Narrator Julia Whelan shifts so smoothly through the stylistic turns of this fragmentary novel that one may well forget she is the lone narrator. Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's 2018 National Book Award Finalist is a challenge. Each of the more than 100 chapters reads like a stand-alone reflection on the human desire to keep others close--or, conversely, to flee others' constraints. Some storylines do recur, such as that of Chopin's sister, who attempts to smuggle the late composer's heart from France back home to Poland to be buried, or another of a man as much overcome by the reappearance of his wife and child as by their disappearance. While FLIGHTS may be a turbulent ride, if listeners stick with Whelan's narration, she'll take them where they need to go.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525626954
Publisher: Penguin 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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