The first draw to this collection is a cyclops who is developing his dating profile (aided by THE cheeriest saleswoman), but stay to survey all of AWAYLAND. Hear the tale of a woman who is trying to have a baby with a friend (it was "a better escape" than being a chef on "fake Mars") and the one of the dying lover who is determined to have her hand grafted onto her boyfriend's. The "gratitude" shown by the animal mummies is hilarious, and cheekily voiced in a British accent. The listener may prefer some tales over others, but the voices for each are good matches, like the wiser-than-his-years teenage boy who is working at a Turkish resort. A grieving mother is voiced gravely, with anxiety and pain. The terrain is strange, the themes are many, and the narrations are smooth guides.
Pub Date: March 6, 2018
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525528401
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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