The consistent, fluid, and engrossing nature of this majestic novel is rendered even more remarkable by the fact that it was completed after the author suffered a massive stroke in 2016. Set in California during WWII, when Japanese-Americans were being interned by the U.S. Government, this ambitious saga of family, romance, and grief is poignantly narrated by Gabra Zackman and Stephen Graybill. The story is told by varying members of the wealthy Rhodes family--father Rocky; his sister, Caswell; and his daughter, Sunny--as well as Schiff, a Jewish-American lawyer who is overseeing the internment camp next to the Rhodes's family ranch. While there are frequent switches between narrators, they are eased by the narrative skill of Zackman and Graybill.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
Duration: 19 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781797142234
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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