A BEND IN THE STARS

This audiobook is not beautifully written, but two accomplished narrators do everything they can to make it gripping listening. Granted, it is not easy to make the calculations of relativistic physics (around which much of the story revolves) exciting, but there is a great deal of chasing around western Russia in 1914. Plummer, narrating the chapters from female points of view, and Ballerini, taking the males, use their skills to bring out every bit of drama. They are especially good at transforming the characters, who are fairly flat as written, into reasonable facsimiles of human beings. There are also train rides, fights, narrow escapes, anti-Semitism, plagiarism, and photographs of a total eclipse. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2019]