Emily Woo Zeller delivers this hopeful domestic drama about an unnamed Chinese American woman who is navigating a divorce and an illness. Weeks after her husband, Sam, bluntly confesses to an affair and moves out of their home, the woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. She copes with the separation by writing a manual about her ex-husband and sharing Chinese folklore that was passed down from her mother with her own children. In higher pitched voices, the kids sometimes whine and shout, and when happy memories are recounted, Sam is charming and jovial. Best friend Darlene is indignant and supportive in all the right places. The lead character starts out speaking softly about her diagnosis and her husband's affair, gaining conviction as she confronts both life events.
Pub Date: July 22, 2025
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668125205
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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