JACOB'S ROOM

JACOB’S ROOM, a classic modernist text, is more about language and the art of fiction than it is actually a story, which means the narrator has to be as alive to the pleasure of the exact right word as a thriller narrator is to the power of a car bomb. Juliet Stevenson is a perfect actor for the challenge. Her voice is lovely, her diction clean and precise, and she is so sensitive to nuance, to the rhythm of Woolf’s sentences, that she communicates her own excitement at Woolf’s achievement in a way that delights and even instructs. There is much beauty here, owing equally to Woolf’s art and Stevenson’s, and the ending is indelibly moving. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2014]