This ambitious first novel is given a near perfect interpretation by Sophie Amoss. Her appealing textured voice bonds us to the narrator, an otherwise rather opaque young employee at a Berkeley, California, bookstore. For months Gabriele, half-Italian herself, fills and ships esoteric book orders for a Signor Vietri in Rome. Ever more curious about his reading lists, she eventually lands in Rome herself and goes looking for her elderly customer. As a plot device, Gabriele's search provides scaffolding for exploring Italy's complicated history in Vietri's lifetime. Emotionally, the story is of Gabriele coming to understand her complicated relationship with her own Roman family. The task for Amoss is to keep us engaged with Gabriele, even when she's a mystery to herself. Amoss nails it.
Pub Date: March 23, 2021
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063017733
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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