Mark Deakins has narrated 134 audiobooks on Listento.it by 136 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 2,712 ratings. The most-rated is Dark Places.
The Dying Game
Summary
A masterly locked-room mystery set in a near-future Orwellian state. The year is 2037, and on the tiny island of Isola, seven people have been selected to compete in a 48-hour test for a top-secret intelligence position with the totalitarian Union of Friendship. One of them is Anna Francis, a workaholic bureaucrat with a nine-year-old daughter she rarely sees and a secret that haunts her. Her assignment: to stage her own death and then to observe, from her hiding place inside the walls of the house, how the six other candidates react to the news that a murderer is among them. Who will take control? Who will crack under pressure? But then a storm rolls in, the power goes out, and the real game begins.... Combining suspense, unexpected twists, psychological gamesmanship, and a sinister dystopian future, The Dying Game conjures a world in which one woman is forced to ask, "Can I save my life by staging my death?"
©2017 Asa Avdic (P)2017 Penguin Audio
The Divorce Papers
Summary
Witty and wonderful, sparkling and sophisticated, this debut romantic comedy brilliantly tells the story of one very messy, very high-profile divorce, and the endearingly cynical young lawyer dragooned into handling it. Twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Diehl is happy toiling away as a criminal law associate at an old line New England firm where she very much appreciates that most of her clients are behind bars. Everyone at Traynor, Hand knows she abhors face-to-face contact, but one weekend, with all the big partners away, Sophie must handle the intake interview for the daughter of the firm's most important client. After 18 years of marriage, Mayflower descendant Mia Meiklejohn Durkheim has just been served divorce papers in a humiliating scene at the popular local restaurant Golightly's. She is locked and loaded to fight her eminent and ambitious husband, Dr. Daniel Durkheim, chief of the Department of Pediatric Oncology, for custody of their 10-year-old daughter Jane - and she also burns to take him down a peg. Sophie warns Mia that she's never handled a divorce case before, but Mia can't be put off. As she so disarmingly puts it: It's her first divorce, too. Debut novelist Susan Rieger doesn't leave a word out of place in this hilarious and expertly crafted debut that shines with the power and pleasure of storytelling. Told through personal correspondence, office memos, emails, articles, and legal papers, this playful reinvention of the epistolary form races along with humor and heartache, exploring the complicated family dynamic that results when marriage fails. For Sophie, the whole affair sparks a hard look at her own relationships - not only with her parents, but with colleagues, friends, lovers, and most importantly, herself. Much like Where'd You Go, Bernadette, The Divorce Papers will have you laughing aloud and thanking the literature gods for this incredible, fresh new voice in fiction.
©2014 Susan Rieger (P)2014 Random House Audio
De Niro
Summary
There's little debate that Robert De Niro is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, screen actors of his generation, perhaps of all time. His work, particularly in the first 20 years of his career, is unparalleled. Mean Streets, the Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, the Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull all dazzled moviegoers and critics alike, displaying a talent the likes of which had rarely - if ever - been seen. De Niro become known for his deep involvement in his characters, assuming that role completely into his own life, resulting in extraordinary, chameleonic performances. Yet little is known about the off-screen De Niro - he is an intensely private man, whose rare public appearances are often marked by inarticulateness and palpable awkwardness. It can be almost painful to watch at times, in powerful contrast to his confident movie personae. In this elegant and compelling biography, best-selling writer Shawn Levy writes of these many De Niros - the characters and the man - seeking to understand the evolution of an actor who once dove deeply into his roles as if to hide his inner nature, and who now seemingly avoids acting challenges, taking roles which make few apparent demands on his overwhelming talent. Levy has had unprecedented access to De Niro's personal research and production materials, creating a new impression of the effort that went into the actor's legendary performances. Levy also spoke to De Niro's collaborators and friends to depict De Niro's transition from an ambitious young man to a transfixing and enigmatic artist and cultural figure.
