Fajer Al-Kaisi gives a riveting performance of this fever dream of a debut, using his voice to ground listeners in character and setting, even as the story shifts between the past and present, New York and Saudi Arabia. In the turbulent 1990s, Youssef and his two brothers grow up with their adoptive father, Imam Salim, above Salim's Staten Island mosque. Al-Kaisi captures Youssef's downward spiral as he learns the dark secrets of his family's past, his voice alternating between despair and excitement. Al-Kaisi is especially good in the section told from Salim's point of view, which he delivers in a deep, gravelly voice, wholly unlike his portrayal of Youssef. An intimate, challenging, and surprising exploration of identity, this audiobook will leave listeners with lots to think about.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2022
Duration: 12 hrs
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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