Surprise! A new audio book. And it's a duet-style gem!

True story—the character of Pepe from the Ivy Years is very loosely based on a real person. When I worked on Wall Street, I briefly had a French Canadian assistant who had attended Yale exactly four years after I did. Our time at school didn’t overlap, but we discovered that he had lived in the exact same dorm room that I did for his Freshman year, four years later.

He was a hockey goalie, I learned. And then he said something that shocked me. He told me that he didn’t speak English very well when he started at Yale.

Now, this was a surprise on several levels. In the first place, his English by the time I met him four years later was flawless, and nearly accentless. So I never would have guessed. But the other shock was that a hockey player could get in to a top college without fluent English. I filed that away to think about later.

And then I wrote the Ivy Years, and I gave the team a couple of French Canadian players. My assistant’s story came back to me when I sat down to write Studly Period in 2018. It’s an eight-chapter serial written from the perspective of Josephine, his English tutor. I never meant it to be a full-length book, which really took the pressure off me to write it. And the result was unexpectedly moving for a story so short.

But ever since, I’ve been dreaming about how wonderful this book would sound in duet audio, with Josie’s voice carrying the weight of it, with Pepe’s French sprinkled throughout.

So I asked Tanya Eby to find a male narrator who could carry this role. And that narrator was Patrick Zeller.

Friends, Studly Period is a fabulous bit of audio! The result is positively dreamy. I’m offering it at a special price of $2.99, which I am only able to do on the Soundwise app for iOS and Android. There are no geographical restrictions.

I sure hope you enjoy it!