Book Review: The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater

High in the Appalachian mountains is a hotel unlike any other. Run by its efficient and enigmatic General Manager, June Hudson, the Avallon is famed for offering unrivalled luxury to the most wealthy and discerning patrons. Season after season, its guests come from far and wide to indulge in its hot springs and healing sweetwater. But the restorative power of the water comes at a price, one June knows only too well.

When the hotel is called upon to help the war effort by hosting hundreds of diplomats and Nazi sympathisers, June is determined to continue business as usual. Even as their regular guests are ousted and FBI agents arrive to watch over the high-profile guests, June demands the upmost professionalism from her loyal staff. But as dark alliances and unexpected attractions crack the polished veneer of the hotel, she begins to question the true price of luxury, as well as how far she’s willing to go to protect the place that gave her a home when she had none.

Maggie Stiefvater is best known for her young adult novels, which include The Wolves of Mercy Falls series and The Raven Cycle series. And if you grew up on those books between 2009 and 2016, you’ll no doubt have been hungry to get your hands on the author’s first adult novel, The Listeners. Given the shift in audience and the genre-defying plot, it’s a very different book to Stiefvater’s back catalogue. Part historical fiction and part tender love story, with a mystical side of unnerving magical realism, it unfolds, as Stiefvater describes it, “less like a novel than like a memory”. Which is a perfect way to encapsulate this haunting, slightly strange and entirely enthralling tale set against the backdrop of WWII-era America.

June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury. June had become a good listener.”

The Listeners is a slow burn novel, at least for the first half, which introduces June, her beloved Avallon, the entitled Gilfoyle family who own it, and the various government officials and FBI agents who descend on the hotel. Along with June’s perspective, the story also follows stoic and sharply perceptive Special Agent Tucker Rye Minnick, who’s drawn to June in a way he can’t quite understand. Each page they share simmers with unspoken words and hidden tensions. Yet it’s their similarities, rather than their differences, that make June and Tucker such an intriguing pair of characters. They both have their own crosses to bear and neither of them gives much away, but I’d happily follow June and Tucker into another book and another.

The second half of the novel is where the whole story picks up pace and it feels like a genuine race against time as June ties her future to a bright but non-verbal child whose parents are open Nazi sympathisers. There’s a real sense of trepidation in these later chapters but there’s also a beautiful feeling of hope; a belief in the unending power of simple human kindness. It’s an incredibly ambitious novel and Stiefvater pulls it off with admirable ease, weaving together themes of class, war, love and wonder. There are times where the book feels as if nothing is really happening but Stiefvater’s writing is crafted from layer upon layer of secrets and atmosphere and subtle meaning. You just have to keep reading to unravel it.

★★★★

The Listeners was published by Headline on 3 June 2025