
Crush
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Robyn Maryke
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By:
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Ada Calhoun
About this listen
“Ada Calhoun writes with absolute clarity about the giddiest and most destabilizing feeling—the crush. This novel made me feel dizzy and I loved every second. Calhoun can seduce me any day of the week.”
—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
When a husband asks his wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both—sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible
She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband” and “wife” force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose.
Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes. Destined to become a classic novel of marriage, and tackling the big questions being asked about partnership in postpandemic relationships, Crush is a sharp, funny, seductive, and revelatory novel about holding on to everything it’s possible to love—friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world’s good books, and most of all one’s own deep sense of purpose.©2025 Ada Calhoun (P)2025 Penguin Audio
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Critic reviews
“[In Crush,] Calhoun’s cleverest feat is blowing us along in this whirlwind of desire and possibility. As ever, Calhoun suggests, women must carve some new path through a thicket of emotional briars. That may sound grim, but rest assured this is not another tale about women’s sexuality that’s so depressing.”
—The Washington Post
“Ensnaring . . . Crush is sometimes so dry or boring it’s funny; other times it’s euphoric, magical or dramatic, and a breezy humor brushes most every page . . . Calhoun makes the specific universal by pointing it all back toward the puzzle most of us spend our whole lives working out: love in its many forms.”
—Associated Press
“Calhoun’s unnamed heroine is a literary powerhouse bursting at the seams . . . What becomes abundantly clear is that the true romance at the heart of the book is a recovery of self . . . Crush reveals the sly ways we delude ourselves into accepting what’s good enough and the liberating ways we can recover our joie de vivre as well as our autonomy.”
—The Boston Globe
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Always a pleasure
- By joshua simons on 03-21-25
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The Grand Scheme of Things
- A Novel
- By: Warona Jay
- Narrated by: Ony Uhiara, Sam Stafford
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Meet Relebogile Naledi Mpho Moruakgomo. Or, for short, Eddie: an aspiring playwright who dreams of making it big in London’s theater world. But after repeated rejections from white talent agents, Eddie suspects her non-white sounding name might be the problem. Enter Hugo Lawrence Smith: good looking, well-connected, charismatic and…very white. Stifled by his law degree and looking for a way out of the corporate world, he finds a kindred spirit in Eddie after a chance encounter at a cafe. Together they devise a plan, one which will see Eddie’s play on stage and Hugo’s name in lights.
By: Warona Jay
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Nothing Serious
- A Novel
- By: Emily J. Smith
- Narrated by: Anna Caputo
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Edie Walker’s life is not going as planned. At thirty-five, she feels stuck: in her career, in her love life, and in her tiny San Francisco studio apartment. It doesn’t help that her best friend, Peter Masterson, is basically the über successful male version of her—and she’s hopelessly, unrequitedly in love with him. But when Peter breaks up with his girlfriend of seven years, Edie thinks her life might finally be turning around. He’ll discover how toxic dating app culture is and realize that Edie has been right for him all along.
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Character development
- By Jason M. on 03-18-25
By: Emily J. Smith
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Also a Poet
- A Memoir
- By: Ada Calhoun
- Narrated by: Ada Calhoun, Lili Taylor, Josephine Brill
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall
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Story
When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own.
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Pretty Interesting
- By Michele A. Cacano-Green on 08-02-22
By: Ada Calhoun
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The Talent
- By: Daniel D'Addario
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Janina Edwards, Nancy Linari, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As Hollywood prepares for its most glamorous evening, five actresses compete to see who will claim the top prize. With humor, wit, and an insider’s insight, The Talent peels back the layers of women who are in the business of being perceived. And while they work to push their careers forward and maintain the public’s goodwill, all five are forced to confront truths about themselves that they would rather ignore.
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Characterless
- By Nancy Ball on 04-24-25
By: Daniel D'Addario
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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
- A Novel
- By: Colwill Brown
- Narrated by: Colwill Brown
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace―the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are.
By: Colwill Brown
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When We Grow Up
- A Novel
- By: Angelica Baker
- Narrated by: Imani Jade Powers
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Clare is supposed to be the grown-up one. Married to the love of her life, with a major deal for her first novel, she has everything she thought she wanted. So then why does it all feel so wrong? When she agrees to a weeklong vacation in Hawai'i with five of her oldest friends as they each approach thirty, she is hoping for an escape with the people who know her best. But when a terrifying news alert shatters their peace, it becomes harder to ignore how much the world has changed since they were teenagers.
By: Angelica Baker
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The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf
- By: Isa Arsén
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld, Isa Arsén
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Up-and-coming stage actress Margaret Shoard has just taken a bow as Lady Macbeth, the role she has always believed was destined for her. At home, she plays wife to her best friend Wesley, even if she doesn’t hold his sole attention romantically. After a public breakdown threatens all she holds dear, Margaret’s doctor prescribes her uppers—just a little help to get through the days.
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The movement of the storyline. The description of characters and place. Everything was brought to life beautifully.
- By Deborah on 04-04-25
By: Isa Arsén
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Animal Instinct
- By: Amy Shearn
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation. But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?
By: Amy Shearn
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Counterattacks at Thirty
- A Novel
- By: Won-pyung Sohn
- Narrated by: Jo Yuan
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jihye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary. In her administrative job at the Academy, she silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. Forever only one misplaced email away from career catastrophe, she effectively becomes a master of the silent eye-roll and the tactical coffee run. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives.
By: Won-pyung Sohn
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A Beautiful Crime
- A Novel
- By: Christopher Bollen
- Narrated by: Tim Paige
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Nick Brink and his boyfriend Clay Guillory meet up on the Grand Canal in Venice, they have a plan in mind - and it doesn’t involve a vacation. Nick and Clay are running away from their turbulent lives in New York City, each desperate for a happier, freer future someplace else. Their method of escape? Selling a collection of counterfeit antiques to a brash, unsuspecting American living out his retirement years in a grand palazzo. With Clay’s smarts and Nick’s charm, their scheme is sure to succeed.
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Avoid this dreck of a book
- By Chris Doherty on 02-10-21
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Dread the Night
- A Dear Celeste Novel
- By: J.R. Erickson
- Narrated by: Robyn Maryke
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A year ago, a hit-and-run nearly killed Celeste Cleary. Instead, it left her with a chilling gift: the ability to see the dead. She uses her new power to unravel the mysteries behind the missing and murdered. But now it's time for her to return home to West Virginia, where her own life began, and where her mother abandoned her family decades before. Celeste is about to confront her darkest fears. And some of them might lead her right to the truth about her own past—a truth buried deep, waiting to be unearthed.
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WO@- the endong
- By Kate on 05-26-25
By: J.R. Erickson
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Creep
- A Love Story
- By: Emma van Straaten
- Narrated by: Hanako Footman
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Alice and Tom are made for each other. Deeply connected, they share a flat in London, go to galleries together, enjoy the same books and wine. They even share a toothbrush. It’s all picture perfect. Except Alice and Tom have never met. Alice has been cleaning Tom’s apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness.
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recommend
- By Chan on 04-11-25
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The Dream Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Laila Lalami
- Narrated by: Frankie Corzo, Barton Caplan
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.
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The next parable of the sower
- By Jess on 03-18-25
By: Laila Lalami
While my journey and situation was different of course, the similarities, conflict and challenges I faced, helped me to have so many awe stricken moments of how so many things resonated with my soul and heart.
I will be listening to this again and again.
Thank you Ada.
This Spoke to my soul
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Boring and trite
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Quite possibly life changing
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insufferable main characters
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