Narrator Aoife McMahon is terrific delivering Naoise Dolan's impressive debut novel. Twenty-two-year-old Ava moves from Dublin to Hong Kong to teach English. There she meets Julian, an odd, self-involved banker. They start an unconventional relationship. She moves in. Julian picks up the tab. Eventually, they sleep together. They have great discussions. There are no emotional ties. McMahon makes Ava a believable millennial, politically aware and socially conscious, complete with melodic Irish accent. She is spot-on with Julian's indifferent affect, yet she makes him appealing. After Ava meets Edith, a coolly elegant lawyer and Hong Kong native, McMahon delivers a tender/prickly love story. Dolan poses contemporary questions and sets up credible scenarios by using honest, simple language and snarky humor. McMahon's performance is bright, sassy, and delightful.
Pub Date: June 2, 2020
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062968760
Publisher: Harper 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
