Narrator Alexa Morden tells the story of a dysfunctional independent bookstore in the Washington, DC, area. Owner Sophie Bernstein abdicates her responsibilities as she grieves for her late husband and worries about anti-Semitic hate. She even wonders if she can retreat to a secret room in her bookstore when her events manager, Clemi, brings a highly controversial poet for a public reading. Morden’s world-weary, sardonic tone fits Sophie’s current state of mind. With a droll matter-of-fact delivery that invites laughter, Morden tracks daily store disasters, many involving animals and an unreliable vacuum cleaner. Moving from a younger, lighter voice for Clemi to a slower, indecisive tone for Sophie, Morden shifts her voice to match the quirky characters’ mannerisms.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
Duration: 8 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781400234110
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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