Katherine Heiny's much anticipated audiobook starts off sounding like a rom-com, but, happily, it soon becomes less conventional. Narrator Kate Rudd portrays Duncan, a small-town Michigan lothario, and Jane, who begrudgingly falls for his charms. Jane is bothered by Duncan's past promiscuity, yet his fatherly relationship with a developmentally disabled adult displays an ability to commit. Rudd's experience with narrating fiction is on display as she shifts easily between a handful of peculiar characters, like Aggie, Duncan's needy ex-wife, and her idiosyncratic husband, Gary, who is voiced with a deadpan oddness that elicits listeners' laughter. Rudd's timing when delivering comedic dialogue keeps the audiobook fun as Jane decides what she truly needs in a life partner.
Pub Date: April 13, 2021
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593349496
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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