Jesse Ball's chilling dystopian tale is set in a bleak future in which citizens are "pats" who live in fear of the branded "quads," migrants, prisoners, and parolees who are separated from society and seen as something less than human. The story is told in three distinct sections. Sophie Amoss narrates "Ogias' Day" with a mix of curiosity and fear as two students become separated from their professor when they go on a trip to observe quads. In the "Row House" section, Devon Hales projects a boy's growing fear as she voices his replies to interrogation about a playmate's disappearance. Most chilling and effective is Cassandra Campbell, in "Letter," as she becomes the voice of Margaret as she faces the consequences of actions taken in a society built on fear, division, and inhumanity.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
Duration: 4 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062958099
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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