On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan. Twenty thousand people perished. How does one remember? How does one mourn? With gentle reverence and journalistic reserve, performer and artist Traci Kato-Kiriyama captures the heady mix of raw pain, sadness, and fantasy in this novel on grief and resilience. When Yui loses both her mother and daughter in the disaster, she is inconsolable until she hears of an abandoned phone booth in a garden that allows mourners to pick up the receiver and speak to the dead. Survivors from hundreds of miles around make the pilgrimage to use the phone. Based on true events, the audiobook asks that the listener not search for the phone booth, which still exists, but listen carefully to the sounds of healing.
Pub Date: March 9, 2021
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593458945
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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