From the moment listeners enter the cottage with Agathe, Lagelée reveals the smoldering tension.
Narrator Elisabeth Lagelée is the perfect choice for this moody and atmospheric work translated from French. Sisters Agathe and Véra reunite at the family’s dilapidated stone cottage in the French countryside to dispose of possessions before its sale and demolition. Lagelée’s French is perfect when appropriate but also reflects Agathe’s years in New York City. The pace is slow, and Lagelée's quiet, breathy delivery hints at insecurity and invisible trauma. Agathe and Véra gingerly navigate nine days spent unpacking the memories of a lifetime, their parents no longer with them but still constant companions.
From the moment listeners enter the cottage with Agathe, Lagelée reveals the smoldering tension.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
Duration: 3 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668148839
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 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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