Dermot Crowley has narrated 7 audiobooks on Listento.it by 4 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 11 ratings. The most-rated is This Is Happiness.
This Is Happiness
Summary
Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish unaltered in a 1,000 years. For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now - just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity - the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world. Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community - its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs - and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.
©2019 Niall Williams (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd
Molloy
Summary
Written initially in French, later translated by the author into English, Molloy is the first book in Dublin-born Samuel Beckett's trilogy. It was published shortly after WWII and marked a new, mature writing style, which was to dominate the remainder of his working life. Molloy is less a novel than a set of two monologues narrated by Molloy and his pursuer, Moran. In the first section, while consumed with the search of his mother, Molloy lost everything. Moran takes over in the second half, describing his hunt for Molloy. Within this simple outline, spoken in the first person, is a remarkable story, raising the questions of being and aloneness that marks so much of Beckett's work, but is richly comic as well. Beautifully written, it is one of the masterpieces of Irish literature.
©2003 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd. (P)2003 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd.
Father Figure: The Complete Series 1
Summary
The complete series of the BBC Radio 2 family sitcom written by and starring Irish comedian Jason Byrne and co-starring Pauline McLynn, Lucy Montgomery, Dominic Applewhite, Dermot Crowley and Michael Smiley. Tom (played by Jason) starts a new life as a house husband looking after the kids and doing a few domestic chores. What could be simpler? Things, however, don't go well for Tom and he is soon on the run from the law, with multiple problems, including some stolen dogs.
©2013 AudioGO Ltd (P)2013 AudioGO Ltd
Father Figure: Pilot
Summary
The pilot episode of the BBC Radio 2 family sitcom written by and starring Irish comedian Jason Byrne and co-starring Pauline McLynn, Lucy Montgomery, Dominic Applewhite, Dermot Crowley and Michael Smiley. A new Belfast house-husband has a dog of a first day as he embraces his change of lifestyle.
©2013 AudioGO Ltd (P)2013 AudioGO Ltd
Dadland
Summary
Keggie Carew grew up in the gravitational field of an unorthodox father who lived on his wits and dazzling charm. As his memory begins to fail, she embarks on a quest to unravel his story, and soon finds herself in a far more consuming place than she had bargained for. Tom Carew was a maverick, a left-handed stutterer, a law unto himself. As a member of an elite SOE unit he was parachuted behind enemy lines to raise guerrilla resistance in France, then Burma, in the Second World War. But his wartime exploits are only the start of it.... is a manhunt. Keggie takes us on a spellbinding journey, in peace and war, into surprising and shady corners of history, her rackety English childhood, the poignant breakdown of her family, the corridors of dementia and beyond. As Keggie pieces Tom - and herself - back together again, she celebrates the technicolour life of an impossible, irresistible, unstoppable man. Foreword and afterword read by the author. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying photographs will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2016 Keggie Carew (P)2016 Random House Audiobooks
Watt
Summary
Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other 'has its place in the series' - those masterpieces running from Murphy to the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their distrust of the rational universe. Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor. The new Faber edition offers for the first time a corrected text based on a scholarly appraisal of the manuscripts and textual history. Watt is at times extremely funny, bizarre, allusive and richly poetic. Though 'early' Beckett, the novel shows the author to be a remarkable virtuoso, investing plot and pace with classical, intellectual and earthy content style. Dermot Crowley proves himself a towering Beckett performer, matching clarity with flair; and with its musical surprises (arranged and conducted by Roger Marsh), the recording shows that, once again, a key Becket novel comes to life unforgettably in the audiobook medium.
©2009 The Estate of Samuel Beckett (P)2016 Ukemi Productions Ltd
How It Is
Summary
How It Is, a landmark in 20th century literature, is one of the most challenging of Samuel Beckett's early novels. He published it first in French in 1961 and then in his own translation in 1964. He explained in a letter that it was the outpouring of a "'man' lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his 'life' as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him.... The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within...." It is written in short paragraphs without punctuation. Fragments of expression pour out, of memories, intentions, emotions. It is testing to read on the page, but in this extraordinary recording by Dermot Crowley, How It Is becomes more accessible and comprehensible than ever before. It is, from the start, mesmerizing, and as the character of the protagonist emerges through his words, moments of aggression, of tenderness, of loss and hopelessness become increasingly affecting. The novel is divided into three parts, as the opening paragraph indicates: 'How it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it [Paragraph] voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting stops tell me again finish telling me/invocation.'
©2009 The Estate of Samuel Beckett (P)2017 Ukemi Productions Ltd