Elizabeth Berg's heartwarming performance of her follow-up to THE STORY OF ARTHUR TRULUV centers on the lives of Lucille, Iris, Monica, Abigail, and a host of well-characterized Mason, Missouri, personalities. Berg envelops listeners with companionable warmth as she recounts the women's search for love, validation, and new beginnings in their small town. Iris, desirous of a fresh start after personal disappointments, sounds cautiously optimistic as she establishes herself anew; Monica, a sweet-voiced waitress, struggles with unrequited love; and Abigail and her family, sensitively portrayed, are beset by disturbing news. Their interconnected stories, with whimsical pragmatist and baker extraordinaire Lucille at the hub, illuminate the everyday miracles of friendship. Despite occasional background noise, the production's neighborly atmosphere, hopeful tone, and relatable characters deliver a satisfying listening experience.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781501983535
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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