Mozhan Marno narrates a story about training for an expedition to Mars with expert voicing of the many characters. Prime Space, a private company, has selected three astronauts to send to Mars. Before they can go, they must withstand a seventeen-month long simulation of the trip to test their psychological and physical well-being--all, paradoxically, in intense isolation but under constant observation. Marno transitions smoothly between the accents and distinct personalities of astronauts Helen, Sergei, and Yoshi, as well as their families and observers, who are going about their everyday lives on Earth. This moving audiobook is less about traveling in space than it is about the extremes to which humans can push themselves, the masks they use to obscure themselves from others, and the challenges of being the one left behind.
Pub Date: March 14, 2017
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524751425
Publisher: Penguin 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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