Devon Sorvari gives a stunning performance of this timely and powerfully affecting audiobook about a young family in dire circumstances. Tuck; her husband, Paul; and their young daughter, Agnes, squat in her late grandmother's home on a remote Maine island, which has been willed to Tuck's long absent father. The family's meager funds are being depleted by Paul, who is addicted to an herbal opiate, and the family receives little help from social services. Sorvari wonderfully mines the resilience and bravery of the one-of-a-kind Tuck, who forages for seaweed to feed her daughter as she struggles to keep her family going. Sorvari imbues the novel's precise and poetic language with emotion and urgency, creating a hypnotic listening experience. This provocative and harrowing audiobook is essential listening.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781696609494
Publisher: HighBridge 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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