Narrating in her native Midlands accent, self-proclaimed queer-cripple author Nicola Griffith, diagnosed with MS in 1993, tosses a welcome new character into the uber male world of Arthurian legend. Peretur--an intelligent, strong, and strong-willed young woman--leaves her snug home in the woods, disguises herself as a man, steals a spear, and sets off to join the Knights of the Round Table. As she bests even the best knights, such as Sir Kay and the Red Knight, in single combat, Peretur discovers that she is a girl who prefers girls and falls in with a powerful sorceress. With its rich, poetic prose, Griffith's story entwines nicely with the stories of Thomas Malory, T.H. White, and Mary Stewart.
Pub Date: April 19, 2022
Duration: 5 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250841391
Publisher: Macmillan 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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