Sean Rohani gives a stirring performance of this quiet coming-of-age novel about K, a queer Iranian American boy growing up in L.A. in the 1990s and early 2000s. His childhood and adolescence are marked by his father's physical and sexual abuse, his deep connection with his two brothers, afternoons spent on the basketball court, and a sudden, life-changing trip to Iran. Rohani's soft, lyrical voice casts a spell, situating the listener in each vividly imagined scene. Khabushani's prose is immediate and visceral, full of the scents, colors, and textures of K's world. Rohani beautifully brings that world to life. Though the story is heartbreaking at times, K's wry and observant first-person point of view, paired with Rohani's sensitive narration, makes this a tender and hopeful listen.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593740927
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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