Narrators Lisa Flanagan and Daniel Oreskes transport listeners to twentieth-century Paris in a haunting audiobook that infuses war and romance with magical realism. It's 1989, and Sylvie is mourning the death of her husband, Julien. She accidentally finds an envelope that leads her on a search for Julien's long-lost niece, who may or may not have survived the roundup of Jews in wartime Paris. What she discovers will change her life forever. Flanagan's voice and tone faithfully capture the melancholy mood of the work. Oreskes, who portrays Julien, further elevates the production with his compelling wistful narration. Even though the narrators' French accents and vocal characterizations falter, their perfectly paced storytelling brings Nazi-occupied Paris to life.
Pub Date: June 18, 2019
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781984891556
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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