Narrator Kimberly Farr enhances Anne Tyler's evocative novel, with its delightful fly-on-the-wall conversations. Listeners meet the Garrett family of Baltimore, who take their only vacation in 1959, an event that showcases their diverse personalities. The novel concludes in the 2020s. Chapters alternate among the characters' third-person viewpoints, which Farr imbues with distinction. As their children leave home, self-centered Mercy moves into her nearby studio to paint, while remote yet loving Robin hardly notices--or is in denial. The family has little contact with each other until Robin throws a 50th anniversary party, exposing secrets and unfulfilled dreams. The conclusion is beautifully moving. This is, arguably, Tyler's best work to date, and because Farr so capably fleshes out the entire Garrett family, audio is the unquestionable choice for maximum enjoyment.
Pub Date: March 22, 2022
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593551424
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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