Soneela Nankani is a strong narrator for a novel about a woman who is confronting her parents' past. Nankani's dexterity and range as a performer are demonstrated in how she captures the wide range of characters. Through her confident style, listeners experience the modernization of India through middle-aged Maneka's eyes. Disoriented after being raised in the U.S., she must grapple with the loss of her mother, along with the many changes--and family secrets--she encounters while visiting India for the funeral. From Gopal, a young boy scorned by his family, to Maneka, who confronts her past, Nankani evokes interest and sympathy for the characters in this sprawling novel. Fans of world literature will find much to admire as this complex story becomes a luxurious listening experience.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798212256971
Publisher: Blackstone 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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