The Cold War is heating up, JFK and Nixon are about to debate, and Mary van der Linden, wife of a hard-drinking, pill-taking British diplomat, falls in love with an American journalist. More than a romantic triangle, the novel explores the nature of morality and the tenuous threads of mortality that connect us to Time and to one another. Faulks colors the late '50s-early '60s with the brush of nostalgia. The events (pre-Camelot and the subsequent assassinations) seem wistfully uncomplicated. Steven Crossley's reading is intelligent, often interesting, but uninspired. As a result, the characters lack definition. Their interior monologues and flashbacks are never fully realized. Even so, the focus on recent American history and a sizzling love affair provide enough conflict and passion to make this a worthwhile listening experience.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
Duration: 13 hrs, 15 mins
Publisher: Clipper Audio/ Recorded Books
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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