This autofiction is sophisticated and heartfelt but organized in such a way that listening can be confusing and disorienting.
This erudite, esoteric audiobook is partly a work of scholarly research, partly a fond memoir, and partly pure fiction. Elisabeth Lagelée narrates this novel in a straightforward manner with scarcely a trace of an accent while perfectly pronouncing French names and expressions. The story is an elegy to the author’s father, Denis Huisman, and her grandfather, George. Both men were part of the French elite—George in the 1930s and Denis later in the century. Many of the political, social, and artistic leaders of France are referenced but few readers will recognize their names.
This autofiction is sophisticated and heartfelt but organized in such a way that listening can be confusing and disorienting.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798217282203
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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