Listeners will rejoice that narrator Mark Bramhall returns to narrate Kent Haruf's bittersweet swan song to his beloved town of Holt, Colorado. This short audiobook focuses on the characters Addie Moore and Louis Waters, now in their 70s and living alone, years after their spouses' deaths. Bramhall's soothing cadences and tender tones bring out the full range of emotions experienced by the neighbors as they find a way to mitigate their loneliness while maintaining their dignity and independence. Despite small-town gossip and the reactions of grown children, Addie and Louis want nothing more than to enjoy comfortable companionship through the uncertainties of aging. Bramhall's unhurried performance allows listeners time to absorb the richness of the couple's newfound friendship and the sadness of the roadblocks they're forced to navigate.
Pub Date: May 26, 2015
Duration: 3 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781101923467
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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