Words, their meanings and sounds, their actual and implied associations, and, in particular, their sometimes fraudulent appearance in dictionaries, provide the fuel for Williams's dazzling first novel, its imagination and wit here expertly enhanced for the ear. Kristin Atherton and Jon Glover, two highly talented narrators, alternate chapters. Each of the 26 is titled alphabetically with a single word intrinsic to that chapter. As the young, female, present-time narrator alternates with a mature, Victorian male, their rich counterpoint and interplay are brought to life in ways only suggested on the page. Fans of literary comedies will revel in this cunning tour de force. And audiobook fans of every kind will take note that this year's fiction begins with an inspired debut.
Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593348864
Publisher: Random House 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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