Dual narrators Jorjeana Marie and Lauren Fortgang immerse listeners in the escalating tensions between expat wives Cassie and Margaret, who are both married to servicemen serving abroad. Thrown together as strangers, they report a car accident in Jordan, and nothing goes as they expect. Marie and Fortgang convey the stress of being far from home, where everything is unfamiliar. Listeners with similar life experiences will relate to the competitive, backbiting atmosphere created when people are dislocated from their creature comforts. The pair of narrators give us a range of emotional ups and downs as Cassie and Margaret experience cultural frustrations and thwarted ambitions. Marie and Fortgang play well against each other in building suspense as secrets are revealed that threaten the characters' tenuous new lives.
Pub Date: June 27, 2017
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524775797
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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