To convey the setting of this novel, narrator Bahni Turpin employs several regional Southern accents and a tone that reflects the oppressive heat and humidity of the Mississippi Delta. A mood of impending doom prevails as Billie James returns to claim a small inheritance from her late father, a renowned African-American poet who died in a mysterious accident when she was only 4. Adding to that mystery is her own unexplained disappearance on the same day--which she doesn't remember. Turpin lets a palpable sense of danger creep into her performance as the questions about what happened to Billie and her father unfold. Billie is engaging and curious, and Turpin reflects her developing maturity as secrets are revealed. Listeners may find fingernail imprints on their armrests at Billie's final confrontation.
Pub Date: June 25, 2019
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062917850
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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