Narrator Lameece Issaq brings a lot of personality to the first-person story of Mina, a Lebanese doctor who travels to Greece to work at a refugee camp. Each chapter is its own vignette, weaving the various subplots together to get a full perspective of who this doctor is to her estranged family, medical colleagues, patients, and community. Employing boldness, wit, and passion to portray Mina, Issaq moves through each chapter with clarity. She also delivers the voices of Mina's patients, her brother, and her equally bold, impressive friend, Emma. Interlaced throughout the novel is the ongoing conversation Mina has with an unnamed author who has tried writing about the refugee experience. Issaq's gutsy tone in these particular chapters adds to the richness of the story.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2022
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
Publisher: Audible, Inc.
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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