Three Irish narrators deliver this literary thriller with classy Irish accents and close attention to characterization. Kinlough appears to be the perfect Irish tourist town, but listeners discover it has secrets involving corruption, revenge, and murder. When a wedding brings longtime friends Mush, Joe, and Helen back together, they reminisce about the past, including the horrendous Halloween of 2003, and talk about current happenings, as well. Frank Blake narrates Mush's chapters, portraying him as gentle, introverted, and sensitive. Moe Dunford animates Joe, a rock star who is spoiled and selfish but loyal to his friends. Seána Kerslake portrays Helen, who is repressed, methodical, and determined to learn what happened to her friend Kala 15 years earlier.
Pub Date: July 25, 2023
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593745854
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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