The achievement of this compelling audiobook is its lyrical prose and moral center.
Adam Grupper delivers the perspective of this novel’s 82-year-old unnamed narrator with restraint, careful pacing, and a tone that shows this is no ordinary octogenarian. The plot captures his ride to the heights of economic success and a downturn to the lows. It’s also a love song to Brooklyn. The drama-filled monologue about the gains and losses of a long life depicts a man who acts courageously yet, due to misinformation on social media, is vilified as a vigilante. Helprin is a master of atmosphere and detail. The protagonist’s military background matters, and his personal tragedies—his father and son both die in war, and his wife is the victim of a violent attack—propel his own heroic acts.
The achievement of this compelling audiobook is its lyrical prose and moral center.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798898850142
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
Review Posted Online: today
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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