Narrator Stacey Glemboski gives an extraordinary performance of this immersive family drama. Middle-aged sisters Joyce and Lydia, who are both divorced and childless, decide to live together in Joyce's Cambridge apartment. The story is told from the perspective of Joyce, whose defensive, prickly persona is wonderfully captured by Glemboski. Lydia's social awkwardness is expertly portrayed by Glemboski in a light, impulsive tone. Listeners become fully invested as the narrative shifts from the present to flashbacks of the sisters' difficult upbringing by neglectful parents, as well as the childhood death of their disabled sister. Glemboski splendidly depicts the sisters' struggles with each other and with their fractured pasts. An exceptional performance enhances an honestly told and satisfying family story.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780063088313
Publisher: Harper 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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