This fictional but plausible memoir features a lesbian mulatto servant who is accused of killing her master and mistress in 1825 London. Sara Collins narrates her own novel in a voice filled with resignation; her voice sounds upper-class English with Caribbean intonations. Frannie's terrible suffering is clear--she was once a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation who was forced participant in grisly pseudoscientific experiments and then was given to another degenerate scientist. Collins makes us care about Frannie. Narrator Roy McMillan's role is to read official documents and newspaper accounts. This story is slow at times and overcrowded with similes, but the narrative will move the listener, as will the hopeless, desolate voice of Frannie.
Pub Date: May 21, 2019
Duration: 12 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062930675
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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