Jim Meskimen takes the pivotal role of the narrator in this dazzling audiobook with a thoughtful tone and sure-handed style. Among an exceptionally talented cast, Robin Miles captures the angsty brilliance of matriarch Naomi; she smoothly performs the character's contradictory combination of self-delusion and self-awareness. Jason Culp portrays her estranged husband, the suicidal Sandy, with eloquent restraint. The children in this Manhattan-based shattered family--Patrick, Winter, and Bering--are voiced evocatively by Josh Bloomberg, Inés del Castillo, and Jaime Lamchick. Each gives these heady, flawed yet compelling characters individuality and grace. A work of metafiction, this novel breaks down the fourth wall as the complex plot moves forward. The many voices in this timely audiobook present a fascinating portrait of a family in distress.
Pub Date: March 28, 2023
Duration: 21 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063294196
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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