Michael Crouch has narrated 174 audiobooks on Listento.it by 172 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 3,066 ratings. The most-rated is The Sea in the Sky.
The Fever King
Summary
In the former United States, sixteen-year-old Noam Álvaro wakes up in a hospital bed, the sole survivor of the viral magic that killed his family and made him a technopath. His ability to control technology attracts the attention of the minister of defense and thrusts him into the magical elite of the nation of Carolinia.
The son of undocumented immigrants, Noam has spent his life fighting for the rights of refugees fleeing magical outbreaks - refugees Carolinia routinely deports with vicious efficiency. Sensing a way to make change, Noam accepts the minister’s offer to teach him the science behind his magic, secretly planning to use it against the government. But then he meets the minister’s son - cruel, dangerous, and achingly beautiful - and the way forward becomes less clear.
Caught between his purpose and his heart, Noam must decide who he can trust and how far he’s willing to go in pursuit of the greater good.
©2019 Victoria Lee (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Futures
Summary
In this dazzling debut novel about love and betrayal, a young couple moves to New York City in search of success - only to learn that the lives they dream of may come with dangerous strings attached. Julia and Evan fall in love as undergraduates at Yale. For Evan, a scholarship student from a rural Canadian town, Yale is a whole new world, and Julia - blond, beautiful, and rich - fits perfectly into the future he's envisioned for himself. After graduation, and on the eve of the great financial meltdown of 2008, they move together to New York City, where Evan lands a job at a hedge fund. But Julia, whose privileged upbringing grants her an easy but wholly unsatisfying job with a nonprofit, feels increasingly shut out of Evan's secretive world. With the market crashing and banks failing, Evan becomes involved in a high-stakes deal at work - a deal that, despite the assurances of his Machiavellian boss, begins to seem more than slightly suspicious. Meanwhile, Julia reconnects with someone from her past who offers a glimpse of a different kind of live. As the economy craters, and as Evan and Julia spin into their separate orbits, they each find that they are capable of much more - good and bad - than they'd ever imagined. Rich in suspense and insight, Anna Pitoniak's gripping debut reveals the fragile yet enduring nature of our connections: to one another and to ourselves. The Futures is a glittering story of a couple coming of age, and a searing portrait of what it's like to be young and full of hope in New York City, a place that so often seems determined to break us down - but ultimately may be the very thing that saves us.
©2017 Anna Pitoniak (P)2017 Hachette Audio
Modern Love, Revised and Updated (Media Tie-In)
Summary
The most popular, provocative, and unforgettable essays from the past 15 years of the New York Times "Modern Love" column - including stories from the upcoming anthology series starring Tina Fey, Andy Garcia, Anne Hathaway, Catherine Keener, Dev Patel, and John Slattery A young woman goes through the five stages of ghosting grief. A man’s promising fourth date ends in the emergency room. A female lawyer with bipolar disorder experiences the highs and lows of dating. A widower hesitates about introducing his children to his new girlfriend. A divorcée in her 70s looks back at the beauty and rubble of past relationships. These are just a few of the people who tell their stories in Modern Love, Revised and Updated, featuring dozens of the most memorable essays to run in The New York Times "Modern Love" column since its debut in 2004. Some of the stories are unconventional, while others hit close to home. Some reveal the way technology has changed dating forever; others explore the timeless struggles experienced by anyone who has ever searched for love. But all of the stories are, above everything else, honest. Together, they tell the larger story of how relationships begin, often fail, and - when we’re lucky - endure. Edited by longtime "Modern Love" editor Daniel Jones and featuring a diverse selection of contributors - including Mindy Hung, Trey Ellis, Ann Hood, Deborah Copaken, Terri Cheney, and more - this is the perfect audiobook for anyone who’s loved, lost, stalked an ex on social media, or pined for true romance: In other words, anyone interested in the endlessly complicated workings of the human heart.
