Narrator Charlie Thurston deftly navigates this road story of a father and son on the run. Silas House's depiction of conflicted evangelical faith in the South begins with Pastor Asher Sharp, who makes an offer to help a gay couple following a flood and then loses his job and, after a messy divorce, custody of his precocious 9-year-old son, Justin, because of this act of kindness. Thurston's performance evokes both empathy and anger in the listener. He uses a soft Southern accent as Asher escapes to the Florida Keys. The novel begins a bit slowly but, as performed by Thurston, is in the end shocking and emotionally satisfying. Thurston's evocative performance leaves the listener filled with a potent combination of hope, joy, and sadness.
Pub Date: June 26, 2018
Duration: 8 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781684411856
Publisher: HighBridge 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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