This atmospheric, otherworldly, splendidly performed novel has a serious premise: the cost of greed. K.J. Boone, a rapacious oilman at the end of his life, is visited by ghosts. The three main narrators are splendid. Judy Greer, as the youthful Jill "Doll" Blaine, the wraith tasked with Boone's exit, plays the role with empathy, remarkable pace, and just the right tone. MacLeod Andrews performs the Frenchman, the unforgiving second ghost, more broadly but persuasively. Stephen Root captures the onetime oil baron's unrepentant attitude. Root characterizes him as a man who never questions himself but knows that others do. Cameos from other standout narrators--Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, Rebecca Lowman, and Saunders himself--add to the experience. This brief and brilliant audiobook is compelling and wildly imaginative.
Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217290192
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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