Rebecca Lowman and Paul Michael provide the main narration of this audiobook, set in contemporary Los Angeles. With a deep timbre and the mannered cadence of a Golden Age Hollywood actor, Michael portrays Verity, an aging A-list movie star. Dismayed by the endless opportunities his fame affords him, Verity sets up a lottery of his film salary to be awarded to one moviegoer. Verity's only stable relationship is with his long-term friend, Helen, who is portrayed by Lowman in a sensible yet slightly resigned tone. Interspersed throughout are acute observations on the film industry by Phoebe, a young screenwriter, who is depicted by author Rothery in an offhand manner. Listeners will have to pay close attention to the shifting perspectives to piece together this narrative.
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063443310
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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