Narrators Daphne Kouma and Amira Ghazalla work together to create this intergenerational and multicultural story of love and loss in war-torn Cyprus. The pair represent Defne and her daughter, Ada, two women who grew up in very different environments. Kouma and Ghazalla give a dreamy feel to this novel, which is first set on an idyllic island and then moves to the urban environment of London. Kouma portrays the young Defne as she falls in love with Kostas, a man who is forbidden because he is Greek. Listeners will soak up Kouma's delivery of the figurative language that depicts the lovers' trysts beneath a watchful fig tree. Ghazalla elicits sympathy for Ada, who is trying to trace her roots. Fans of Shafak's work will fall in love all over again.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
Publisher: N/A
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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