Five outstanding narrators capture the beauty and despair of this haunting novel about a Cherokee family that is reckoning with the murder of their teenage son and brother. In the week before the anniversary of his death, Maria, portrayed by DeLanna Studi, tries to hold her family together. Her two adult children, Sonja (Katie Rich) and Edgar(Shaun Taylor-Corbett) wrestle with their own demons. Each narrator brings their character to life. Maria's voice is tired but warm. Edgar sounds frenzied and unmoored. Sonja's sections brim with steely determination. Tying it all together is the deep, assured voice of a Cherokee elder, portrayed by Gary Farmer, whose tales link the family to their past. This powerful intergenerational story carries many interlocking stories within it--tales of ancestors, ghosts, history, legend, memory, and the land itself.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062997579
Publisher: Harper 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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