Adenrele Ojo narrates this oddly tantalizing novel by the acclaimed Black author Gayl Jones. In a series of vignettes, it follows the intertwined lives of three members of the Black elite: Catherine Shugar, an abstract artist and sculptor; Ernest, her husband, a respected science writer; and Amanda Wordlaw, a travel writer and onetime author of erotic fiction. It is the clear, sane voice of Amanda who tells the story and intrigues us with the antics of Catherine, who tries to murder her husband every time she is released from a mental institution. Ojo gives Catherine a frenetic, high-pitched voice that makes her seem girlish and charming. Ojo propels this story forward with her dramatic timing and wows listeners with characters who are unique and appalling yet captivating.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780807007235
Publisher: Beacon Press
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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