Oh, what a sly, darkly funny, and strange story Dame Muriel Spark has concocted in this slender novel. In 1974, British Lord Lucan disappeared from England after purportedly murdering his children's nanny in an attempt to kill his wife. This much is fact. Now the fiction: In 1994, European psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf is intrigued by two new patients, who both claim to be Lord Lucan. Who is the real one, and who is Dr. Wolf, who evidently has also abandoned a previous life? Davina Porter handles the plot digressions and Spark's famously elliptical writing with ease. She always succeeds in keeping us entertained and mostly succeeds in not losing us through the plot twists. Every so often, a character's accent slips and merges into another's, but that's a minor quibble. A 'Spark'ling listen.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2002
Duration: 4 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Recorded Books/ Clipper
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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