Tokyo's history and socioeconomic issues are the subtext of this moving audiobook about a tormented spirit that roams the environs of Tokyo's Ueno train station. The ghost of Kazu recounts his life story and reveals the hopelessness and personal misfortune--including the loss of a beloved son--that led to his living on the streets like the nameless faces he now observes. Johnny Heller's dejected tone captures Kazu's disappointment and heartbreak. Heller uses a quavering voice to powerfully bring out the sense of disquiet and disconnection effectively conveyed in this English translation of the Japanese novella. He also evokes the poetic elements in the descriptive Tokyo scenes. Overall, Heller's powerful performance adds to the emotional and lyrical qualities of this poignant story.
Pub Date: 2020
Duration: 4 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593211250
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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