Tanya Eby performs this unusual fictionalized biography of the Brontë family, particularly Anne, Charlotte, and Emily and their brother, Bramwell. She acts out the various vignettes that imagine the Brontës' lives as children, teens, and then adult writers. The stories are set in time periods that range from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth (long past their lifetimes) and into the 21st century. Eby shifts her sunny voice to reflect the children bouncing with joy, drooping with hunger, and groaning with sorrow as their father is overwhelmed by penury and caring for six children after his wife dies in childbirth. Eby uses a neutral American accent throughout, allowing listeners to ponder anachronisms, contemporary language, and the veracity of this creatively constructed work.
Pub Date: July 11, 2023
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781696612692
Publisher: HighBridge 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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