Gregory Maguire has 14 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 11 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.9★ across 89 ratings. The most-rated is Wicked.
Wicked
Summary
Heralded as an instant classic of fantasy literature, Maguire has written a wonderfully imaginative retelling of The Wizard of Oz told from the Wicked Witch's point of view. More than just a fairy tale for adults, Wicked is a meditation on the nature of good and evil. Elphaba is born with green skin, a precocious mind, and a talent for magic. An outcast throughout her childhood in Munchkinland, she finally begins to feel as though she fits in when she enters the University in the Emerald City. While she hones her skills, she discovers that Oz isn't the Utopia it seems. She sets out to protect its unwanted creatures, becoming known as the Wicked Witch along the way. Narrator John McDonough draws you in to Maguire's magical world of witches and talking animals, making it possible to believe in a land somewhere over the rainbow.
©1995 Gregory Maguire (P)2000 Recorded Books, LLC
Out of Oz
Summary
The stunning conclusion to the smash New York Times best-selling series the Wicked Years Gregory Maguire's Wicked Years series became national best sellers and the basis for a hit Tony-winning Broadway musical. Now, Maguire returns with the final installment in his transformative work, a thrilling and compulsively readable saga in which the fate of Oz is decided at last. Once peaceful and prosperous, the spectacular Land of Oz is knotted with social unrest: The Emerald City is mounting an invasion of Munchkinland, Glinda is under house arrest, and the Cowardly Lion is on the run from the law. And look who's knocking at the door. It’s none other than Dorothy. Yes. That Dorothy. Yet amid all this chaos, Elphaba’s granddaughter, the tiny green baby born at the close of Son of a Witch, has come of age. Now it is up to Rain to take up her broom - and her legacy - in an Oz wracked by war. The stirring, long-awaited conclusion to the best-selling series that began with Wicked, Out of Oz is a magical journey rife with revelations and reversals, reprisals and surprises - the hallmarks of the unique imagination of Gregory Maguire. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2011 Gregory Maguire (P)2011 HarperCollinsPublishers
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
Summary
Gregory Maguire, critically acclaimed author of Wicked, returns with his eagerly anticipated second novel. Using a dazzling reincarnation of the Cinderella story set in 17th century Holland, Maguire deftly weaves together stories of inner and outer beauty. Iris is a plain but intelligent young girl. Forced to flee England with her recently widowed mother, Margarethe, and her older sister, she finds herself swept into a life that becomes a legend. Arriving destitute, the family becomes employed in the home of a wealthy tulip merchant. Margarethe is hired as the housekeeper and Iris as a companion to the merchant’s stunningly beautiful but troubled daughter. When the merchant’s wife dies, Margarethe seizes the moment, and a wicked stepmother is born. Narrated with spirit and warmth by Jenny Sterlin, Gregory Maguire’s vision of Cinderella is a sweeping story of love and deception, where a ball, a handsome prince and the betrayal of a daughter can lead to everyone living happily ever after.
©1999 Gregory Maguire (P)2000 Recorded Books
Son of a Witch
Summary
Ten years after the publication of Wicked, beloved novelist Gregory Maguire returns at last to the land of Oz. There he introduces us to Liir, an adolescent boy last seen hiding in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Bruised, comatose, and left for dead in a gully, Liir is shattered in spirit as well as in form. But he is tended at the Cloister of Saint Glinda by the silent novice called Candle, who wills him back to life with her musical gifts. What dark force left Liir in this condition? Is he really Elphaba's son? He has her broom and her cape, but what of her powers? Can he find his supposed half-sister, Nor, last seen in the forbidding prison, Southstairs? Can he fulfill the last wishes of a dying princess? In an Oz that, since the Wizard's departure, is under new and dangerous management, can Liir keep his head down long enough to grow up? For the countless fans who have been dazzled and entranced by Maguire's Oz, Son of a Witch is the rich reward they have awaited so long.
