Heavier fare for a light season

Nurse Kate Zweig is a beautiful young Englishwoman married to a German surgeon during World War I. The story begins in 1918, when Kate and husband, Horst, are mistaken for spies and flee a field hospital at the front lines. We follow them through a life of misery and despair. This is not for the faint of heart, as the starvation, paranoia, fear, and hatred in Germany following the war left a citizenship that was brutalized, and often brutal.

We next meet Kate during the next World War. She is a widow, living in London, and about to embark on a love affair with Claus Murphy, an American exile working as a filmmaker and a British double agent. Nothing is as it seems. Layers of lies and mistrust are painted with fear and the despair of people living too long with hardship.

Usually, when a audio novel has two protagonists and is using two narrators, male and female leads, as it were, are assigned by gender. In this case, Anne Flosnik reads the first part of the story set in Germany, and Michael Page reads the section set in England. While this works for the first part of the audio book, which is only about Kate, it flows less smoothly when both characters are in the same section. Also, Flosnik has a nasally voice and a more abrupt, less polished style than Page. Both offer a range of voices, which help us keep the characters straight, but Page’s sound more realistic. He gives Claus Murphy a realistic accent, as he sounds like an American whose accent has a slight British inflection.

Moving back in time to Salem in the 17th century and Massachusetts in the 1990s, “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,’’ by Katherine Howe, tells the story of an (almost) modern-day scholar and the book of spells she discovers while doing research. The story itself is not all that new, and doesn’t reveal much about the Salem witch trials we haven’t heard before. Well, except that maybe the Puritans had it correct in the case of the fictional Deliverance Dane. An interesting aside: According to Howe’s website, her family settled in Essex in 1620 and she is directly related to two of the accused witches, Elizabeth Proctor and Elizabeth Howe.

The story is fun and perfect for the summer, spooky and intriguing without being too taxing. It veers between a Harvard doctoral candidate whose family is rooted in the North Shore and the original inhabitants of the village during the witch trials. It is smarter than most summer audiobooks, but contains all the elements for spellbinding entertainment, from romance to mystery to an undercurrent of creepiness.

At first narrator Katherine Kellgren comes across as somewhat too arch, a little too theatrical. She relaxes into her performance as the book progresses and sounds more natural. However, she does not consistently give the characters different voices. Some have almost ridiculous Boston Brahmin accents while others sound no different from her regular narrative voice. The production is very nicely produced, as pretty snippets of music are used to indicate a new chapter or a shift back in time to the trials.

Published posthumously, “My Father’s Tears’’ is a sublime collection of 18 short stories by John Updike that look at foreign travel as well as lives lived in New England, where Updike spent most of is life, or Pennsylvania, where he was raised.

In typical Updike fashion, he took ordinary events and made then worth hearing about. The title story begins with a boy recounting the only time he saw his father cry. The father was seeing him off to college and was mourning that “the boy I had been was dying, if not already dead’’ and knew that they would now see less and less of each other. Years later the grown man hears the news of his father’s death and finds he is unable to cry. “My father’s tears had used up mine.’’

This was Updike’s 12th collection of short stories, and the prose flows seamlessly, beautifully, and in typical Updike fashion, manfully, except for “Varieties of Religious Experience,’’ which recounts the lives of four people on Sept. 11, 2001 and is the weakest of the lot. These are stories about average people, almost all men, each told with grace and style. Especially poignant is “The Walk with Elizanne,’’ in which an elderly gentleman runs into an old flame at his 50th high school reunion and tries for days afterward to recall a walk they once took that she recalled so vividly, a walk that changed her life. Updike points out, with subtle yet chilling clarity, how fleeting time can be.

The weak spot in this collection is narrator Luke Daniels, who is mediocre. He has an unexceptional, Middle American kind of voice, and he sometimes slips into a monotone that does nothing to enhance Updike’s fiction. His reading is straight in that he does not attempt voices or accents, and that in itself is fine. But he is, essentially, boring. It is too bad that the publisher could not find someone who could better articulate this fine writer’s swan song.

Rochelle O’Gorman is a syndicated audiobook critic.