This quirky, gentle tale of the friendship between a Japanese man and his beloved pet is told by Nana the cat. The audiobook is more poignant and less ridiculous than it sounds. George Blagden narrates with a quiet formality suitable for this story, translated from Japanese, and especially for the dignified feline's point of view. Blagden portrays Nana's initial disdain at being adopted by Satoru, who provides care when Nana is hit by a car. When Satoru and Nana embark on an adventurous road trip around Japan, Blagden narrates Nana's observations with humor and sarcasm. His occasional delivery of cat sounds is amusing and suitably sparse. When Nana realizes the purpose of his travels with Satoru, his grateful reflections reveal his love for his treasured human.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781984827302
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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