavery two centuries earlier and going forward to Abel’s stolen life in present-day New York City. The time shifts and the multitude of characters may confuse listeners. But Williams’s performance ramps up the story’s suspense. A wholly separate story about three shape-shifting children awaits listeners at the end. A.C. 2021 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: March 3, 2020
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781797103891
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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