These meditative stories will appeal to the patient listener.
Ashland, New Hampshire provides a quiet backdrop for this subdued audiobook. Six different characters share their points of view, with Emmy Bean voicing the female townsfolk and Evan Sears performing the roles of their male counterparts. Both narrators have earnest, personable voices that suit their respective characters. For the most part, both Bean and Sears imbue each individual with an appropriate tone and energy. The interconnected stories, though, have an element of stream of consciousness that can be confusing in the audio format. The placid performances are fine, but without the benefit of the written word to look back on, the content lacks a strong direction and often feels choppy.
These meditative stories will appeal to the patient listener.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
Duration: 5 hrs, 46 mins
DD ISBN: 9798889661986
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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