Uplifting, compassionate listening.
Veteran actor and narrator Jason Culp possesses a timeless American voice. Here his unique combination of ease and resilience leads the listener into the story of Stafford Hopkins, a highly successful Hollywood executive who has emotionally lost touch with his wife and becomes rudderless amid the daily highballs and golf games of early retirement. When the family of a boyhood friend is struck by tragedy, Hopkins must return home to rural Ontario, Canada, and face a world of dark memories and buried secrets. Culp makes it all sound achingly human, grounded, and real. Hopkins makes some decisions that may lead to understanding, forgiveness, and better times.
Uplifting, compassionate listening.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781668653241
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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