This audiobook is a dramatic dissection of one woman's psyche. Through richly detailed lyrical prose, listeners enter the mind of Mara, who is helpless and hapless, and living insecurely in a coastal town. Narrator Amy Rutherford manages to make this wounded heroine believable. The author has an intuitive feel for the refinement and subtlety of language. Listeners are not surprised when Mara's affair with her boss in a wine shop ends precipitously. There is something about Rutherford's voice that alerts listeners to Mara's continual failure to sustain what is generally regarded as a good life. There are memorable depictions in this production, such as the smooth, self-satisfied voice of the wine shop owner's wife. This is a language lover's audiobook.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
Duration: 4 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781705036044
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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