Thanks to Oliver Wyman’s extraordinary performance, this novel should be savored in audio. Matthew Quick’s feel-good storytelling (THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK) is made even better by Wyman’s eager, youthful exuberance as the story of Bartholomew Neil unfolds. Bartholomew is 38 years old, lives with his mother, and is a true innocent. When his mother dies, Bartholomew is bereft. His mother was obsessed with Richard Gere, and, in a series of letters to the actor, “to remedy the gaps in our collective knowledge of each other,” Bartholomew reveals his bizarre life. Wyman is simply amazing. He delivers gravelly voices and voices as delicate as spiders’ webs. He rants and roars, and he’s touching and tender in this sweet, quirky coming-of-age story. One can only pity the poor print reader.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062308702
Publisher: Harper 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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