Lisa Flanagan's narration captures Nell Zink's comic timing and droll observations with flair. A group of quirky uber-wealthy misfits find themselves at an exclusive Michelin-starred dinner to honor a literary award recipient. The food proves disappointing, and the guests leave, heading out into nighttime Berlin. Some go off in search of more satisfying fare, possibly Burger King, while others find themselves confronting their personal demons. Zink provides Flanagan with wonderful characters to inhabit, ranging from art critic Demian and his transitioning teenage daughter, Nicole, to Livia, a German whose grandfather was probably a Nazi. Flanagan is especially funny portraying publisher Toto's online date, Avianca, nicknamed the Flake, because it's "shorter than 'Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl'." Flanagan gently handles each of the other over-the-top characters, as well. Fun summer listening.
Pub Date: March 25, 2025
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217018598
Publisher: Random House 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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