©2014 Shawn Levy (P)2014 Random House Audio
Prophecy and Modern Times
Summary
Have you ever wondered what the ancient prophets had to say about these modern times? Find the answer in Prophecy and Modern Times, a brief but powerful exploration into 6,000 years of prophecies about these latter days. All the ancient warnings and promises are beautifully distilled, organized, and explained for clear understanding and quick application by this generation. As President Ezra Taft Benson said in the foreword, “Every person interested in present and future events in this war-torn world will profit from a careful perusal of these pages.” Prophecy and Modern Times will help you interpret what ancient prophecies mean for your own life, and for the modern world. These prophets foresaw many of the complexities of the modern era, the Middle East, America, the rise of enormous economic and military powers, the stealthy corruption of nations and of personal lives, and how the second coming of Jesus Christ will finally begin a long-awaited era of peace. Gary D. Goodwin, of the Association for Mormon Letters, said “Skousen reveals his brilliance in his organization of such a monumentally complicated task. He suggests how to interpret prophecy, tells us its purpose and our responsibility to understand it. Skousen is masterful!”
©2014 Izzard Ink Publishing (P)2014 Izzard Ink Publishing
How to Read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence
Summary
Have you ever wanted to read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and really understand what they're saying? Millions of others have, too. But getting a real understanding of the legal language of 200 years ago can be challenging - and as a result, few Americans know these important documents as well as they should. Recognizing this, Paul Skousen has written exactly the book you've been looking for. It's an easy step-by-step guide that makes these documents come alive. With his help, you will be able to read them with purpose, with understanding, and with clarity. Skousen provides several valuable memory aids for you to master the Constitution's seven Articles and the 27 important rights named in the Bill of Rights. You will be able to navigate through the Declaration's five power statements on freedom and unlock their 18th century phrases with a convenient glossary. You will find the answers to 10 popular myths about the Constitution, and discover how its guiding principles protect human rights. Thousands of books describe the origins of these famous documents, but only one audiobook gives you a place to start reading them made easier in How to Read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
©2016 Paul B. Skousen (P)2016 Paul B. Skousen, Izzard Ink Publishing
Wingspan
Summary
Originally produced as a one-act play starring Grace Experience and K.K. Glick, Wingspan is the story of a young flight attendant with a fear of flying who is about to work her first transatlantic trip. When a veteran coworker tries to help her through the turbulent crossing, she discovers that a fear of flying is the least of the young woman's secrets. The two actresses who starred in the play will also narrate this audio original.
©2019 Chris Bohjalian (P)2019 Random House Audio
The Suicide Run
Summary
Before writing his memoir of madness, Darkness Visible, William Styron was best known for his ambitious works of fiction - including The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice. Styron also created personal but no less powerful tales based on his real-life experiences as a U.S. Marine. The Suicide Run collects five of these meticulously rendered narratives. One of them - "Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco" - is published here for the first time. In "Blankenship," written in 1953, Styron draws on his stint as a guard at a stateside military prison at the end of World War II. "Marriott, the Marine" and "The Suicide Run" - which Styron composed in the early 1970s as part of an intended novel that he set aside to write Sophie's Choice - depict the surreal experience of being conscripted a second time, after World War II, to serve in the Korean War. "My Father's House" captures the isolation and frustration of a soldier trying to become a civilian again. In "Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco," written late in Styron's life, a soldier attempts to exorcise the dread of an approaching battle by daydreaming about far-off islands, visited vicariously through his childhood stamp collection. Perhaps the last volume from one of literature's greatest voices, The Suicide Run brings to life the drama, inhumanity, absurdity, and heroism that forever changed the men who served in the Marine Corps.
