Narrators Indira Varma and Antonio Aakeel come together to create a rich vocal experience for the two intertwined stories in this intergenerational family drama. Varma becomes the young Mehar, who in the 1920s is married in a group ceremony to one of three brothers, though she doesn't know which one. Her lush, vivid narration inspires compassion for the Punjabi young wife who is trying to figure out which man who visits her at night is hers. Aakeel also portrays Mehar's great-grandson, who returns to Punjab from England in 1999, as a recovering addict. His journey is interspersed among Mehar's chapters, though some listeners might prefer the book's focus on the inner workings of the family home in the earlier decades. Overall, this is an intriguing story with a unique setting that fans of world literature will enjoy.
Pub Date: July 13, 2021
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593402344
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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