©2019 Daniel Jones, Andrew Rannells, Ayelet Waldman, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Veronica Chambers (P)2019 Random House Audio
Ill Will
Summary
Two sensational unsolved crimes - one in the past, another in the present - are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon. “We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves.” This is one of the little mantras Dustin Tillman likes to share with his patients, and it’s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie? A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. The trial came to epitomize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence, the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning. Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients has been plying him with stories of the drowning deaths of a string of drunk college boys. At first, Dustin dismisses his patient's suggestions that a serial killer is at work as paranoid thinking, but as the two embark on an amateur investigation, Dustin starts to believe that there’s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon, he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries - and putting his own family in harm’s way. From one of today’s most renowned practitioners of literary suspense, Ill Will is an intimate thriller about the failures of memory and the perils of self-deception. In Dan Chaon’s nimble, chilling prose, the past looms over the present, turning each into a haunted place. Cast of Narrators: Ari Fliakos as the Narrator Edoardo Ballerini as Dustin Michael Crouch as Aaron Alex McKenna as Wave and Kate Scott Aiello as Rusty PRAISE FOR DAN CHAON Among the Missing “Unforgettable...hums with life and wry humor.... The stories sneak resolutely up on you, like new weather that hits before you know it.” (The New York Times Book Review) “One of those writers who possess an uncanny and seemingly otherwordly understanding of the human condition...Chaon [is] a remarkable chronicler of a very American kind of sadness, much in the tradition of Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, and Denis Johnson.” (San Francisco Chronicle) You Remind Me of Me “Remarkable...weaves the threads into a whole that is not only satisfying but devastating.” (Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice) “Extraordinary...renews my faith in the unique capacity of literature to help us understand and ultimately respect ourselves and the strange, baffling, complex figures we all can be.” (Houston Chronicle)
©2017 Dan Chaon (P)2017 Random House Audio
Dragons in the Waters
Summary
Thirteen-year-old Simon Renier has no idea when he boards the MS Orion with his cousin, Forsyth Phair, that their journey to Venezuela will be a dangerous one. His original plan - to return a family heirloom, a portrait of Simon Bolivar, to its rightful place - is sidetracked when Forsyth is found murdered. When the portrait is stolen, all passengers and crew are suspects. Simon's newfound friends, Poly and Charles O'Keefe, and their scientist father help Simon try to find his painting and his cousin's murderer. But will they succeed before they land? Or will the murderer and thief escape into the jungles of Venezuela?
©2011 Madeleine L'Engle (P)2016 Listening Library
Sting
Summary
Lock up your jewels! Best-selling author Jude Watson is back with her gang of kid criminal masterminds. Never do a favor for a friend. Twelve-year-old March McQuin forgot rule number one for cat burglars, which is how he and his twin sister, Jules, found themselves dangling upside down 20 feet above a stone floor at three in the morning. Their target was a set of stunning diamonds, and it should have been an easy job, in and out. Except another thief got there first. March and Jules were lucky to escape with their lives - and one measly stone. Now the botched heist has created a world of trouble. The stone they grabbed was the Morning Star, one of a trio of famous sapphires, and it's cursed. The theft put the twins and their friends in the crosshairs of Interpol, the FBI, and a vicious adult gang of international criminals. And worst of all, the only way to break the curse and set everything to rights is to somehow manage to steal the other two sapphires in the set. Break out the black gloves. Lay out the masks. There's a full moon coming and jewels to steal....
©2016 Jude Watson (P)2016 Scholastic Inc.
Fighting to Be Free
Summary
All his life, people have told Jamie Cole that he was born bad. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But that doesn't matter now. Because after a lifetime of demons, Jamie has finally found an angel. Ellie Pearce learned the hard way that boys can't be trusted. But the night she meets Jamie, something shifts. He's different: brooding, a bit dark, determined to change. The connection they share is intense, compelling. Ellie tries to resist, but with each breathtaking kiss, she can't help falling deeper. Things between Ellie and Jamie are perfect - and perfection can't last. When fate goes horribly wrong, Jamie's only hope of saving his family is to strike a deal with the devil. Most of all, Jamie wants to prove he's the person Ellie believes him to be. But if she learns just how much he's been hiding, Ellie won't be able to believe anything Jamie has ever told her.
