Hanya Yanagihara's long-awaited third novel is a sprawling epic that refuses easy categorization. It consists of three distinct sections, each set 100 years apart in different versions of America. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini expertly voices David, a wealthy young man in a homophobia-free 1890s New York, who falls in love with a poor music teacher. Kurt Kanazawa's melancholic voice amplifies the pain and ambivalence of another David, a Hawaiian man living with his older white lover in 1990s New York, who is reflecting on his fraught relationship with his father, voiced by Feodor Chin. The last section, set in a bleak dystopian future, concerns a grandfather (BD Wong) and his granddaughter (Catherine Ho). All five narrators give superb performances, bringing listeners deep inside these complex emotional lives. Wong's performance merits a particular mention. This is a once-in-a-lifetime listen.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
Duration: 28 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593507575
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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