Cassandra Campbell narrates this unique exploration of grief. When her teenage son commits suicide, author Yiyun Li is left with just her memories of her dear son and many unanswered questions. What follows is a unique work that documents imaginary conversations she has with Nikolai, a coping mechanism she adopts as she struggles to come to terms with her loss. Campbell adopts age-appropriate tones for both the grieving middle-aged mother, inquiring and tender, and the teenaged Nikolai, philosophical and ever the adolescent in his mother's imagined conversations. The interplay between Campbell's characterizations of the two, alternately affectionate, joking, and complex, rings true, capturing their relationship and Li's efforts to once again "give Nikolai a life of flesh and blood . . . this time by words."
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
Duration: 4 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781984887320
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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