Narrator Rachel Atkins conveys the heartbreak, pain, and confusion experienced by Sarajevans under siege during the first year of the Bosnian War in 1992. Artist Zora Koovi chooses to stay in Sarajevo even as family members flee, bombs begin to fall, and snipers wreak havoc from nearby rooftops and hills. Atkins provides a pitch-perfect performance, capturing Zora's love for her complex, cultured city and her growing despair at the brutal conditions she and other Bosnians endure--starvation, bitter cold, lack of electricity and running water, and never-ending raids. The world watches but does little to help, but even then, beauty, love, and connection provide sustenance. Author Morris delivers her author's note with dignity and gravitas, supplying additional insight into this impactful portrait of survival, ingenuity, and hope.
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593906996
Publisher: Random House 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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