Paul Rhys draws the listener in with his measured, detached narration of Rachel Joyce's latest novel. Moving smoothly between time frames, he slowly exposes the layers connecting the past and present. In the past, James Lowe and Byron Hemmings were classmates, drawn into friendship by their mutual quirkiness. In the present, Jim (a third character) is a loner who struggles to readjust to the world he has to re-enter when the sanatorium that has been his home for years closes. Rhys keeps his narration impersonal, recounting events and describing characters without emotion. Curiosity about what connects James, Byron, and Jim and how that connection will be revealed keeps the listener engaged. An intriguing story that makes one wonder at the subtle ways we are connected to our world.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
Duration: 11 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780804164153
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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