A poetic, fragmented, and deeply haunting story of motherhood and lost histories.
Listeners who make it to this audiobook’s remarkable second act are in for a treat. EJ Lavery’s narration of two parallel stories—both, in different ways, about lost motherhood—is immersive, yet Bruni’s characters struggle to fully emerge in the audiobook format. Regardless, the payoff is significant. As timelines collapse in the second half, Bruni’s protagonist’s motives suddenly materialize. A researcher and translator, A. travels to the country of her birth to uncover the powerful truth behind the mysterious death of the author whose work she is translating. Even while Bruni’s form works to disrupt it, the emotional impact of the real, global story being told is unforgettable.
A poetic, fragmented, and deeply haunting story of motherhood and lost histories.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
Duration: 4 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781511388108
Publisher: Brilliance
Review Posted Online: April 21, 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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