Multiple narrators perform the story of a transcriptionist who falls for a client of her employer, a sex coach. Working from home, Greta doesn't see the clients whose therapy sessions she transcribes, but she recognizes their voices. She's drawn to Flavia, whom she refers to as Big Swiss. Upon meeting her in person, Greta develops a relationship with her. Using a false name and omitting her prior knowledge, she struggles with guilt while trying to keep Flavia in her life. Rebecca Lowman captures Greta's sardonic personality. Carlotta Brentan and Stephen Graybill skillfully deliver Flavia's frank expressions and Om's slightly pretentious demeanor. Scattered throughout are snippets of therapy sessions with other patients, who are superbly performed by Joy Osmanski and Matt Pittenger.
Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
Duration: 11 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781797149288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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