Novelist Richard Price has as fine an ear for American speech as anyone writing today, and his panoramic novels have tested the skill of a string of fine audiobook narrators. His latest, revolving around the collapse of an apartment building in East Harlem in 1982, moves from one character to another--a photographer, a policewoman, an undertaker, and the Lazarus Man of the title, who is found trapped but uninjured in the rubble near the very end of the search. The narrative moves slowly and without a clear objective; this is not one of Price's best. But it's rendered effectively by narrator Robb Moreira, who has an excellent feel for the characters, their voices and emotional centers. He infuses even the slackest scenes with immediacy and purpose.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250353948
Publisher: Macmillan 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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