Listeners will be glad to discover kindhearted vinyl devotee Frank, who has his own music shop in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood. His patrons are a cast of quirky, lonely characters who gather to receive his musical suggestions, always tailored perfectly to what they need to hear at that moment. When a mysterious woman shows up, Frank finds himself drawn to her but scared to emerge from his own solitude. Narrator Steven Hartley's raspy, unrefined, British accent is a natural fit for characters who are rough around the edges. His narration underscores the psychological states of the ragtag group--which range from contemplative to anxious to angry. The story and the narration complement each other and remind us that music can bring people together and allow them to heal.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525626213
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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