Narrator Will Damron was paired with author Scott Spencer for Spencer's best-known novel, ENDLESS LOVE. Damron is a prolific and versatile performer who is also reliably steady and consistent. He demonstrates the balance of qualities necessary for this particular novelist and this particular novel, both of which would be easy to overplay. Spencer is an eloquent prose stylist, unsurpassed in capturing romantic longing and rapture, and especially adept in the use of figurative language. Here the story thread is a gay man's lifelong passion for his straight friend, a situation essentially frustrating and difficult to externalize but performed here with conviction, energy, and restraint. This is a rather joyless book, but Spencer's prose makes it stimulating listening for its descriptions alone.
Pub Date: June 16, 2020
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063006140
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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