Hari Kunzru narrates his disturbing novel at a deliberate pace in an eerily calm tone that mimics his protagonist's diminishing mental state. Kunzru's softly intoned English accent gives this audiobook a sense of otherness. He reads flatly, and that fits the dystopian world his socially conscious antihero envisions. Set in Berlin, rural England, and Brooklyn, the plot unfolds as the protagonist's mind descends into paranoia. He becomes fixated on an alt-right filmmaker who unnerves him. The timing of the novel reveals the political heart of this dark story--it ends on election night 2016. Events of that night lead the, by then heavily medicated, narrator to say, "My madness is about to become everyone's madness."
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593291870
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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