Narrator Aida Reluzco transports listeners to an alternate version of 2009, when Argentina is the most powerful country in the world by virtue of having won a war through the use of "psychopigments," weaponized chemicals that can induce any feeling in a human through ingestion or absorption. Psychopigment Enforcement Agent Kay Curtida's job is busting small-time psychopigment dealers--that is, until she gets involved with a high-profile case that would take the threat of the chemicals to a new, more devastating level. Reluzco gives Curtida a world-weary Latinx vibe that perfectly conveys the blend of conspiracy theory, science fiction, and noir that characterizes this debut novel. How do you trust your gut feelings when they can be produced chemically?
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781797150888
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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