Experienced narrators of South Asian descent come together to create vivid listening. In a near apocalyptic Kolkata, India, two families battle for survival without fully understanding how each family's decisions impact the other. The varied voices work together to mimic life in a crowded, strained city. The narrators' pacing and tonal changes guide the listener through the ups and downs of the tumultuous week of the story. Leela Tapryal, Sid Sagar, Rajib Bhattacharya, Soneela Nankani, Reena Dutt, Shawn K. Jain, and Mayuri Bhandari weave mounting conflicts between Ma and Boomba as they both try to flee Kolkata before it collapses under the weight of a food shortage and a mounting climate crisis. The ensemble cast expertly shapes an urgent, shifting story.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798217174430
Publisher: Random House 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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