Harden’s masterful delivery brings Barbara to life.
In Lavery’s latest novel, 58-year-old Barbara laments losing her ninth and last remaining best friend—who came to dinner, delivered her list of grievances, and walked out without eating. Marcia Gay Harden is spot on, delivering Barbara’s unfiltered voice as she shares her story, revisiting the past relationships that have defined her life. Harden lets us hear Barbara’s self-pity, disbelief, and ignorance of her lack of interpersonal skills as, over the years, these special friends desert her and she has to figure out how to find and nurture a new best friendship. As an almost-60 divorcée with an estranged adult son, can Barbara learn from her past and build a true and equal friendship?
Harden’s masterful delivery brings Barbara to life.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
Duration: 7 hrs, 37 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063425910
Publisher: Harper Audio
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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