This slow-burn novel features two brilliant Harvard undergraduates who are caught up in the intoxicating allure of start-up culture when their biotech brainchild promises to change the world. Zoe, portrayed by Helen Laser, is born into an elite family and destined for greatness. Laser's boldly confident tone is perfect for the sharp, privileged young woman who is studying the relationship between DNA and consciousness. Laser also portrays Jack, another gifted student. But Jack is mysterious. With charming sheepishness, Zoe identifies him as her only real intellectual match. It isn't until Shahjehan Khan comes in for the audiobook's emotional third act that listeners truly get to know Jack. Khan reenergizes listeners after a critical cliff-hanger and a new empathy for these young visionaries emerges as Laser brings this novel to an unforgettable close.
Pub Date: June 3, 2025
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250401724
Publisher: Macmillan 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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