A group of narrators takes turns delivering Homes's story collection, offering a mixture of tones and textures that add weight and specificity to her characters and storylines. Melding the bizarre and the mundane, Homes depicts the odd rhythms and lingering emotions that are present in both daily life and outlandish situations, while the characterizations of the narrators allude to the dissatisfaction and restlessness that many of these characters are experiencing. The pacing is at times disjointed, but the emotions and dialogue are solid, illuminating the tension in many uncomfortable moments. Homes's characters are flawed, complex, and deeply introspective, and while there's little overlap between stories, each narrator works to create a cohesive listening experience, capturing the tones and style of Homes's atmospheric, melancholy pieces.
Pub Date: June 5, 2018
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780525630999
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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