Notable German screenwriter Arango has produced a funny, thoughtful thriller. The protagonist is a fraud who is breathtakingly free of scruples--except when he mysteriously does the right thing. Corey Brill is the perfect narrator for Arango's audiobook although the plot is so intricate and full of surprises that it's sometimes difficult to feel sympathy for his colorful mob of characters. Arango's translator did a comprehensive job--one hardly remembers that the action is taking place in Germany. While Brill's strong voice is clear and expressive, like Arango's characters, he holds enough back to keep the listener guessing what will happen next. His pacing is suitably quick but always clear enough to follow, and he does an excellent job with some wonderful dialogue.
Pub Date: June 23, 2015
Duration: 7 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781442382602
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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