This audiobook unites two consummate professionals: author Richard Russo and narrator Mark Bramhall. Russo is at his storytelling best here, returning to the North Bath community of NOBODY'S FOOL and EVERYBODY'S FOOL. A broad array of characters interacts credibly, thanks to Bramhall's strong performance. As Peter Sullivan mulls over his relationship with his estranged son, Janie struggles in her role as a daughter and mother, and Raymer ponders a new life and a violent death, Bramhall provides distinctive voices for all. Rarely is it confusing to follow the plot or appreciate the characters, even when the story itself becomes slow or the voices hit a strident pitch. The audiobook shines as the work of an excellent novelist delivered by an exceptional vocal artist.
Pub Date: July 25, 2023
Duration: 16 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593741658
Publisher: Random House 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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