Narrator Aiden Kelly takes listeners into the Hilltop Nursing Home, where curmudgeonly widower Joel Monroe is unhappily living out his last years. Kelly injects Joel's voice with anger, especially when he's railing against the people he resents for taking his independence away. Kelly expertly injects secondary characters with unique voices, bringing their personalities to life. From the deep, sonorous tones of Mighty Jim to the friendly voices of Una and nurses Liam and Angelica, the sad confusion of daughter Eva, and the no-nonsense proclamations of "The Rhino," Kelly balances humor and pathos in this poignant look at the sidelining of our elderly. And when former soap opera star Frank de Selby enters Joel's life, their adventures and dialogue are filled with mischief, mutual respect, and affection.
Pub Date: June 25, 2019
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781488206740
Publisher: Harlequin 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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