Luiselli's knotty metafictional novel about a family road trip and lost children, which includes images and documents as well as multiple narrators and multiple narratives, does not initially seem suited to audio. Smart production decisions and capable narration, however, transform it into a fascinating audiobook that will stay with listeners long after they finish. The protagonist and her husband are audio producers themselves, and the production includes background noises, recordings of different quality, and other elements mentioned in the text. Young actor Kivlighan de Montebello and the author read the bulk of the novel, and both give subtle and nuanced performances; without using distinct voices, they clearly capture the members of the family and imbue the novel's big questions with emotional depth. A moving, thought-provoking listen.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
Duration: 11 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781984840073
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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