©2009 William Styron (P)2009 Random House
Spying on the South
Summary
The New York Times best-selling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Tony Horwitz. With Spying on the South, the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times. For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman", the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape architect. Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic. “A tour is only as good as its guide, and Horwitz is a seasoned one - inquisitive, open-minded, and opting for observation over judgment, whether at a dive bar, monster truck rally, the Creation Museum, or a historical plantation. The book will appeal to fans of travelogue, Civil War-era history, and current events by way of Southern sensibilities.” (Booklist) “With the keen eye and deft pen that he's long brought to telling the odd and wonderful and fascinating story of America, Tony Horwitz has returned to familiar territory - the South - to give us a unique piece of reportage from a region that tells us a whole lot more about the country than the country sometimes wants to admit. Like his classic Confederates in the Attic, this book will be read, remembered, and treasured.” (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian and author of The Soul of America)
©2019 Tony Horwitz (P)2019 Penguin Audio
Child of Light
Summary
The first and definitive biography of one of the great American novelists of the postwar era, the author of Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, and a penetrating critic of American power, innocence, and corruption Robert Stone (1937-2015), probably the only postwar American writer to draw favorable comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, and Joseph Conrad, lived a life rich in adventure, achievement, and inner turmoil. He grew up rough on the streets of New York, the son of a mentally troubled single mother. After his Navy service in the '50s, which brought him to such locales as pre-Castro Havana, the Suez Crisis, and Antarctica, he studied writing at Stanford, where he met Ken Kesey and became a core member of the gang of Merry Pranksters. The publication of his superb New Orleans novel, Hall of Mirrors (1967), initiated a succession of dark-humored novels that investigated the American experience in Vietnam (Dog Soldiers, 1974, which won the National Book Award), Central America (A Flag for Sunrise, 1981), and Jerusalem on the eve of the millennium (Damascus Gate, 1998). An acclaimed novelist himself, Madison Smartt Bell was a close friend and longtime admirer of Robert Stone. His authorized and deeply researched biography is both intimate and objective, a rich and unsparing portrait of a complicated, charismatic, and haunted man and a sympathetic reading of his work that will help to secure Stone's place in the pantheon of major American writers.
©2020 Madison Smartt Bell (P)2020 Random House Audio
Drama High
Summary
The inspiration for the NBC TV series "Rise," starring Josh Radnor, Auli'i Cravalho, and Rosie Perez — the incredible and true story of an extraordinary drama teacher who has changed the lives of thousands of students and inspired a town. By the author of The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino. Why would the multimillionaire producer of Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon take his limo from Manhattan to the struggling former steel town of Levittown, Pennsylvania, to see a high school production of Les Misérables? To see the show performed by the astoundingly successful theater company at Harry S Truman High School, run by its legendary director, Lou Volpe. Broadway turns to Truman High when trying out controversial shows such as Rent and Spring Awakening before they move on to high school theater programs across the nation. Volpe’s students from this blue-collar town go on to become Emmy-winning producers, entertainment executives, newscasters, and community-theater founders. Michael Sokolove, a Levittown native and former student of Volpe’s, chronicles the drama director’s last school years and follows a group of student actors as they work through riveting dramas both on and off the stage. This is a story of an economically depressed but proud town finding hope in a gifted teacher and the magic of theater.
©2017 Michael Sokolove (P)2017 Penguin Audio
If You Could See Me Now
Summary
One summer night, a boy and his beautiful cousin plunge naked into the moonlit waters of a rural quarry. Twenty years later, the boy, now grown, flees the wreckage of his life and returns to Arden, Wisconsin, in search of everything he has lost. But for Miles Teagarden, the landscape he knew so well has turned eerie and threatening. And the love he shared has become very, very deadly....
©2016 Peter Straub (P)2016 Random House Audio
Swim Back to Me
Summary
From Ann Packer, author of the New York Times best-selling novels The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, a collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a lifetime. A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy - and vulnerability - of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex. Ann Packer is one of our most talented archivists of family life, with its hidden crevasses and unforeseeable perils, and in these stories she explores the moral predicaments that define our social and emotional lives, the frailty of ordinary grace, and the ways in which we are shattered and remade by loss. With Swim Back to Me, she delivers shimmering psychological precision, unfailing intelligence, and captivating drama: her most enticing work yet.
©2011 Ann Packer (P)2011 Random House Audio
Bubblegum
Summary
"Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest, and Bubblegum is a dazzling accomplishment of wit and inventiveness." (George Saunders) "Levin's brains may have earned him a cult...but here he swells to a democratic reach. Give him a try sometime. His gate’s wide open." (Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review) The astonishing new novel by the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award-winning author of The Instructions. Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the internet does not exist and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology - a "flesh-and-bone robot" called the Curio - has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to but must find a way to live in. At age 38, still living at home with his widowed father, Belt insulates himself from the awful and terrifying world outside by spending most of his time with books, his beloved Curio, and the voices in his head, which he isn't entirely sure are in his head. After Belt's father goes on a fishing excursion, a simple trip to the bank escalates into an epic saga that eventually forces Belt to confront the world he fears as well as his estranged childhood friend, Jonboat, the celebrity astronaut and billionaire. In Bubblegum, Adam Levin has crafted a profoundly hilarious, resonant, and monumental narrative about heartbreak, longing, art, and the search for belonging in an incompatible world. Bubblegum is a rare masterwork of provocative social (and self-) awareness and intimate emotional power.
