This short story collection is a portrait of the island nation of Jamaica and her exiles in America. A talented cast, including Janina Edwards, Adenrele Ojo, Dominic Hoffman, and James Fouhey, creates the rich tapestry of these lives with their voices. The production's female narrators work to show the emotional struggles of immigrant women who are battling identity politics in New York. Hoffman's rich baritone has a joking tone as he explores a twin's jealousy of his brother's success. And Fouhey brings a melancholic undertone to the angst of a young man who is sent abroad by his mother and brought home years later, only to find they're strangers to each other. From story to story, listeners hear the hopes and heartbreaks of families separated by distance and regret.
Pub Date: July 24, 2018
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780525595908
Publisher: Random House 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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