Narrators Pej Vahdat and Hend Ayoub work together to create an immersive listening experience of this contemporary love story. Anvar and Safwa are two teenagers from Afghanistan and Iraq brought together by fate when their families immigrate to the United States. Vahdat brings across Anvar's plucky, sarcastic tone through a lively delivery that contrasts with Ayoub's dreamy and determined portrayal of Safwa. As the pair flee religious extremism and war, the narrators dramatize how they wrestle with their pasts and hope for their futures. The result is that listeners will be hooked to the very end of this story. Fans of world literature will appreciate the twists and turns of the plot, as well as the underlying humor laced throughout the otherwise serious themes.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593292631
Publisher: Random House 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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