Kimberly Farr lends her talents to the narration of Strout's third novel in her Amgash series, providing new insights on the life of writer Lucy Barton. While still mourning her second husband, Lucy agrees to accompany her first husband, William, on a trip to Maine, to investigate his shadowy family history. In straightforward and unadorned tones, Farr describes Lucy's reflections on her past, which intersect with and sometimes contradict William's recollections. Strout's spare prose is mirrored by Farr's nuanced narration, which reveals Lucy's vulnerabilities as well as her enduring strength. Farr ably captures the townspeople's broad accents and William's infuriating petulance, but it is her pitch-perfect depiction of Lucy--so damaged yet so forgiving--that makes for a truly affecting listening experience.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593416129
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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