©2020 Adam Levin (P)2020 Random House Audio
Losing the Long Game
Summary
The definitive account of how regime change in the Middle East has proven so tempting to American policymakers for decades - despite never achieving the far-reaching aims of its proponents - and how it's finally time to forge a new path forward. Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade - in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reasons for these interventions have also been extremely diverse, and the methods by which the United States pursued regime change have also been highly varied, ranging from diplomatic pressure alone to outright military invasion and occupation. What is common to all the operations, however, is that they failed to achieve their ultimate goals, produced a range of unintended and even catastrophic consequences, carried heavy financial and human costs, and in many cases left the countries in question worse off than they were before. Losing the Long Game is a thorough and riveting look at the US experience with regime change over the past 70 years and an insider's view on US policymaking in the region at the highest levels. It is the story of repeated US interventions in the region that always started out with high hopes and often the best of intentions, but never turned out well. No future discussion of US policy in the Middle East will be complete without taking into account the lessons of the past, especially at a time of intense domestic polarization and reckoning with America's standing in world.
©2020 Philip H. Gordon (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Mormon People
Summary
With Mormonism on the verge of an unprecedented cultural and political breakthrough, an eminent scholar of American evangelicalism explores the history and reflects on the future of this native-born American faith and its connection to the life of the nation. In 1830, a young seer and sometime treasure hunter named Joseph Smith began organizing adherents into a new religious community that would come to be called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and known informally as the Mormons). One of the nascent faith’s early initiates was a 23-year-old Ohio farmer named Parley Pratt, the distant grandfather of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In The Mormon People, religious historian Matthew Bowman peels back the curtain on more than 180 years of Mormon history and doctrine. He recounts the church’s origin and development, explains how Mormonism came to be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world by the turn of 21st century, and ably sets the scene for a 2012 presidential election that has the potential to mark a major turning point in the way this “all-American” faith is perceived by the wider American public - and internationally. Mormonism started as a radical movement, with a profoundly transformative vision of American society that was rooted in a form of Christian socialism. Over the ensuing centuries, Bowman demonstrates, that vision has evolved - and with it the esteem in which Mormons have been held in the eyes of their countrymen. Admired on the one hand as hardworking paragons of family values, Mormons have also been derided as oddballs and persecuted as polygamists, heretics, and zealots clad in “magic underwear”. Even today, the place of Mormonism in public life continues to generate heated debate on both sides of the political divide. Polls show widespread unease at the prospect of a Mormon president. Yet the faith has never been more popular. Today there are about 14 million Mormons in the world, fewer than half of whom live inside the United States. It is a church with a powerful sense of its own identity and an uneasy sense of its relationship with the main line of American culture. Mormons will surely play an even greater role in American civic life in the years ahead. In such a time, The Mormon People comes as a vital addition to the corpus of American religious history - a frank and fair-minded demystification of a faith that remains a mystery for many.
©2012 Random House Audio (P)2012 Matthew Bowman
Brokenhearted - The Power of Darkness
Summary
A journey through dark, forbidden worlds, beyond the limits of fear. Are you strong enough to tempt Fate? From the author of the number one best-seller Touched comes the highly anticipated third episode of the saga that has bewitched thousands of listeners around the world. How can you go on living if the person you love is gone? Consumed by grief and remorse, Gemma Bloom wonders that day after day. Evan defied the laws of Fate to save her, paying dearly for his disobedience: falling into the trap laid by an Angel of Death, he was poisoned by Gemma’s own lips. Since that accursed kiss, she has been inconsolable, tormented by nightmares and hallucinations in which Evan is tortured by invisible hands. Just when Gemma believes she’s losing her mind, a deep, seductive evil begins to entwine itself around the fragments of her broken heart. Horrified at first, Gemma finds herself gradually drawn to this new emotion. A terrible, mesmerizing power seems to be growing inside her, threatening to take possession of her soul. Tormented by frightening premonitions and dangerous secrets, Gemma will have to summon all her courage if she wants to challenge Fate and resist the power of darkness. With her elegant style and intense prose, Elisa S. Amore leads us down a path paved with unbreakable bonds and fatal betrayals, forbidden realms and extreme sacrifices. An unforgettable adventure. Nightmares. Premonitions. Dark Secrets. Death Has Never Been So Close. How brave do you have to be to face your worst fears?
