Mathan’s sincere performance gives this novel the feel of an honest, heartfelt memoir.
This realistic and timely novel draws inspiration from real-life journalists Christiane Amanpour and Sylvia Poggioli. Narrator Sneha Mathan gives reporter Rita Das a realistic voice with a full range of human emotions as she finds herself pulled between the needs of her family and friends and her own passion to achieve her dream of becoming a successful “serious” journalist. Her inner conversations convey love, defiance, doubt, regret, and frustration while always expressing confidence in her skills as a journalist. Rita fights her editors’ gender bias, balances personal and professional demands, and uses her journalistic skills to give Americans balanced, honest, humane, accurate pictures of the post 9/11 world.
Mathan’s sincere performance gives this novel the feel of an honest, heartfelt memoir.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
Duration: 9 hrs, 9 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063289444
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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