A wedding, a moonlit midnight drive home, and young friends—reckless and high, naïve and invincible. The night ends with a tragedy that will affect them all for the rest of their lives, defining their romantic and family relationships, friendships, and self-esteem. Renée Raudman provides an intuitive narration that escorts the listener into the future that follows that fateful night, recounting sexual encounters, broken marriages, friends supporting friends, internalized guilt, joys, and sorrows. Raudman manages to make relatable the ordinariness of daily life and enlivens the characters’ deepest thoughts and obsessive love chatter. Raudman reveals how a traumatic event can trigger twists and turns, causing those who experience it to confuse love and hate, passion and longing, and obsession and personal satisfaction.
Pub Date: March 6, 2012
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: Tantor Media
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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