Author Sarah Winman narrates her latest novel, which is about two boys who meet as tweens and become lifelong friends. Ellis, who quits school early to take the factory job his father insists on, and Michael, a free spirit who embraces life and follows his heart, make an unlikely pair, but their shared pain forges a strong bond. Winman's performance creates a dreamlike atmosphere that is appropriate for the central viewpoint: that of middle-aged Ellis reflecting on his loves and losses while facing an uncertain future. The prose is beautifully rendered, but Winman's inability to differentiate her characters while narrating prevents the listener from becoming immersed in this heartbreaking story. The novel, which examines social and family expectations, personal identity, loneliness, loss, and new beginnings, is best read in print.
Pub Date: May 15, 2018
Duration: 4 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525590828
Publisher: Penguin 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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