Narrator Neil Shah brings alive a story of India's rich history. After seeing his mother's harsh life, Biren Roy dreams of transforming his native India into a place of equality and freedom. Biren becomes a champion of educational equality, challenging both British colonial policy and Indian tradition, eventually finding his salvation in the love of Maya, the daughter of a local educator. Though Shah overlooks much of the humor in the narrative, he crafts entirely distinct voices for each character, enlivening the complex world of early-twentieth- century India. He excels at tracing Biren's personal and spiritual evolution from ambitious civil servant to dejected outsider and captures his redemption through his love for Maya. Biren's dialogue holds such nuance that listeners will be transfixed as his story unfolds.
Pub Date: June 30, 2015
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781488200021
Publisher: Harlequin 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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