©2016 Kirsty Moseley (P)2016 Hachette Audio
Out East
Summary
"An unforgettable story told with feeling and humor and above all with the razor-sharp skill of a delicate and highly gifted writer." (Andre Aciman, New York Times best-selling author of Call Me by Your Name) "Out East is full of intimacy and hope and frustration and joy, an extraordinary tale of emotional awakening and lacerating ambivalence, a confession of self-doubt that becomes self-knowledge." (Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner) A gripping portrait of life in a Montauk summer house - a debut memoir of first love, identity, and self-discovery among a group of friends who became family. They call Montauk the end of the world, a spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. The house was a ramshackle split-level set on a hill, and each summer 31 people would sleep between its thin walls and shag carpets. Against the moonlight the house's octagonal roof resembled a bee's nest. It was dubbed The Hive. In 2013, John Glynn joined the share house. Packing his duffel for that first Memorial Day weekend, he prayed for clarity. At 27, he was crippled by an all-encompassing loneliness, a feeling he had carried in his heart for as long as he could remember. John didn't understand the loneliness. He just knew it was there. Like the moon gone dark. Out East is the portrait of a summer, of the Hive and the people who lived in it, and John's own reckoning with a half-formed sense of self. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, The Hive was a center of gravity, a port of call, a home. Friendships, conflicts, secrets, and epiphanies blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their 20s and beyond. Blending the sand-strewn milieu of George Howe Colt's The Big House and the radiant aching of Olivia Liang's The Lonely City, Out East is a keenly wrought story of love and transformation, longing and escape in our own contemporary moment.
©2019 John Glynn (P)2019 Hachette Audio
Heretics Anonymous
Summary
Put an atheist in a strict Catholic school? Expect comedy, chaos, and an Inquisition. The Breakfast Club meets Saved! in debut author Katie Henry’s hilarious novel about a band of misfits who set out to challenge their school, one nun at a time. Perfect for fans of Becky Albertalli and Robyn Schneider. When Michael walks through the doors of Catholic school, things can’t get much worse. His dad has just made the family move again, and Michael needs a friend. When a girl challenges their teacher in class, Michael thinks he might have found one, and a fellow atheist at that. Only this girl, Lucy, isn’t just Catholic... she wants to be a priest. Lucy introduces Michael to other St. Clare’s outcasts, and he officially joins Heretics Anonymous, where he can be an atheist, Lucy can be an outspoken feminist, Avi can be Jewish and gay, Max can wear whatever he wants, and Eden can practice paganism. Michael encourages the Heretics to go from secret society to rebels intent on exposing the school’s hypocrisies one stunt at a time. But when Michael takes one mission too far - putting the other Heretics at risk - he must decide whether to fight for his own freedom or rely on faith, whatever that means, in God, his friends, or himself.
©2018 Catherine Henry (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
White Rabbit
Summary
Caleb Roehrig, author of Last Seen Leaving, delivers another spellbinding YA murder mystery in White Rabbit. Rufus Holt is having the worst night of his life. It begins with the reappearance of his ex-boyfriend, Sebastian - the guy who stomped his heart out like a spent cigarette. Just as Rufus is getting ready to move on, Sebastian turns up out of the blue, saying they need to "talk." Things couldn’t get worse, right? Then Rufus gets a call from his sister April, begging for help. He and Sebastian find her, drenched in blood and holding a knife beside the dead body of her boyfriend, Fox Whitney. April swears she didn’t kill Fox. Rufus knows her too well to believe she’s telling him the whole truth, but April has something he needs. Her price is his help. Now, with no one to trust but the boy he wants to hate yet can’t stop loving, Rufus has one night to clear his sister’s name . . . or die trying.
©2018 Caleb Roehrig (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
These Violent Delights
Summary
An O Magazine LGBTQ Book that Is Changing the Literary Landscape in 2020 An Electric Lit Most Anticipated Debut of the Second Half of 2020 A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year A Paperback Paris Best New LGBTQ+ Books to Read This Year Selection The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively enjoyable debut novel - a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence. When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm. Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal — an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him. As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence. Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us.
