Narrator Elisabeth Rodgers gives an extraordinary performance of this perceptive family saga. Set mainly in rural Virginia during the first half of the twentieth century, this exceptional audiobook is composed of linked vignettes that beautifully reveal one family's poignant history. The point of view shifts among the seven adult Shaw children-- Wendy, Sam, Jack, Maeve, Lane, Henry and Bette--and their kindhearted father, Jim. Rodgers provides unique and memorable portrayals of each family member, including several children. While the repercussions of two traumatic events are imprinted in this family's history, it is Rodgers's subtly dramatic pacing and exquisite depictions of everyday struggles, joys, and tribulations that make this audiobook sing. Rodgers's exceptional narration enhances Kauffman's penetrating writing to create a must-listen.
Pub Date: March 1, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781705028513
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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