Narrator Davina Porter adds spark to this collection of 15 short stories, which focus on various relationships and ask how well we really know those we are closest to. Porter's versatility is in the spotlight as she skillfully connects listeners to the playfulness of the title story, told by a swamp hen living in ancient Pompeii. Her skill is notable with the other stories as well, which involve a woman's nostalgia for her bohemian youth in the 1950s, the guarded responses a biographer elicits when interviewing a television actress's friends and husband, the tense undercurrent between a couple who are fixing up an old house with a dark past, and a man's surprise at learning the true nature of his third wife. Listeners will delight in Porter's melodic delivery and easy-to-understand British accent.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2017
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781501940484
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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