Narrator Amy Landon invites listeners behind the curtain of the ballet world in this vivid and intimate novel. Celebrated ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to the St. Petersburg stage after two years in recovery from an accident. Landon's crisp voice breathes life into Natalia's inner monologues. Landon smoothly pronounces the Russian and French vocabulary of Natalia's jet-set lifestyle. Facing addiction and ghosts from her past, Natalia reflects on her childhood, years as a ballet student, friendships, and toxic relationships. For her last performance, Natalia must confront her greatest love and heartbreak. Weaving scenes from the past and present, CITY OF NIGHT BIRDS is a glamorous character study.
Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2024
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063394803
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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