Alex Jennings provides a sensitive narration of Perry's multilayered novel, a meditation on loneliness and the fragility of human connections, as seen through the motif of a comet's recurring orbits. With a thoughtful air, Jennings tells the interconnected stories of columnist Thomas Hart, a closeted gay man who lives in the village of Aldleigh; Maria Vaduva, a nineteenth-century astronomer who is rumored to haunt a local manor; and Thomas's godchild, Grace Macaulay, a prickly girl who seeks intimacy with a classmate. Perry's intricate prose and Jennings's measured, somewhat formal tone work in tandem, blurring the boundaries between the past and the present and underlining the cyclical nature of human interactions. While the densely packed narrative requires careful listening, patient listeners will find much to ponder.
Pub Date: June 4, 2024
Duration: 13 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780063352643
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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