Using a crisp French accent, narrator Jane Copland embodies Sister Johanna Marie, the featured character in this introspective Icelandic novel. The French nun tells a story that moves fluidly between her years as a college student in Paris in the 1960s; her investigation of abuse at a Catholic school in Reykjavik, ending in a priest's fall from a bell tower in 1987; and her return to Iceland 30 years later to confront the boy, now a man, who witnessed it. Sister Johanna Marie's lifelong struggles with love and faith arise from her unspoken passion for her college roommate, a subplot that overshadows the mystery surrounding the priest's death. Copland's tone evokes the spirit of a woman who is full of sincerity and regret despite her feisty edge.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
Duration: 7 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062958174
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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