This immersive audiobook exemplifies how a full cast can animate a work of fiction.
This speculative novel is exceptionally well performed. All the narrators capture the unique voices and distinct diction of these near-future souls. Kimberly Farr as Ari and James Aaron Oh as Sebastian are outstanding. The novel is set in the 2030s, just after the United States splinters into city-states and regional governments. The party at the center of the plot occurs in LA and presents many of the central characters—and their doppelgängers. Violence and fear hang over this dystopian world like a toxic mist. In the future, Paris consists of domes to separate the haves from the have-nots. Violent militias roam the U.S. People work for The Service, a secret police agency that watches all.
This immersive audiobook exemplifies how a full cast can animate a work of fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
Duration: 12 hrs, 29 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217406500
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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