Listen to clips of our reviewer's choices: "Fathers and Sons," "City of Dreams" and "Dust Child."
‘Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family,’ by Alexander Waugh
Waugh’s entertaining, psychologically astute masterpiece, published in the United States in 2007, has finally materialized as an audiobook. The author is a grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh and son of Auberon Waugh (best known for his outrageously funny columns of satire, bombast and conservative bluster in various British publications). The book investigates the relations between five generations of Waugh fathers and sons, starting with the first Alexander (“the brute”), on to his son, Arthur, a mild-mannered publisher who attempted to redo his own wretched childhood through a weird involvement in the life of his firstborn, Alec (“the baldheaded lecher”), while neglecting and belittling Evelyn, whose name expressed Arthur’s desire for a daughter. The author continues with his father Auberon’s strained relationship with Evelyn and ends with his own friendlier one with Auberon. Dennis Kleinman delivers the book in a rich, cultivated (non-Cockney-infused) English accent. He errs a few times in pronunciation but maintains harmony throughout with the changing mood of this extraordinary tale, one that ranges from profundity and empathy down to peculiarity — such as Auberon being flogged with Hilaire Belloc’s golfing shoe. (Blackstone, Unabridged, 16½ hours)
‘City of Dreams,’ by Don Winslow
The second installment in Winslow’s planned trilogy about Rhode Island crime families is, like the first, meant to echo “The Aeneid.” In reality, the novel is an entertaining, old-fashioned tale of mobbed-up Irish American and Italian American families in decline, populated with aging kingpins, gangsters, dirty cops and a fresh harvest of corpses. At the center is Danny Ryan, who is heading for California out of the moral and meteorological murk of Providence with his 18-month son and boozy father. His pursuers proliferate until members of a Mexican drug cartel, a rival family, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration are all on his tail. After a tangle of plot twists, Danny ends up in Hollywood, involved with the making of a movie based on the gang war he recently escaped — much to the apprehension of Hollywood honchos. Award-winning narrator and Long Island native Ari Fliakos’s tough East Coast voice nicely enhances the novel’s overall atmosphere of menace, though he softens his delivery for the more sympathetic characters and changes pitch unobtrusively for women. It’s a superior performance and truly improves the novel over the printed version. (HarperAudio, Unabridged, 8 hours)
‘Dust Child,’ by Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Mai’s disturbing but moving novel takes up the fate of the children of Vietnamese women and American soldiers, despised racial outcasts in a war-devastated country. Stretching across time, from the late 1960s to the near present, the story is woven from the lives of a handful of characters. There is Dan, a guilt-racked White American veteran who returns to Vietnam, hoping to find and make amends — somehow — to the pregnant woman he abandoned in 1969 and to their child. At the same time, Phong, son of a Black American soldier and a Vietnamese woman who left him outside an orphanage in 1972, hopes against the odds to emigrate to America with his wife and children. Also central are sisters Trang and Quỳnh, who become “tea girls” in Saigon to help their parents out of ruinous debt. The plot is intricate and ingenious, and the scenes of street life and wartime, and the inner battles of the characters, are vividly drawn. Quyen Ngo narrates the book in a warm, soft voice in a variety of accents and delivers the many Vietnamese words in all their musicality and, I imagine, authenticity. (Algonquin, Unabridged, 12½ hours)
