Active listening will tie up the loose threads.
Amanda Dolan gives a believable voice to Lena Connolly, the main character in Lemle’s debut novel about the shady connections between archeology, stolen relics, and museum acquisitions. Lena is a trust and estates attorney who, 20 years ago, was an archeology student at a dig in Italy. When Italy sues for reparations for a stolen cup made of dichroic glass, Lena’s ability to speak Italian lands her on the team investigating the claim. Dolan narrates in Lena’s voice while giving Italian characters and the French professor hints of accents. As the story moves between the two timelines and Lena reflects on her summer on the dig, she begins to suspect it wasn’t an accident she ended up on this team.
Active listening will tie up the loose threads.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
Duration: 11 hrs, 40 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668114629
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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