Will Watt and Mike Ortego provide the main narration of this novel about the multigenerational impact of the Armenian Genocide. The story blends the worlds of wrestling and backgammon with scenes of political intrigue and violence. Both narrators do not overemphasize the most devastating moments, focusing listeners' attention upon the effects of historical events on the course of everyday lives. Watt illuminates the tensions that arise from cousins Avo and Ruben's participation in Armenian causes. Ortego adeptly captures former wrestler Terry's canny but thoughtful tone as he reflects on managing Avo's wrestling career in the U.S. and on the loss of his younger brother. Mary Jane Wells reveals Avo's former girlfriend, Mina's unease with Ruben in the only chapter she narrates.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062989444
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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