Zadie Smith is either the ultimate nightmare for a narrator or a gift from the audiobook gods. Her characters are a stew of ingredients from all regions of the English-speaking world: London intellectuals and street toughs, Haitians, African immigrants, New Englanders, Southerners, urban hip-hop poets. And in this virtuoso author's reimagining of E.M. Forster's HOWARD'S END, these characters interact repeatedly, forcing instantaneous switches from one dialect or accent and right back again. Smith's third novel revolves around Howard Belsy, a British academic teaching college in Boston, his African-American wife, Kiki, and their three headstrong teenaged children. Happily, James is up to the challenge and, even more commendably, never stoops to mawkish, exaggerated voicings. Even while ably negotiating a diverse cast, he never diverts attention from Smith, the rightful star.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2005
Duration: 18 hrs
Publisher: Penguin 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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