This audiobook draws listeners in slowly and holds on tight. Beautifully narrated by Hillary Huber, the story introduces an engaging protagonist and a compelling location. Emily, who is turning 40 and is questioning everything about her life after a miscarriage, has just inherited an abandoned summer camp with her husband. After moving there, she discovers an unexpected resident, Stella, a captivating, enigmatic 22-year-old, who charms everyone she meets. As Emily and Stella grow closer, Emily begins to reevaluate where she has come from and where she is going. As the story recounts one unforgettable summer, Huber shines both in her vivid descriptions of the camp and in her nuanced presentation of the characters. A complex and convincing portrayal of friendship, intimacy, and identity.
Pub Date: June 4, 2019
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781684574506
Publisher: HighBridge 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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