Cambodian-American actor François Chau seems to inhabit the anonymous narrator of this novel--a young man of Vietnamese and French parentage who flees Vietnam at the fall of Saigon and heads to California and France. Chau's narration is so stellar that the listener sees the action through the narrator's eyes, yet Chau's soft voice remains unobtrusive. The writing in this novel is wild and often hyperbolic, and Chau delivers it as we imagine the protagonist would speak the words. This is one of the signs of a gifted storyteller. Though this work is the sequel to THE SYMPATHIZER (the Pulitzer Prize winner in 2016), this audiobook can be listened to as a stand-alone work. Listeners who enjoy a compelling story that is narrated beautifully will find much to love.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 12 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Audible, Inc.
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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