NDiaye’s novel, newly translated, is enhanced by a richly gifted narrator.
This brief, mesmerizing audiobook’s power comes from the voice of its first-person narrator, a failed witch living a conventional life in a Paris suburb. Her unique tone and outlook fit narrator Virginia Grainger as if they were tailor-made for her. Grainger possesses a rich, deliberate voice, and she takes her time quietly unspinning the suppressed feelings of a modern witch being undone by her banal life and her two gifted but indifferent daughters. The action is not as important as the tone and atmosphere of the sentences, and Grainger makes the most of these, seeming to savor every word of this subtle, masterfully wrought little spellbinder.
NDiaye’s novel, newly translated, is enhanced by a richly gifted narrator.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
Duration: 4 hrs, 8 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217174157
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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