Istanbul is a major character in this lean, intricate audiobook, which makes Maggi-Meg Reed's elegant evocation of atmosphere essential. She beautifully communicates place names, the pace, the smells, the lights and darks of Istanbul, where an American wife and mother named Catherine is deciding to leave her Turkish husband for her photographer/lover, neither of whom is going to like it. Istanbul, part in Europe, part in Asia, is half familiar, half rather frighteningly not. No one in the story is likable, certainly not the Americans; all are transactional, which is not to say uninteresting, though it makes for a rather cool and intellectual read. Comparisons with Graham Greene are apt, high praise, and Reed warms the text with an accomplished, nuanced, and sympathetic performance.
Pub Date: May 26, 2020
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593169735
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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