This posthumously published novel, a meditation on death, has a dark side, but Eunice Wong's performance balances its undercurrent of grief with buoyant energy that will have listeners rooting for its antiheroes. A comatose Korean cello aficionado named Alma has ambivalent memories of her relationship with Daniel, a white violinist. Daniel, meanwhile, finds himself locked in a basement, where he is forced to confront a fetish he has that has hurt many women. Kyoko, Daniel's captor struggles to reconcile her identity in relation to the chained-up man. While the three characters confront racial politics and love laden with pain, Wong's narration manages to bring levity to the story without devaluing its depth. Her performance offers elegance amid the messy relationships, while Kayla Min Andrews' afterword emotionally explores her mother's writing process and how it inspired her own writing career.
Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593787441
Publisher: Penguin 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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