Read an Excerpt of THE LISTENERS

what the heck is this book, you ask

I don’t even know if I will like this book, Maggie, you say (I assume we are on first name basis, if for no other reason than because my last name is hard to say). First of all, the copy on the jacket sounds very historical and serious. Secondly, you wrote this long piece about the differences between YA and adult and how you used to write one and now you write the other and I don’t even know where I fall on that spectrum as a reader. Thirdly, why did it have to be World War II?

Let me get this out of the way first: you can read a first chapter excerpt of THE LISTENERS here.

And you can listen to the first chapter of the audiobook here:

The rest of it comes out on 6/3/2025, but for now, since you can’t have the leg, have the ankle.

I’m going to confess something to you: when I wrote Shiver, I didn’t think anyone who had liked my debut, Lament, would like it. And when I wrote The Scorpio Races, I didn’t think anyone who liked Shiver would enjoy it. In my mind, they felt so different, entities that lived in far-distant corners of an enormous genre. At signings, I was stunned when readers came with all of them in a stack.

Now, fifteen years into my career, those stacks have grown beyond a dozen titles and I know that no matter how disparate the topic seems, they have an important unifying element: my point of view.

It is not about the pacing, focus, setting, amount of magic, amount of history, etcetera. It is more essential, more ephemeral. It has to do with what I am interested in pointing my prose camera at, the kinds of people I am interested in exploring, my beliefs about the durability and fragility of humankind, my understanding of good and evil, my relationship with the natural world, my questions about the spiritual world, my theories on love and friendship, my sense of humor, my unconscious biases, my conscious biases, my interest in wordplay, my disinterest in certain kinds of tension, my passion for creating books that work better on the reread, my preference for background noise, my dislike of formula, my love of repetition. All of these things together form a point of view that mean that no matter what I look at on the page feels like a Maggie Stiefvater novel.

Ok, look, what am I trying to tell you?

I’m trying to tell you what The Listeners is about. Well, actually, I’m trying to tell you that it isn’t really important what it’s about. There are lots of advanced reviews by now: Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Historical Novel Society, Shelf Awareness, and The Bookseller, as well as plenty more on Goodreads, and they will all tell you the facts of what it’s about. Heck, I can tell you right now! It’s about World War II because I wanted to take a whack at writing a book in the genre of Wonder instead of Horror, and in order to write realistic awe and joy, you have to also include realistic crap and evil, otherwise the book ends up a featherweight fable. It’s an adult book because I wanted to write literary equations that got to use time as a different sort of variable. And it’s a historical because I wanted that sense of wistful distance that comes from wanting desperately to visit the Avallon Hotel, but knowing that a century separates you from it.

But all those are just facts. Here is the truth: it’s a Maggie Stiefvater novel.

I am so excited to share it with you this June.

(You can come see me on tour here).