Listeners will be slowly drawn into the story of Melmoth the Witness, aided by Jan Cramer's deliberate and eerie narration. Helen Franklin, a briskly voiced woman living in present-day Prague with an eccentric older woman as her roommate, allows herself few pleasures as punishment for a transgression she committed decades ago. When a scholar friend leaves Helen documents he collected as he obsessed over legends of Melmoth, the witness of humanity's darkest deeds, Helen finds a name for her own haunted feeling. Cramer narrates the documents of atrocities around the world and through the centuries with subtle accents, leading the listener through tales of evil acts and complicity. Cramer amps up the drama in the final act, leaving listeners shivering and wondering what they themselves have just witnessed.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062856432
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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