Narrator Andrus Nichols quickly engages listeners with this story of family and personal truths amid a hardscrabble existence in the High Plains of Montana. Her rough-edged timbre and soft cadence create an intimate atmosphere as Alma, a successful Seattle lawyer, is called home after her sister is found dead in the streets of Billings. As Alma teases out the tangle of Vicky's drunken, drug-addicted life, she unintentionally exposes family secrets. Using careful pacing and limited dramatization, Nichols emphasizes both the beauty of La Seur’s prose and Alma's deeply emotional journey to self-acceptance. Although the plot involves the mystery of Vicky’s death, the novel’s focus is the myriad ways that home and place intertwine to shape us. Nichols's performance is outstanding.
Pub Date: July 29, 2014
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062333520
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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