Clara Harte is perfect as she narrates this beautifully written timely novel about connections, transitions, and authenticity. Phoebe Ford is starting a new life as a trans woman in Copenhagen. Originally from Ireland, she is reinventing herself but leads a relatively solitary life. Harte infuses Phoebe with wit, humor, and compassion in this story told over a long weekend. Phoebe is shocked when a knock at her door reveals her ex-girlfriend, Grace, who hasn't seen Phoebe as her authentic self. The two have unfinished business, and Harte captures the story's nostalgia, loss, and heartbreak with humor and understanding. Listeners will find themselves invested in this novel set against the social and political climates of Ireland and Denmark.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
Duration: 7 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781666649802
Publisher: Dreamscape
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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