A worthy, emotionally intelligent listen that benefits from the context of the first book.
You may need to take notes to keep track of the conversations between Eily and Stephen, scattered across the first 18 months of their cohabitation in a new apartment. Author/narrator McBride keeps things straight with sensitive tonal shifts that parse timelines. In this sequel to The Lesser Bohemians (2016), we pick up with the couple in a tangle of sheets and dialogue. Present-day flash-forwards soon reveal yet another chasm for this complicated relationship. McBride spends the next several hours closing that gap, aiming her signature psychological acuity and deep tenderness at the trauma that so often informs our decisions. While the audio performance is thoughtful and assured, the novel doesn’t easily stand alone.
A worthy, emotionally intelligent listen that benefits from the context of the first book.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781038038944
Publisher: Bolinda
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 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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