©2018 Elisa S. Amore (P)2018 Elisa S. Amore
Touched: The Complete Series
Summary
This box set includes all four books in the number one best-selling series Touched.
Only true love can survive a journey through heaven and hell.
My name is Evan, and I’m a Soldier of Death.
For centuries I’ve killed mortals in order to ferry their souls to the other side.
Until I met her.
Her fate is sealed - I must take her soul. What never occurred to me was that I would fall in love with her. If I don't kill her, the forces of heaven and hell will be unleashed, and others will come to take her.... Will I be able to protect her?
Lovers of vampires, werewolves, and witches, be ready for a new, deadly race. The Soldiers of Death are coming to take your souls. Are you brave enough to face them? Take the risk and click the buy button to meet them now....
©2018 Elisa S. Amore (P)2018 Elisa S. Amore
Aster Wood and the Lost Maps of Almara: Aster Wood, Book 1
Summary
Experience the suspense and mystery of this top young adult series. Broken. That's what the world is now. The Long Drought is over, but the rain that falls burns like acid on the flesh. Young Aster Wood is weak compared to the other survivors who flock to the cities, the only places where a meal and fresh water can be had. But when he finds a ragged piece of parchment in a hidden corner of his father's childhood home, he is pulled through the cosmos to a place no one on Earth knows exists. Here, the grass grows green. The wolves glow like the full moon. The wizards play with ancient knowledge, delighted with simple spells that can bring dying plants back to life and make invisible that which they do not want seen. And Aster is healthy again. The heart condition that has plagued him since he was a toddler is suddenly absent, and Aster finds himself running - no, flying - across the countryside, as if he were born to do it. Now, he must chase down the long-lost sorcerer, Almara, to discover the truth about his own family's past. And to learn what is yet to come for Earth.
©2014 J. B. Cantwell (P)2015 J. B. Cantwell
Expiation: The Whisper of Death
Summary
One great sacrifice will end it all - but can true love ever be forgotten?
Would you brave hell to save the one you love?
How can you look forward to the future when you know your days are numbered? Gemma has asked herself that every night since making her fateful pact with Sophìa, queen of the underworld.
Three days after giving birth to her child, Gemma must return to Hell and be transformed into a Witch, erasing her past and surrendering herself to evil. This is the price she’s agreed to pay in exchange for bringing Evan back to life and ensuring the safety of their child.
Evan, however, refuses to accept her agreement. He’s convinced that together, they can overcome this new challenge. His deepest fear is different: He knows the Angels of Death will do everything they can to kill Gemma before she becomes a Witch.
Pursued by unrelenting danger and dark secrets, Evan and Gemma ready themselves for the ultimate bloody battle to defend their love.
Prepare yourself for a journey with no return.
©2018 Elisa S. Amore (P)2018 Elisa S. Amore
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This
Summary
Heralding the arrival of a stunning new voice in American fiction, Robin Black's If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This takes readers into the minds and hearts of people navigating the unsettling transitions that life presents to us all. Written with maturity and insight, and in beautiful, clear-eyed prose, these stories plumb the depths of love, loss, and hope. A father struggles to forge an independent identity as his blind daughter prepares for college. A mother comes to terms with her adult daughter's infidelity, even as she keeps a disturbing secret of her own. An artist mourns the end of a romance while painting a dying man's portrait. An accident on a trip to Italy and an unexpected connection with a stranger cause a woman to question her lifelong assumptions about herself. Brilliant, hopeful, and fearlessly honest, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This illuminates the truths of human relationships, truths we come to recognize in these characters and in ourselves.
©2010 Robin Black (P)2010 Random House