Narrator Jennifer Pickens nails the sharp, witty tone of this novel set in academia. Robbie, an MFA student nearing graduation, is working on her creative writing thesis, focusing on the theme of infidelity. She is secretly basing it on her advisor, Simone, and Simone's husband, Ethan, who both work in the English department. Ethan is having an affair with the department's secretary, Abigail, while Simone becomes entangled in an emotional affair with Robbie. Told through Robbie's thesis, the audiobook unpacks topics of marriage, power, and betrayal. Pickens keeps listeners guessing about what is real and what is invented. Her sometimes detached, sometimes biting delivery makes for a quick yet layered and entertaining listen.
Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668649411
Publisher: Hachette 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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