The lyrical cadence of Amy Molloy's accent paired with Irish vernacular transports listeners to Northern Ireland in 1994, when tensions between Catholics and Protestants ran high. At the start of the summer, Maeve and her friends get their first jobs at a shirt factory. Maeve's goal is to save money as she awaits her final exam results. Then, she'll leave her small town, and the sadness surrounding her sister's death, and go to London, where she dreams of studying journalism. Molloy gives Maeve's friends distinct voices that match their personalities, and she enhances the complexity of Maeve's mother by giving her both harsh and tender tones. The frequent countdown to exam results creates dramatic tension. The story is often hilarious, but violence is brought to the forefront in tragic flashbacks.
Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781649041302
Publisher: N/A
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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