If ever a literary character's backstory needed to be told, it would be Miss Havisham's, and no one tells that story better than Sophie Ward in this eminently listenable audio. Consider the calculating string-puller in Dickens's GREAT EXPECTATIONS and imagine her as a wide-eyed girl: This makes for fascinating listening, and Ward's sweet yet complex performance of Catherine Havisham's perspective suits the development of the character without fail. Ward's proper British accent is appropriate but not overwhelming, and its nuances change subtly as Catherine becomes more aware of high society's ways, to say nothing of its cruelties. Thanks to Frame's imagination and Ward's narrative skill, one might come away with a better understanding of that woman left scarred by being left at the altar.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2014
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781427235275
Publisher: Macmillan 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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