Rieger's family saga is satisfyingly rich with complex characters and tangled relationships. Narrator Kimberly Farr's straightforward, crisply paced delivery keeps the text moving and the listener on track throughout. Rupert and Eleanor Falkes and their five handsome sons are wealthy Manhattan's golden family. Then Rupert dies, and the picture of perfection begins to crumple. Farr offers a reasonable British accent for transplant Rupert but wisely employs simple tone and inflection changes to differentiate between the many other characters. As buried secrets emerge, toppling long-held family truths, Farr conveys the emotional intensity without resorting to drama. Although some of the events challenge credulity, and some listeners may find intimate scenes too explicit, Rieger's story is intriguing, and Farr's masterful presentation makes it difficult to step away.
Pub Date: May 23, 2017
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524773816
Publisher: Random House 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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