This novel tells the story of a mega-rich octogenarian and a 33-year-old Black woman. Audie Award winner Nicole Lewis is an excellent narrator who does subtle gradations of tone and tempo. She makes an excellent guide to the gilded world in this story of wealth and aspiration, race and power. The plot involves Vassar-educated Brooke Orr; Lewis gets her sound and style. Orr goes to work for wealthy philanthropist Asher Jaffee to help him give away his billions. Asher takes a real interest in Brooke, and this provides one of the many ambiguities in the story. Alam gets the details of privilege: Frankenthaler and Diebenkorn art in an enormous modern apartment, for example. This often dark story stays with the listener.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593911099
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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