Narrators Nyasha Hatendi and Sibongile Mlambo create a rich vocal tapestry for this historical novel. We trace the journey of Africans who are carrying explorer David Livingstone's body across the continent in order to return it to England for burial. Hatendi and Mlambo alternate between the main characters, Jacob and Halima, who make the perilous trip with a retinue of 69 men, women, and children. They bring front and center the brave Africans who worked to accomplish the impossible, traversing hostile territories in memory of someone they came to respect, admire, and love. As Jacob, Hatendi speaks with the confidence of an orator, infusing the character with dignity not readily given to colonial subjects. Mlambo brings out Halima's spiritedness, which is unexpected from an African woman of that time.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781508295556
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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