Arriving just in time for the holiday season is this relatable family story of three adult siblings, Martin, Kate and Henry, and their respective spouses and children, who spend the three days before Christmas at Henry's upstate New York home. Narrator Andi Arndt beautifully expresses the complicated inner life of each character, as well as the bonds and tensions that exist among them. Listeners will feel as though they are eavesdropping on the family as they grapple with grief over the loss of a parent, marital strife, financial woes, and career upsets. Arndt's characterizations of males and females are equally skilled, and her pacing varies with the momentum of the narrative. This quietly absorbing family drama is perfect for this time of year.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063135161
Publisher: Mariner Books
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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