Narrator Joanna Scanlan's British-accented voice sets the stage for an audiobook that follows a young woman named Susan from college to middle adulthood. While treated as an exploration of the friendship between Susan and her best friend, Norma, who end up on very different paths, the story is somewhat meandering and lacks a coherent focus. Scanlan's narration does play up the author's quips, and her detached characterization of Norma highlights how different she and Susan are throughout the years as Susan focuses on family while Norma grows her career. Leading up to Susan's employment at a university and newfound career fulfillment in the midst of the COVID era, the novel is timely but feels somehow incomplete, Scanlan's competent narration notwithstanding.
Pub Date: May 3, 2022
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781549103865
Publisher: Hachette 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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