Four narrators breathe life into Lisa Halliday's thought-provoking and elegant novel. Of the four, Candace Thaxton is the most effective; her youthful voice brings warmth and wry humor to the story of an editorial assistant's relationship with an award-winning writer several decades her senior. Aden Hakimi, recounting the harrowing subplot of an Iraqi-American man who is detained on a trip to see his brother, also gives a engaging performance, adroitly capturing the character's seemingly calm demeanor while hinting at the turmoil beneath. Unfortunately, the final and shortest section, written as an interview between the award-winning writer (Arthur Morey) and a radio host (Fiona Hardingham), feels staged and unnatural. This small misstep aside, the audiobook is an appealing listen.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781508245667
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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