In the English town of Noon Sun, jeweler Benedict Stone is lamenting the demise of his marriage and obsessing over how to win back his wife, Estelle, as his teenaged niece, Gemma, from America arrives. Can Gemma help Benedict face past worries and help mend his marriage? Narrator James Langton's interpretation of this story is enchanting. Forty-something Benedict's stiff and nervous British speech patterns and Gemma's American teen enthusiasm and angst are delivered flawlessly. The listener connects with Estelle's frustration over Benedict's need for the perfect family while feeling her pain that she cannot provide it for him. Langston's ability to verbalize male and female characters with equal perceptiveness adds dimension to this humorous and heartfelt story. Patrick begins each chapter explaining gemstones and their meanings, adding texture to the book.
Pub Date: May 16, 2017
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781488202957
Publisher: Harlequin 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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