Narrator Ari Fliakos strikes the right tone between pathos and irony in his narration of Gessen's novel. Russian-born Andrei, a struggling Ph.D. candidate living in New York City, returns to Moscow to care for his grandmother. Fliakos draws the listener in with his warm conversational tone; one can imagine oneself sitting with Andrei and Baba Seva at her kitchen table. Yet Andrei's ambivalence at returning to the "terrible country" of his birth informs Fliakos's reading as the conflict between his personal and professional obligations comes to a head. Fliakos's rendering of Baba Seva is both heartbreaking and hilarious, leaving an indelible impression of this frail and feisty elderly woman. This fully realized performance of a compelling novel will no doubt find many fans.
Pub Date: July 10, 2018
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525630890
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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