Set near Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, this audiobook is beautifully written and expertly performed. Brid Brennan's delivery of Kennedy's prose is lovely: Her accent and tone are perfectly matched to each character she voices. Clear-eyed descriptions so carefully wrought come alive in her calmly paced care. In the story, Cushla Lavery is a young Catholic teacher who carries on an affair with an older, married Protestant man. The emotions attached to new love and community violence are ever present as Cushla tries to care for her mother, protect her young students, and see her way to some kind of future for herself. All of these challenges are quietly illuminated by Brennan's warm performance. With distinct dialogue and a sensitive touch, Brennan does right by this excellent debut novel.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593612118
Publisher: Penguin 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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