Susan Vinciotti Bonito gives this introspective, fragmented fiction--written in Italian and translated into English by the author--a delicate, poignant narration. She narrates the vignettes with a deliberate pace and inquiring tone that suit the internal monologue style. The choice to read in a distinctly inflected way gives the novel an immersive quality that illuminates the inner workings of the unnamed narrator's mind. The world that Lahiri creates feels Italian: Women are signoras, she eats in trattorias, says ciao. The narrator, presumably a literature professor in her mid-forties, closely observes her world and herself and has a rich imagination. The novel's slim chapters often have prepositional phrase titles--"On the Street," "At the Trattoria," "In the Pool"--that taken together combine to create listeners' understanding of a solitary and lonely life.
Pub Date: April 27, 2021
Duration: 3 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593393260
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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