An all-star cast of narrators lends their voices to the telling of Imbolo Mbue's much-anticipated second novel, which recounts the devastation wrought by American oil on a small African village. A chorus of voices details the tragic consequences when oil giant Pexton starts work near the sleepy village of Kosawa. As the land and water are poisoned and the children sicken and die, the villagers decide to fight back, aware that they are hopelessly outmatched but still determined to speak out. Each narrator tells the story from a different perspective--some angry, some naïve, some weary--all contributing to a powerful, multifaceted performance. Listeners will be heartbroken but roused by the villagers' collective ferocity, bravery, and, above all, their enduring hope that one day justice will prevail.
Pub Date: March 23, 2021
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593209943
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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