A playful, rollicking audio adventure.
Saskia Maarleveld shepherds listeners through the complicated past and present of stoic philosopher and “moral trainer” Adora Hazzard. Maarleveld portrays the specifics of Adora’s happy life on the Upper West Side among a “coven” of middle-aged ladies with whom she shares the seventh floor of an apartment building, along with Viv, Adora’s wonderful teen daughter. Maarleveld’s understanding of Semple’s quick humor and witty wordplay aids these descriptions and establishes the novel’s philosophical bent without being heavy-handed. Maarleveld shows her gift for pacing when handsome stranger Digby Beale enters Adora’s life. While the sexual tension between them crackles and burns, the mysterious Digby ushers Adora into a fast-moving investigation that involves society elites and an international art scheme. The resolution untangles the mystery and clarifies questions about Digby’s love in a satisfying conclusion.
A playful, rollicking audio adventure.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
Duration: 9 hrs, 1 min
DD ISBN: 9798217166619
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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