This touching tale offers a poignant, fantastical exploration of what it means to be left behind.
Actor Michael Urie brings humor and emotional depth to this original, moving audiobook about love, loss, and alien abduction. Thirty years after their meet-cute in Venice Beach, LA, Jesse and Norman are married and living in Joshua Tree, California. One night, Jesse watches Norman get out of bed, walk into their backyard, step into a weird beam of light, and vanish. Suddenly, Jesse is alone in a way he has not been in decades, and people start to wonder if Jesse had something to do with Norman’s disappearance. Despite a somewhat distracting, caricaturelike take on Norman’s voice, Urie’s performance highlights Rowley’s signature wit and charm.
This touching tale offers a poignant, fantastical exploration of what it means to be left behind.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
Duration: 10 hrs, 28 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217285198
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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