Lucy Paterson narrates this novel as if she wrote it herself. The searching, slightly hesitant quality in her voice perfectly matches the unnamed protagonist's struggle to reconcile her desire for children with her fears that the early death of her mother and her troubled relationships with other relatives may impede her caregiving ability. To settle her apprehensions, she researches scientists who strove for transparency in their work, including Röntgen's discovery of the X-ray and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories. This audiobook is a recent entry in the subgenre of autofiction (fictionalized autobiography) on the ambiguities of motherhood. While its meditative tone is not for everyone, the honest reflections of the protagonist coupled with her sharp observations make for a compelling listen.
Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781984828019
Publisher: Random House 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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