Allan Corduner superbly narrates this wryly humorous and deftly observed audiobook featuring two 90-something characters, Beryl and Shimi. Beryl is a challenging woman with a domineering and abrasive manner; she refers to her caregivers as Euphoria and Nastya. Corduner succeeds in depicting all the facets of her complex character, including her severe memory lapses. The gentle Shimi is portrayed in a self-effacing tone that shades his deep shame over a childhood incident. Employing authentic-sounding Eastern European and African accents, Corduner also infuses the caregivers with lively spirits tempered by a strong measure of fortitude. The story requires some patience as Beryl and Shimi don't meet until halfway through the audiobook, but the wait is well rewarded by their late-in-life special friendship.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
Duration: 9 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593150269
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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