Nine provocative tales are divided among seven utterly capable voices. The result is an often startling, sometimes humorous, and always satisfying exploration of the human condition. Lorna Raver is clearly energized and engaged with the characters, and her low-pitched voice lends itself well to the stories that open and close the collection, each featuring an older woman who is struggling to balance reality and imagination. Also performing double duty, Arthur Morey is deliberate with pace and pronunciation as he navigates the murky intersection of biography and storytelling. Though she's tasked with the shortest story, Emily Rankin's memorable performance belies the innocence of a character whose genetic condition is mistaken for vampirism. The highlight is Margaret Atwood's reading of the titular story. Her understated delivery and low tones are a chilling combination in this pointed tale of revenge.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780553546040
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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