*STARRED REVIEW Okay, Anne Tyler devotees and newbies (are there any?): settle in for another utterly engrossing multi-generational saga of Baltimoreans (who scatter), gently, absorbingly read by versatile Kimberly Farr. In her third iteration as Tyler’s cipher, Farr effortlessly adapts to Tyler’s distinct phrasings and rhythms,...
*STARRED REVIEW Vikas Adam, who was one-third of the terrific trio that voiced Abdi Nazemian’s Like a Love Story (2019), returns solo to adroitly cipher the diverse boarding-school cast here (Nazemian closes the recording with his own author’s-note narration). Chandler Academy is tiny enough, but to be...
Listeners familiar with Natalie Naudus’s performances – she’s amassed almost 200 narrating credits – will surely have begun to notice that she has two narrative modes for girlfriends: one with aural gravitas, the other (usually deemed “the pretty one”) pitched a few notes higher, reminiscent...
*STARRED REVIEW Sneha Mathan returns for her third outstanding collaboration with Thrity Umrigar, their shared Indian heritage again enhancing their author/narrator symbiosis. Accents, genders, ages, backgrounds, and emotions abound, but Mathan embraces diverse characterizations with effortless ease. In a remote Indian village, a young Hindu widow has...
Sa-i-gu (Korean for 4-2-9 as in April 29, 1992) was a defining moment in Korean American history, when 2,300-plus Korean-owned businesses were destroyed in the Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of Rodney King’s brutal arresting officers. Actor John Cho makes his fiction debut with...
*STARRED REVIEW In 1960s Australia (not so unlike in the U.S.), the laws allow Aboriginal communities to be openly mistreated, their movements restricted, and their humanity denied. Lauded Australian Indigenous writer Tony Birch explores his country’s complex racist history through three generations of brown women, centering...
Murder is rarely something to laugh about, and yet prolific Percival Everett’s (Telephone, 2020) latest will inspire at least a smirk, if not an out-loud snort (or many) as narrator Bill Andrew Quinn deftly evokes characters living and dead. Welcome to Money, Mississippi, where corpses...
*STARRED REVIEW Actor Hannah Cabell’s stage training clearly gives her a stupendous boost in the recording studio; with a mere dozen credits, she’s already superb – and proves herself an ideal audio enabler for Toronto librarian Eva Jurczyk’s novel debut. Liesl Weiss’ boss, Christopher, is lying...
The recording begins with supposed-to-be-eerie tinkling notes. By the time they gratingly repeat 4.5 hours later, eyes might roll, ears could need clearing, and yet Mariko Tamaki’s dual-voiced thriller just might be immersive enough for listeners to overlook this uneven production. Katharine Chin opens as awkward...
Once upon a time, Hornclaw had a family...
Brian Nishii’s fluency is evident within minutes, and continues throughout, as he reads Japanese names, places, and words as smoothly and accurately as English text. What’s not as initially clear is that the narrative is a multilayered reveal – something easily distinguishable in the print...
*STARRED REVIEW Meet Phyllis Fischer – she prefers Phyl – the latest protagonist of British auteur Tessa Hadley, who so brilliantly writes of familial relationships often facing significant change, possibly collapse. English actor Abigail Thaw, who voiced Hadley’s Late in the Day (2019), delivers another resounding performance;...
“We live in the dregs of Queens, New York,” debut Filipina American author Daphne Palasi Andreades introduces her polyphonic Brown Girls, with names like “Khadija, Akanksha, Maribeth, Ximena, Breonna, Cherelle, Thanh, Yoon, Ellen ...
*STARRED REVIEW In addition to 11 novels, Novel Prize-winning Toni Morrison wrote this “one and only short story” in 1980, collected in 1983’s Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka. Posthumously published as a standalone volume, the story is paired...
As the third narrator of Keigo Higashino’s internationally bestselling Detective Galileo series (four volumes available Stateside thus far), David Shih is also the first (finally!) to be facile with Japanese names and places. Although the Taiwanese American actor speaks only English, his conscientiously researched, accurate...
*STARRED REVIEW Edoardo Ballerini is that rare talent who instantly, effortlessly transports listeners into a story. His agile adaptability further enhances Ruta Sepetys’ (The Fountains of Silence, 2019) latest historical fiction as he expertly performs characters’ specific details, empathically channels emotions, and deftly reveals a narrative rife...
*STARRED REVIEW Chameleonic writer Jabari Asim’s second novel after Only the Strong (2015) gets historical with a cast of enslaved Black characters – searingly called the Stolen, their white enslavers rightfully are Thieves – who attempt to survive the atrocities of the antebellum South. “All of...
*STARRED REVIEW Virtuoso Jason Reynolds’ latest is another chameleonic masterpiece, brilliantly consumable in various mediums, each providing transporting rewards. The original collaboration, conceived between best friends Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin, works best on the page: Reynolds’ glorious words – cut-out phrases and sentences – laid...
Fourteen voices (each embodying a specific poetic form!) – enlivened by 14 performers – take turns bearing witness in this novel in verse. Perspectives shift among the enslavers, the enablers to such inhumanity, their victims, and their descendants, revealing decades from capture to post-Civil War...
Exceptional narrator Dominic Hoffman adroitly assumes the internationally mega-bestselling, 2020 Prix Goncourt-winning, Anglophoned latest from prodigious French author Hervé Le Tellier. Hoffman begins as professional assassin Blake, then becomes frustrated author Victor, film editor Lucie, and David, who is about to be diagnosed with terminal...
