Patchett reminds us that love endures.
Patchett narrates her latest gem with nuance and feeling as a chance encounter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art leads Daphne to revisit her past. She and her husband are enjoying their day in the city when Jonathan notices, and then confronts, an elderly man who seems to be following them. Eddie was Daphne and her sister Leda’s beloved stepfather for barely a year before their mother banished him and he disappeared from their lives. Patchett’s delivery is smooth as Daphne reconnects with Eddie and faces the trauma that upended their lives. Her pacing and inflection express the heartfelt emotions of the most minor characters, and listeners even get to hear her sing snippets of the Yale Whiffenpoofs song.
Patchett reminds us that love endures.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
Duration: 10 hrs, 44 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063511668
Publisher: Harper Audio
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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