Golden Voice narrator January LaVoy brings empathy and believable characterizations to this multigenerational saga by the author of the bestselling novel BLACK CAKE. Years ago, Ebby Freeman's brother was killed and a family heirloom shattered in a still unsolved crime. In the present, Ebby, who's from an affluent Black family, has been jilted by her white fiancé. After bolting to Europe, she must piece together all that is broken to solve the long-ago crime and put her life back together. Always warm and sympathetic, LaVoy adjusts her pace and tone to signal shifts as the story moves between the pre-Civil War South and the current day. Coupled with realistic portrayals of everyone from children and teens to old men, the result is an engrossing audio experience.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593505236
Publisher: Random House 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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