Narrator Imogen Church turns this story about Martha Storm, a selfless, colorless librarian, into a compelling mystery. Martha was cursed with a sadistic father and a spineless mother who never defied him. Only her Nana Zelda encouraged her to use her imagination as a child. Now, with her family members are gone, Church credibly portrays a middle-aged spinster who is often taken advantage of, even by her friends. When Martha finds a book with stories she remembers from childhood and an inscription from Nana Zelda suggesting that the old woman may still be alive, Church's ingenuous enthusiasm takes Martha on a journey to new truths. Thanks to Church's performance, listeners remain fully invested as Martha discovers her own well-hidden talents, along with deeply buried family secrets. An engrossing listening experience.
Pub Date: March 26, 2019
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781488205880
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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