Lush Life Audiobook By Richard Price cover art

Lush Life

A Novel

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Lush Life

By: Richard Price
Narrated by: Bobby Cannavale
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $20.24

Buy for $20.24

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel
What do you do?

Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers: artist, actor, screenwriter....But now he's 35 years old and he's still living downtown, still in the restaurant business, working night shifts and serving the people he always wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike Marcus had what the Lower East Side wanted: he was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, and he wouldn't say "tend bar". He was going places, and he was going to live forever - until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric on Eldridge Street one night and pulled a gun. Ike's last words were "Not tonight, my man".

At least, that's Eric's version.

©2008 Richard Price (P)2008 Macmillan Audio Genre Fiction Hard-Boiled Literary Fiction Mystery

Critic reviews

"Price writes with the slightly manic desperation of someone determined to tell the absolute truth....This heightened, anxious awareness of moral and psychological complexity is one of the great accomplishments of first-rate writing." ( The New York Times Book Review)
All stars
Most relevant  
The reader makes this story worth listening to til the end, making accents of the variety of characters on NY's Lower East Side sound so amazingly real and effortless. To that end, the author has captured the sounds of the city and its neighborhoods, no doubt. But the story meanders, and the ending is about as anti-climactic as they come. Listen for the reader, Bobby Cannavale, not so much for the author, Richard Russo.

listen, don't read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

What did you love best about Lush Life?

Bobby Cannavale. His narration of the books I've listened to are excellent. He makes any character he's reading come to life in a way that you wish you knew that person in real life!

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

I would have tried to make better distinctions between the events. Everything seemed to roll into each other and with Bobby doing ALL the characters, it got a little confusing as to who was "speaking" and what event they were at or covering.

What does Bobby Cannavale bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He is extremely good at bringing the characters to life in each of his books. (Bobby - PLEASE PLEASE go back to being Michael Bennett !!)

If you could take any character from Lush Life out to dinner, who would it be and why?

None. I would take Bobby to dinner.

Any additional comments?

Not so much about the book other than to say that it would have been a much better listen if more distinctions had been made regarding who was speaking, where they were and what they were dealing with at the time. It just all seemed to run into each other and you couldn't tell the difference until they said "Lugo said" or "Matty commented" , etc.

I love Bobby Cannavale but.....

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Price's opus given a magnificent read. New York in the oughts and the detectives in it.

Cannavale Delivers!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
subject line says it all. he brought price's story to life. good combination. thank you

Cannavale is super!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This audiobook is the rare intersection of a great New York story and a contemporary gritty crime novel. Although the story would easily be successful as a plot-driven police procedural, it is lifted into a special place by its focus on characters. Those characters were given greater life by Canavale's reading. Even Canavale's slight mispronunciations are done in a true New York way (witness the way "trompe l'oeil" comes through.

This is my first Price novel, and I intend to read many more.

Fantastic book - excellent reading

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
good, basic cop story, not as fantastic as reviews implied. No earth-shattering insights. Kind of like a long episode of The Wire. Narrator's smoker's voice is appropriate to the tone of the book, but got grating after a while.

not bad

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

If you could sum up Lush Life in three words, what would they be?

Sophisticated, intense, piercing.

What about Bobby Cannavale’s performance did you like?

Everything. He performed every character in a sprawling cast without missing a beat. Truly a spectacular performance.

Deep, rich work + flawless performance

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Bobby Canavale does a great job capturing the speech characteristics of the individual characters. The street dialogue of the street kids, desperation of the father and police. Great job, look forward to more of his work.

Great narration by Bobby Canavale

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The darkness of the lives in this story is painful to read about. Sad, soul-sucking lives. But the writer was amazingly graceful in his treatment; analogies are fresh and the street argot is clever and absorbing. Great writer.

Narrator was brilliant and made the characters come alive. Too gritty for a steady diet, but masterfully written.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I read the review in the Times, which described the book as having terrific dialog. It seemed to me that such a book would be particularly good to listen to. For those of you that are withdrawing from The Wire -- this book will do it. It is gritty and realistic, and the narration is wonderful.

A wonderful listen

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews