Imogen Church's performance of Jones's audiobook is a master class in characterization. Listeners will be drawn in both by the compelling story of family, virtue, and greed and by Church's ability to achieve the sound of a full-cast production all by herself. The story involves Bea and Dan, a British couple who dip into their meager savings to take a vacation. Their first stop is a visit with Bea's brother, Alex, who is struggling to maintain a French hotel. This fateful visit begins a series of revelations about Bea's wealthy family, Alex's true behavior, and the seductive power of money. When Alex disappears mysteriously, secrets begin to come to light. Church's performance throughout is humorous, suspenseful, and, ultimately, harrowing, a perfect fit for an audiobook not to miss.
Pub Date: June 25, 2019
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062931221
Publisher: Harper 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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