Diary entries, letters, and telegrams take listeners into the world of painter Vanessa Stephen (later Bell). Emilia Fox's portrayal of Vanessa is layered and intimate as she and her siblings gather the friends (Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, et al.) who will become the Bloomsbury Group. Fox is subtle and engrossing as Vanessa navigates love and loss as well as relationships with her family—especially her sister, the brilliant, tempestuous, troubled writer Virginia Woolf. Fox handles the bulk of the narrative, while the other actors read correspondence among her coterie; Julian Rhind-Tutt particularly stands out as an appealingly flamboyant Strachey. The plot veers occasionally into soap opera, but the portraits are so believable and their world of art and literature so lovingly drawn that fiction and history are indistinguishable.
Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2014
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780553398458
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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