This is an audiobook that grips the listener from the opening sentence and gets even better as the story progresses, all because the engaging performances of narrators Johnny Heller, Karen White, Kathleen Early, and Keith Szarabajka complement Swanson’s compelling psychological thriller. While an ensemble cast could have overwhelmed this book, these narrators enhance the story by creating distinct and memorable personas of its many psychopaths. From the moment Ted Severson and Lily Kintner meet on a transatlantic flight and begin playing a seemingly fatal game of psychological chess, the production shines. It’s hard to say which performance is best; however, Kathleen Early’s seemingly emotionless presentation of Lily's complex character stands out among the narrators’ stellar presentations.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781504610612
Publisher: Blackstone 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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