David Crellin narrates this gloomy novel set in 2001 in Northern England, featuring sheep farmers Steve Elliman and William Herne. Their flocks are suffering from deadly foot-and-mouth disease and must be euthanized, a calamity that is destroying other generations-old family farms, as well. In the aftermath, the dour men rustle healthy flocks in an attempt to survive. With the addition of Elliman's affair with Herne's wife, the novel can be compared to a contemporary Western with questionable heroes. Crellin's thick accent adds local ambiance but challenges listeners' comprehension, as does the local terminology laced throughout the story. Crellin authentically depicts painful decisions, gut-wrenching descriptions of killing sheep and burning carcasses, and other aspects of the struggle to survive against all odds in the Cumbrian fells.
Pub Date: June 4, 2024
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781797176796
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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