Louisa Harland performs with a quiet intensity that is just right for this disturbing look at the effects on a family trapped in an abusive relationship in Dublin. Ciara, a pregnant mother of two, must get away from Ryan, her controlling, easily angered husband. Harland makes this audiobook so real that listeners will mentally cringe each time Ryan verbally or psychologically attacks Ciara. While he hasn't struck her . . . yet, she finally leaves, intending to start a new life for her girls and herself. Facing the harsh realities of homelessness and despair, Ciara manages to relocate to an emergency shelter. Harland's narration is appropriately painful and uplifting by turns, and the afterword reminds listeners that this story is considerably more than fiction.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668646151
Publisher: Hachette 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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