Kirby Heyborne's top-notch narration distinguishes between the remembrances of Luca in 2027 and the bumbling 22-year-old he was during the turbulent period after the 2016 election. Hired as an intern at a prestigious New York magazine, Luca, an innocent from the Midwest, is easily seduced by the glitz and glamour of the big city. Heyborne highlights Luca's naïveté; his attraction to Zara, the magazine's only black employee; his awakening to social injustices; and his infatuation with the wealthy A-list couple Paula and Jason. In Luca's nostalgic look back, he reveals his embarrassing shallowness and the disastrous consequences of his inaction. Author Hermione Hoby's descriptions are spot-on, often wry, sometimes funny, and frequently cutting. Heyborne's skillfully nuanced performance makes listening to the audiobook the right choice.
Pub Date: July 20, 2021
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593413463
Publisher: Penguin 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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