Darrell Dennis navigates this touching novel about a family in distress; it's a gritty story about addiction, dementia, and obligations. Charles Lamosway is a white man raised on Maine's Penobscot reservation--an outsider. With the empathy created by Dennis, listeners will root for Charles as he deals with losing his mother and trying to connect with an estranged daughter, both of which he observes plaintively at a distance. Dennis depicts so much struggle--with the past and present constantly interfering with his moving on. Talty's debut novel is a virtuoso story of blood, heritage, beliefs, and the legacy of how we are indebted to others. Dennis's youthful tone and empathy for these troubled characters make this listen triumphant and bittersweet.
Pub Date: June 4, 2024
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798891783270
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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