English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald took a mostly undocumented half-year sojourn to Mexico in the 1950s, and this new story by Jessica Francis Kane is a fictional account of that visit. Cerris Morgan-Moyer narrates as Fitzgerald and her young son become guests of two capricious spinsters who are distant relatives in small-town Fonseca. Their ambiguous invitation implied the existence of an inheritance, and Morgan-Moyer depicts Fitzgerald's growing confusion as she encounters a string of local hangers-on who are also vying for the sisters' favor. Colorful characters include the grumpy housekeeper with a heart of gold and the charming man from New York who might be an imposter. Actual letters from Fitzgerald's children, written during that period, are delivered by Nicholas Guy Smith and Christine Rendel.
Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593951569
Publisher: Penguin 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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