©2020 Micah Nemerever (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful
Summary
"An alternately charming and horrifying exploration of what it means to be human and how far we'll go in pursuit of personal and societal 'perfection.' I devoured this book." (Kiersten White, New York Times best-selling author of And I Darken) For fans of television shows Black Mirror and Westworld, this compelling, mind-bending novel is a twisted look into the future, exploring the lengths we'll go to remake ourselves into the perfect human specimen and what it means to be human at all. The future is curious. Stronger. Today, our bodies define us. We color our hair; tattoo our skin; pierce our ears, brows, noses. We lift weights, run miles, break records. We are flesh and blood and bone. Faster. Tomorrow has different rules. The future is no longer about who we are - it's about who we want to be. If you can dream it, you can be it. Science will make us smarter, healthier, flawless in every way. Our future is boundless. More beautiful. This is a story that begins tomorrow. It's a story about us. It's a story about who comes after us. And it's a story about perfection. Because perfection has a way of getting ugly. Audiobook cast of narrators: "Part One", read by Michael Crouch "Part Two", read by Karissa Vacker "Part Three", read by Brittany Pressley "Part Four", read by Christopher Gebauer "Part Five", read by Ari Fliakos "Part Six", read by Rebecca Lowman Three starred reviews! "A deep and suddenly necessary exploration of the beautiful and terrible futures we face. Every story leaves you desperate for more. Somehow, the further from today Dayton travels, the more real it becomes." (Hank Green, number-one New York Times best-selling author of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing)
©2018 Arwen Elys Dayton (P)2018 Listening Library
Magonia
Summary
“Maria Dahvana Headley is a firecracker: she’s whip smart with a heart, and she writes like a dream.” (Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of The Graveyard Book and Coraline Aza) Ray Boyle is drowning in thin air. Since she was a baby, Aza has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak - to live. So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of her medication. But Aza doesn't think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name. Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who's always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea, something goes terribly wrong. Aza is lost to our world - and found, by another. Magonia. Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power - but as she navigates her new life, she discovers that war between Magonia and Earth is coming. In Aza's hands lies fate of the whole of humanity—including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie? Neil Gaiman’s Stardust meets John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars in this New York Times best-selling story about a girl caught between two worlds, two races, and two destinies. Don’t miss Aerie, the stunning, highly anticipated sequel!
©2015 Maria Dahvana Headley (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Where I End and You Begin
Summary
Ezra Slevin is an anxious, neurotic insomniac who spends his nights questioning his place in the universe and his days obsessing over Imogen, a nerdy girl with gigantic eyebrows and a heart of gold. For weeks, Ezra has been working up the courage to invite Imogen to prom. The only problem is Imogen's protective best friend, Wynonna Jones. Wynonna has blue hair, jams to '80s rock, and has made a career out of tormenting Ezra for as long as he can remember. Then, on the night of a total solar eclipse, something strange happens to Ezra and Wynonna - and they wake up in each other's bodies. Not only that, they begin randomly swapping back and forth every day! Ezra soon discovers Wynonna's huge crush on his best friend, Holden, a five-foot-nothing girl magnet with anger management problems. With no end to their curse in sight, Ezra makes Wynonna a proposition: while swapping bodies, he will help her win Holden's heart...but only if she helps him woo Imogen. Forming an uneasy alliance, Ezra and Wynonna embark on a collision course of mistaken identity, hurt feelings, embarassing bodily functions, and a positively byzantine production of Twelfth Night. Ezra wishes he could be more like Wynonna's badass version of Ezra - but he also realizes he feels more like himself while being Wynonna than he has in a long time.... Wildly entertaining and deeply heartfelt, Where I End and You Begin is a brilliant, unapologetic exploration of what it means to be your best self.
©2019 Preston Norton (P)2019 Recorded Books
North to the Rails
Summary
When Tom Chantry comes west to buy cattle, he quickly runs into trouble. During a drunken scuffle in a bar, Dutch Akin challenges Chantry to a gunfight. Leaving town rather than face Akin, Chantry is quickly branded a coward. Later, when hiring men to take his herd to the railroad, Chantry faces a dilemma: No one wants to make the long, dangerous ride with a leader of questionable courage. So when French Williams, a shrewd and ruthless cattleman, makes Chantry an offer, Tom reluctantly accepts his unusual terms: Tom must remain with the drive from start to finish. If he fails to do so, the entire herd will belong to French. Tom quickly learns that life is not going to be made easy for him. The first man French hires is Dutch Akin.
