Tom Lowe is broke, rudderless, and approaching toxic levels of bitterness as this audiobook opens. Once he proudly defined himself as a devoted husband, father, and carpenter; now, following an accident, he can't define himself at all. Dubus works narrative magic here. Without giving too much away, know that Tom's story is ultimately a satisfying one and Dubus navigates that transformation admirably. His heavy cadence captures Tom's despair in the audiobook's early chapters, and somehow--through both words and vocal nuances--he expertly depicts Tom's growth. As Tom's outlook brightens, Dubus's voice quietly lightens. Dubus artfully delivers dialogue, humor, sorrow, and Tom's personal meditations with depth and alacrity. The characters are all three-dimensional, and the pacing is steady, creating an outstanding performance of an excellent story.
Pub Date: June 6, 2023
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798889565406
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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