Genevieve Gaunt's narration allows listeners to enter the hearts of the Rosenthals, a Jewish family living in London after WWII. Initial scenes describe the dying patriarch, Yosef, a Holocaust survivor. Though his appearance is brief, his impact on the family is convincing because of Gaunt's depiction of his age, accent, and authority. Yosef's death yields to the family's concerns about the mystical preoccupations of middle daughter Elsie, whose youth Gaunt conveys in a singsong intonation. The novel then switches viewpoints, time periods, and main characters and shifts from the first to the third person. Regardless, Gaunt keeps listeners engaged, tracking the curious qualities of all five of the dysfunctional Rosenthal family members. Gaunt's portrayals and dynamic scenes allow the characters' realities to depict weighty issues such as Jewish mysticism.
Pub Date: March 19, 2024
Duration: 9 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781797176581
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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