©1971 Louis & Katherine L'Amour Trust (P)2019 Random House Audio
You Asked for Perfect
Summary
For fans of Adam Silvera and Nina LaCour comes a timely novel about a teen's struggle when academic success and happiness pull him in opposite directions. Senior Ariel Stone is the perfect college applicant: first chair violinist, dedicated volunteer, active synagogue congregant, and expected valedictorian. And he works hard - really hard - to make his success look effortless. A failed calculus quiz is not part of his plan. Not when he's number one. Not when his peers can smell weakness like a freshman's body spray. Ariel throws himself into studying. His friends will understand if he skips a few plans, and he can sleep when he graduates. But as his grade continues to slide, Ariel realizes he needs help and reluctantly enlists a tutor, his classmate Amir. The two have never gotten along, but Ariel has no other options. Ariel discovers he may not like calculus, but he does like Amir. Except adding a new relationship to his long list of commitments may just push him past his limit.
©2019 Laura Silverman (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
The Fell of Dark
Summary
What's a boy to do - in Caleb Roehrig's YA paranormal romance The Fell of Dark - when his crush is a hot vampire with a mystery to solve? The only thing August Pfeiffer hates more than algebra is living in a vampire town. Located at a nexus of mystical energy fields, Fulton Heights is practically an electromagnet for supernatural drama. And when a mysterious (and annoyingly hot) vampire boy arrives with a cryptic warning, Auggie suddenly finds himself at the center of it. An ancient and terrible power is returning to the earthly realm, and somehow Auggie seems to be the only one who can stop it.
©2020 Caleb Roehrig (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
Down the Long Hills: A Novel
Summary
Everyone was dead. Indian raiders massacred the entire wagon train. Only seven-year-old Hardy Collins and three-year-old Betty Sue Powell, managed to survive. With a knife, a faithful stallion, and the survival lessons his father taught him, Hardy must face the challenges of the open prairie as they head west in search of help. Using ingenuity and common sense, Hardy builds shelters, forages for food, and learns to care for Betty Sue. But their journey through this hostile wilderness is being tracked by even more hostile men. And, as he struggles to keep them alive, Hardy realizes that their survival may depend on his ability to go far beyond what his father had been able to teach him.
©2017 Louis L'Amour (P)2020 Random House Audio
How to Feed a Dictator
Summary
“Amazing stories.... Intimate portraits of how [these five ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” (Lulu Garcia-Navarro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday) Anthony Bourdain meets Kapuscinski in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the appetites of five of the 20th century's most infamous dictators, by the acclaimed author of Dancing Bears. What was Pol Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one particular cow? Traveling across four continents, from the ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Witold Szablowski tracked down the personal chefs of five dictators known for the oppression and massacre of their own citizens - Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot - and listened to their stories over sweet-and-sour soup, goat-meat pilaf, bottles of rum, and games of gin rummy. Dishy, deliciously listenable, and dead serious, How to Feed a Dictator provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.
©2020 Witold Szablowski; Antonia Lloyd-Jones - translation (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Worth Fighting For
Summary
Kirsty Moseley brings us the sequel to Fighting to be Free. Sometimes in life you have to walk away. Leaving Jamie Cole was the hardest thing Ellie Pearce ever had to do. Somehow she moved on. She made a new life in a new city with a new man. So when a family tragedy calls Ellie back home, she believes all her old feelings for Jamie - the hunger, the heat, the heartbreak - are safely behind her. But the second she lays eyes on him, the intensity of their connection is as strong as ever. Sometimes you stay and fight. Jamie knows pain. He's felt it fighting in the streets, and he felt it fighting to survive in prison. Yet nothing he's experienced has been as painful as the day Ellie left - until the moment she came back. This time Jamie is determined to hold on to Ellie forever. But as much as she still loves him, she can't ignore the dark world he's now a part of. Jamie has enemies. Dangerous ones. And after seeing Jamie with Ellie, they know exactly how to take him out.
©2016 Kirsty Moseley (P)2016 Hachette Audio