Six talented narrators perform this story of office dynamics and existential angst amid the 2008 financial crisis. At 64, Rosa Guerrero, HR chief for Ellery Consumer Research Group, faces health issues and looming retirement while dealing with another round of layoffs in her department. Though Rosa is the story's focal point, we also follow the careers and personal lives of several of her employees, Lucy Bender, Leo Smalls, Rob Hirsch, and Kenny Verville. Each narrator assumes a specific point of view that shows the same characters through a different lens, resulting in a captivating, though sometimes disorientating, RASHOMON effect among the cubicles and conference rooms. Office life can be a slog, but these narrators provide warmth and humor that will keep listeners invested.
Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
Duration: 13 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062798350
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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