This quiet, character-driven novel, set in Chile, features four principal characters, but only three have a voice. After suffering a fall, 80-year-old Vera, a famous, reclusive author, is in a coma, unable to communicate. Narrator Nicol Zanzarella performs the chapters told from the perspective of Emilia, a Franco-Chilean graduate student who's researching Vera's life. Robert Fass narrates the sections recounted by Vera's friend and neighbor, Daniel, a struggling architect, and by Horacio, an internationally known poet and ex-lover of Vera's. As the three await Vera's fate, they contemplate the past and reassess the future. Zanzarella's and Fass's performances complement each other in pacing, pronunciations, and mood, smoothing the transitions between viewpoints and enhancing the dreamlike atmosphere of this story about relationships, talent, and finding one's path.
Pub Date: June 5, 2018
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781684412037
Publisher: HighBridge 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
