A scientist who breeds rare snails encounters sisters who provide "romance tours" in this audiobook. Set against the backdrop of wartime Ukraine, the complex story defies a simple summary or spoiler-proof description. Saskia Maarleveld delivers the female points of view with quiet intensity. Her nimble pace and sincere tone showcase Reva's solid prose. Max Meyers captures bachelor Pascha's perspective well, infusing irony and humor where appropriate. Author Reva is less precise and polished than the other two narrators, but she's believable. The novel's unconventional structure can be challenging in the audiobook format; its sudden shifts between the central plot and various subplots threaten to leave listeners lost. However, the strong performances throughout and the interesting story, it will linger in the thoughts of patient listeners.
Pub Date: June 3, 2025
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593170052
Publisher: Random House 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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