WWII atrocities are dramatized through the relationship between the English widow of a German surgeon and an exiled American with German roots. The lovers' terror, loyalties, and entanglements take place amid the appalling history that is woven into their daily lives. Anne Flosnik's crisp enunciation serves as a striking counterpoint to vivid descriptions of Nazi concentration camps and wartime battlefields. Her portrayals of Kate, the widow, and other characters are so realistic that they could be mistaken for the work of a full cast. Michael Page's bravery as Charles, the American, is audible through his stoic narration of the brutality he witnesses while spying for the British. The struggle for survival and the tension between collaboration and loyalty are the themes of this novel, which is reminiscent of the work of Graham Greene.
Pub Date: June 1, 2009
Duration: 12 hrs
Publisher: Brilliance 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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