The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater (book review).
The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater is a historical novel with elements of magical realism that fit it, just about, into the fantasy genre. Stiefvater is known for young adult fiction featuring mystical and eerie Appalachian magic, but this is her first adult novel.
The main character is June Hudson, nicknamed Hoss, general manager of the Avallon Hotel, which has hot springs, healing waters, 450 staff, 420 rooms, 418 acres, 212 Shropshire sheep and 110 Golden Delicious apple trees. The staff, including June, are a mix of hardy West Virginia working-class folk and immigrants. It’s made clear that life in West Virginia was tough, especially in the coal mines. June comes from that community, having been born into a dirt-floor home with no electricity or running water.
Mr Francis Gilfoyle, the hotel’s late owner, was June’s mentor and saw her potential, especially when she demonstrated a rapport with the magical water beneath and around the hotel. He had the same gift and believed that perhaps she could stand in for him when the water needed tending or controlling.
However, there’s more to running a posh hotel than water. He taught June about the upper classes, whose language is legacy, humour, artifice, generosity and subtlety. The language of the lower orders, according to Gilfoyle, is immediacy, possession, lust, hunger and the obvious. Readers may disagree with his point of view. Plenty of staff from those lower orders are now being drafted or volunteering for military service.
Meanwhile, the heir and new owner of the hotel, Edgar David Gilfoyle, is still doing the playboy bit in New York and leaves June to take care of the hotel. He’s a ladies’ man and she has slept with him in the past. June herself is upwardly mobile.
June’s normal life was turned upside down when Francis Gilfoyle died in November 1941 and then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in December. On 25 January 1942, a pair of government men turn up and tell her that she has to evict all her guests: Astors, Morgans and the cream of American society. These are loyal customers who have been staying at the Avallon Hotel for years.
The government men are Benjamin Pennybacker of the State Department and Tucker Rye Minnick of the FBI. Minnick comes from the same poor West Virginia background as June and is as dedicated to the Bureau as she is to the hotel. They respect each other. Maybe more.
The State Department is planning to accommodate three hundred diplomats from Germany, Italy and Japan in luxury until they can be safely returned home. The idea is that their counterparts, American diplomats in enemy territory, will therefore be treated well, too.
Obviously, the hotel staff hate having to be servile to enemy aliens, but are cajoled into doing their jobs, mostly by June. Life is complicated by the fact that one or two of the enemy don’t actually want to go home. Nazi Germany wasn’t very nice.
It’s the interactions between staff and guests that throw spanners into the smooth workings of the hotel and give June trouble. The machinations of the FBI and State Department don’t help. Several characters face hard moral choices: do the right thing to keep your job, or do the right thing.
Among the more interesting new residents is Hannelore Wolfe, the highly intelligent daughter of German cultural attaché Friedrich Wolfe and his wife, Sabine. Hannelore is sensitive to the sweetwater, which calms her. She seldom speaks but has tantrums. She likes counting things and counts the seconds that each experience lasts. Nobody has the vocabulary for it in 1942, but she is clearly autistic. June tells a few people that she used to be like Hannelore, which explains her eye for detail and her ability to manage several things at once.
The only fantastical element in this book is the sweetwater, as it’s called, which lies beneath and around the hotel, flows from fountains inside it and supplies four specially built bathhouses nearby. I couldn’t really get a grip on its magical qualities, but it seems to be sensitive to the moods of the hotel’s occupants. If they are happy, it’s happy.
However, the whole novel could have been written using perfectly ordinary water with little change to the plot. Hoss gets some of her special status from her rapport with the water, yes, but just as much from her managerial ability.
Overall, I enjoyed it. The Listeners is slow-paced and a bit more sophisticated than my standard melodramatic SF, fantasy and horror reading, being more focused on character and realism, which made for a change. June Hudson is a strong lead and the minor roles are also well done.
I don’t think a life spent pandering to the super-rich is a life well spent, but anyone who turns up for work every day and does their best is worthy of respect in my book and in this book. Inevitably, there’s a love story, but it’s rather sweet and the lead character does change for the better by the end of the story.
I wouldn’t recommend The Listeners for fans looking for dramatic genre fiction, as it’s more literary. I would recommend it as a solid, intelligent read. The book is already a bestseller and well reviewed in top journals, so my two cents’ worth of opinion won’t make a ha’porth of difference, but I liked it anyway. So there.
Eamonn Murphy
August 2026
(pub: Headline, 2025. 416-page enlarged paperback advance copy for hardback. Price: £20.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-03543-324-7. Ebook: £5.99 (UK))
Check out website: www.headline.co.uk
