Nickolas Butler’s novel features the small town of Little Wing and an ensemble of four friends who grew up there. These characters are brought to life by a talented group of narrators, including Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos, and Maggie Hoffman. The friends’ reunion, as portrayed in individual chapters by Shepherd, Fliakos, and Hoffman, grabs the listener by the ears and doesn’t let go as old emotional buttons get pushed and new conflicts are explored. Fliakos and Shepherd ably handle the sometimes plaintive voices of the male characters, while Hoffman carries most of the emotional weight with her redolent vocal talents and astonishing emotional connection to her female character, Beth. There’s no question that all the narrators connect with the characters’ emotional journeys.
Pub Date: March 11, 2014
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781427236364
Publisher: Macmillan 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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