The titular “sisters” are not related, but they share the familial bond of being wrung dry by the same system.
Annie Q. Riegel narrates this incisive, unsettling thriller about the power of chosen family. But what happens when we choose wrong? Hana grows up impoverished and desperate in her shadowy Tokyo neighborhood, her mother, who works as a hostess, barely making ends meet. When charismatic Kimiko enters her life, Hana gratefully accepts her help, and the two go into business together. As the plot spins out of control and Hana slowly reveals herself to be a rather unreliable narrator, Riegel hits every note. We pity the soft-spoken teenager and empathize with the earnest young woman who insists that everything she has done, she has done to survive.
The titular “sisters” are not related, but they share the familial bond of being wrung dry by the same system.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
Duration: 15 hrs, 27 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217174393
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: May 12, 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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