Guy Gunaratne narrates his audiobook, which is centered on the fractured life of its Syrian protagonist, Yayha Bas. We listeners are flies on the wall as Yayha's interrogator asks him to recount the actions that brought him to the present moment. Gunaratne delivers this wending tale about a poet turned revolutionary and then prisoner in a tender voice that makes us draw near. This lyrical story draws listeners closer and closer to the heart of Yayha's many questions about the world and its injustices. Gunaratne deftly escorts us through Yayha's ruminations. From his birth, through his brief childhood, and then his experience with the conflict in Syria, Yayha's poetic story is one that fans of world literature will embrace.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
Duration: 13 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593822494
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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