Sophie's Choice by William Styron (2007, Abridged, Compact Disc)

Styron’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece flits back and forth across time and space from war-torn Poland and the Nazi death camps to rural Virginia and the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, examining, through the lives of its three principal characters, the seeds of racial and religious intolerance in even its most benign and comic manifestations. One of the most important novels of the past century to look absolute evil in the face, "Sophie’s Choice" is also quite approachable, relying far more upon humor, irony and sentiment than upon politics to amplify its theme. It is narrated in retrospect by Stingo, then a naïve 22-year old Southern virgin with literary (and libidinous) ambitions, and it recounts his life-altering friendship over the summer of 1947 with Sophie, a beautiful Polish Catholic Auschwitz survivor, and her mercurial Jewish lover, Nathan.

William Hope’s performance is exceptional. A Canadian himself, his assorted Southern, European and Brooklyn accents do strike an occasional false note, but this is more than compensated for by his pacing and his uncanny ability to get inside of the psyche of every character and to reveal each one as a complex, unique individual. Strong sexual content.