At first, author-narrator Lionel Shriver (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) may sound laconic, but the persevering listener will be rewarded by this striking collection. Bookended by two novellas and with a passel of short stories in between, this audiobook is packed. Shriver proves herself a narrator who knows when to inflect her words and mimic her characters' cadences to reveal their inner and outer lives. The theme of property--both stuff as well as occupation or ownership of places--connects these works like ornaments on a single string. Her spare but engaging reading makes these varied stories engaging and meaningful. The novellas, THE STANDING CHANDELIER and THE SUBLETTER, demonstrate the author's ability to show people warts and all yet captivate the listener.
Pub Date: April 24, 2018
Duration: 14 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062799289
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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