Narrator Hugh Quarshie is a gifted mimic. His Somali-inflected English and his reading of Arabic give verisimilitude to Mahood Mattan. Quarshie narrates at a measured pace that provides this sad historical novel with a sense of inevitability. Quarshie delivers Welsh, Jamaican, and English accents well and has an ability to place the listener inside the characters' minds. Best of all, his performance gives dignity to the falsely accused illiterate petty criminal who is convicted of murder and later hanged. The story is based on real events in Cardiff, Wales, in 1952. It took decades for Mattan's name to be cleared, and his death remains a racist blot on British jurisprudence. Author Mohamed has vividly reimagined this story, and it comes alive in this audiobook.
Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2021
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593589908
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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