Nigerian author Atogun's debut novel is difficult to categorize. It's primarily a story of survival with elements of allegory, folk tale, and just a touch of magic. Prentice Onayemi's lilting African English adds its own melody as he narrates musician Taduno's struggles to reclaim his voice and his music, which he lost under an oppressive regime. The slightest modulations of volume and tone allow Onayemi to capture Taduno's anguish and anger as he wrestles with the choice of saving his imprisoned lover and himself, or saving his beloved country. Atogun's dark picture of life under authoritarian rule is leavened by the hope Taduno embodies as he upholds music as a powerful weapon of defiance. Onayemi's lyrical presentation of this short novel offers an intriguing choice for adventurous listeners.
Pub Date: March 7, 2017
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524756529
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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