Fans of world literature will fall headlong into this reimagining of the fight to keep southern Mozambique free of colonialism in the late nineteenth century. The pair of talented narrators work together to create the personas of Emperor Ngungunyane and teenage Imani. Bahni Turpin gives the teenager a steely voice that follows her through the tumult of the Portuguese invasion. Her chapters alternate with those performed by Joel Richards, who portrays Sergeant Germano de Melo. Listeners are treated to a rich historical tapestry most may know little about. Richards lends a slight accent to the Portuguese military man, which creates a nice contrast to the feminine Imani, who serves as his translator. The two are thrown together by fate, and their loyalties are tested--will they choose love or country?
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
Publisher: Tantor Media
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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