Eileen Stevens provides the main narration of this relatable family story, which is set in New York City and Maine during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fine assistance is provided by Joe Knezevich and Sarah Naughton. Pete and Alice, and their young daughters, Sophia and Iris, leave New York City for their vacation home in small-town Maine. Some locals are less than welcoming, and their confinement brings to a boil the tensions between Pete and Alice due to Pete's infidelity. Stevens masterfully conveys Alice's emotional turmoil as she rebuilds her confidence and determination. Knezevich expresses the lack of confidence underlying Pete's focused persona. Naughton's depictions of Sophia and Iris add depth to this portrait of a family in crisis during a time of national crisis.
Pub Date: July 4, 2023
Duration: 7 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063242838
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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