Sneha Mathan's mellifluous voice draws listeners into this lyrical rumination on what it means to be an intelligent woman of a certain age. Fifty-five and disabled, an Indian feminist sociology professor with two divorces behind her decides she's tired of being alone. She's ready to meet someone and marry again. She decides to hold a "swayamvar," an ancient Hindu ritual in which men perform feats of derring-do to win a woman's hand. Mathan captures the ironic tone inherent in each of our heroine's observations, questions, and reactions. Feminists, disability rights activists, and others come to support her, while the men's rights movement excoriates her for objectifying men. Couched in gorgeous prose, Jha's humor is prickly and pervasive, and Mathan doesn't miss a note. Serious fun.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063440869
Publisher: Harper 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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