Narrator Grover Gardner and poet-novelist Paulette Jiles are a dazzling combination. This accomplished picaresque novel is set in post-Civil War Texas, a place and time Jiles owns. It's historical fiction of the highest order, transporting the listener to a distant culture and making it both exotic and piercingly familiar. Her tale is in a period style, the story of a rough-cut young hero making his way in a lawless world with talent and a courageous heart. Gardner brings excitement and experience to creating the sounds and voices of Simon's world as he strives against liars, grifters, and bullies to win freedom and love with an indentured immigrant girl. Pairing high-voltage adventure with passages of exquisitely beautiful writing, Gardner and Jiles leave you cheering.
Pub Date: April 14, 2020
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062966773
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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