A layered, affecting listen.
This audiobook follows a young woman whose tightly controlled life begins to strain under the weight of a recent loss and the growing pressure of dealing with a conservative activist who disrupts the fragile calm of her library job. The story blends humor with emotional honesty, capturing the exhausting push-pull of wanting connection while feeling overwhelmed by her own thoughts and her fierce sense of social justice. Natalie Naudus delivers a standout performance, bringing the protagonist's guarded vulnerability into sharp focus. Her subtle tonal shifts make every interaction feel immediate, and her steady pacing deepens both the humor and the anguish. Naudus' nuanced delivery brings every emotional shift into sharp, resonant focus.
A layered, affecting listen.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
Duration: 7 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668138540
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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