Mei Mei Macleod narrates a family drama told in reverse, starting in 2040 and ending in 2014. Leo Yang; his Japanese French wife, Eko; and their three daughters, Yumi, Yoko, and Kiko, navigate the complexities of life in Shanghai and elsewhere. As the story moves backward, characters become younger, a development that allows Macleod to subtly change her portrayals of the three daughters while still leaving each character recognizable as her previous older self. Macleod dazzles with her linguistic prowess as she voices the numerous accents required by the large cast of characters and smoothly performs dialogue in French, Japanese, and Chinese, in addition to English. An outstanding performance of a startling novel.
Pub Date: May 7, 2024
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9798368955742
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau by Spotify Audiobooks
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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