George Newbern narrates this provocative novel in a relaxed conversational style that allows Tuil's breathtaking story to sparkle. Sam Tahar, a wealthy New York attorney, learns that a life built on lies will eventually unravel. He can't resist wooing Nina, the ex-lover he lost long ago to his former best friend, Samuel, and this uncontrollable hunger triggers an inevitable downward spiral. Newbern's straightforward dialogue and fast pace sometimes make it difficult for for the listener to identify which character is speaking. But this shortcoming is relatively insignificant because this work stands so strongly on its narrative elegance. It's a dark story, but Newbern's performance doesn't linger on the gravitas. It seems that obsession will destroy only those who deserve it.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781442397743
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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