In a smart-alecky tone mixed with genuine heart, narrator Aimee Horne nails the character of Abigail Sorenson. Abigail is a single mother in her mid-30s running a café in Sydney after leaving her law practice. She is a satirical and sharp observer of the absurd with a witty turn of phrase, but she also holds her losses close--a cheating husband and the unsolved disappearance of her brother when they were both teenagers. This audiobook mix of the quirky and the tragic holds together partly due to the terrific talents of Horne. Her Australian accent is charming, her snappy delivery perfect and often hilarious, her emotional depth and empathy completely authentic, and her timing terrific--her pace noticeably quickens as Abigail's son faces a medical emergency.
Pub Date: July 23, 2019
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062931191
Publisher: Harper 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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