4th April 2025
Books
Author Profile
Maggie Stiefvater
Stiefvater’s first adult novel mixes magic and history to create ‘wonder’, the novelist tells Katie Fraser
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Imprint Headline Review Publication 3rd June 2025 Formats HB (9781035406197, £20); EB (9781035406227, £20) Rights sold 12 territories, including the US (Viking) Editor Frances Edwards Agent Bill Hamilton, AM Heath
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onder, according to the dictionary definition, means “to want to know something or try to understand the reason for something”, or
“something that makes you feel surprise or admiration”. It is also the name YA author Maggie Stiefvater has given to a brand-new genre which she hopes to establish with her adult debut, The Listeners. When announcing the novel on her website,
Stiefvater wrote: “I wanted to write controlled, intense, strange, sensual, truthful novel set firmly in a genre I’m increasingly thinking of as wonder.” When we talk over video call, she recalls what Will Patton, who narrates both Stiefvater’s and Stephen King’s work, said to her: “‘I really feel like you and Stephen are writing the same kind of idea, this sense of otherness to the world. But when he writes about terrible things happening to people it’s horror and when magic happens to people in your books, it’s wonder.’” Stiefvater believes that “wonder requires a change in the reader”. She explains: “You can watch a romcom where someone is covered with bees and they’re terrified and you’re laughing, so their experience is not the same as your
Books Author Profile
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