©2005 Gregory Maguire (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers
Hiddensee
Summary
In this imaginative novel rooted in the rich soil of early 19th-century German Romanticism, beloved New York Times best-selling author Gregory Maguire twins an origin legend of the famous Nutcracker with the life of Drosselmeier, the toymaker who carves him. Gregory Maguire's novels have been called "bewitching", "remarkable", "extraordinary", "engrossing", "amazing", and "delicious". Having brought his legions of devoted listeners to Oz in Wicked, Wonderland in After Alice, and Dickensian London in Lost, Maguire now takes us to the Black Forest of Bavaria and Munich of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffman. Hiddensee recreates the backstory of the Nutcracker, reimaging how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how it magically guided an ailing little girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a snowy Christmas Eve. It also brings to life the mysterious godfather Drosselmeier - the ominous, canny, one-eyed toymaker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky's ballet - who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter. But Hiddensee is not just a retelling of a classic story. Maguire discovers in the flowering of German Romanticism a migrating strain of a Hellenic mystery-cult and ponders a profound question: how a person who is abused by life, short-changed, and challenged can access secrets that benefit the disadvantaged and powerless. Ultimately, Hiddensee offers a message of hope. If the compromised godfather Drosselmeier can bring an enchanted Nutcracker to a young girl in distress, perhaps everyone, however lonely or marginalized on the eve of a winter holiday, has something precious to share.
©2017 Gregory Maguire (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
A Lion Among Men
Summary
In the much-anticipated third volume of the Wicked Years, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion. While civil war looms in Oz, a tetchy oracle named Yackle prepares for death. Before her final hour, a figure known as Brrr - the Cowardly Lion - arrives searching for information about Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West. Abandoned as a cub, his path from infancy is no Yellow Brick Road. In the wake of laws that oppress talking animals, he avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the warmongering Emperor of Oz. A Lion Among Men chronicles a battle of wits hastened by the Emerald City's approaching armies. Can those tarnished by infamy escape their sobriquets to claim their own histories, to live honorably within their own skins before they're skinned alive? Gregory Maguire's new novel is written with the sympathy and power that have made his books contemporary classics.
©2008 Gregory Maguire (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers
Interview with Gregory Maguire
Summary
An interview with the author of Wicked and the new release, Son of a Witch.Ten years after the publication of Wicked, beloved novelist Gregory Maguire returns at last to the land of Oz. There he introduces us to Liir, an adolescent boy last seen hiding in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Bruised, comatose, and left for dead in a gully, Liir is shattered in spirit as well as in form. But he is tended at the Cloister of Saint Glinda by the silent novice called Candle, who wills him back to life with her musical gifts.For the countless fans who have been dazzled and entranced by Maguire's Oz, Son of a Witch is the rich reward they have awaited so long.
(P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers
Mirror Mirror
Summary
The year is 1502, and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives perched high above the rolling hills and valleys of Tuscany and Umbria at Montefiore, the farm of her beloved father, Don Vicente. But one day a noble entourage makes its way up the winding slopes to the farm - and the world comes to Montefiore. In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia - decadent children of a wicked pope -- no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a years-long quest, he leaves Bianca under the care -- so to speak - of Lucrezia. She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but salvation can be found in the dark forest as well. A lyrical work of stunning creative vision, Mirror Mirror gives fresh life to the classic story of Snow White - and has a truth and beauty all its own.
©2003 Gregory Maguire (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers
A Wild Winter Swan
Summary
After brilliantly reimagining the worlds of Oz, Wonderland, Dickensian London, and the Nutcracker, the New York Times best-selling author of Wicked turns his unconventional genius to Hans Christian Andersen's The Wild Swans, transforming this classic tale into an Italian-American girl's poignant coming-of-age story, set amid the magic of Christmas in 1960s New York. Following her brother's death and her mother's emotional breakdown, Laura now lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a lonely townhouse she shares with her old-world, strict, often querulous grandparents. But the arrangement may be temporary. The quiet, awkward teenager has been getting into trouble at home and has been expelled from her high school for throwing a record album at a popular girl who bullied her. When Christmas is over and the new year begins, Laura may find herself at boarding school in Montreal. Nearly unmoored from reality through her panic and submerged grief, Laura is startled when a handsome swan boy with only one wing lands on her roof. Hiding him from her ever-bickering grandparents, Laura tries to build the swan boy a wing so he can fly home. But the task is too difficult to accomplish herself. Little does Laura know that her struggle to find help for her new friend parallels that of her grandparents, who are desperate for a distant relative’s financial aid to save the family store. As he explores themes of class, isolation, family, and the dangerous yearning to be saved by a power greater than ourselves, Gregory Maguire conjures a haunting, beautiful tale of magical realism that illuminates one young woman’s heartbreak and hope as she begins the inevitable journey to adulthood.
©2020 Gregory Maguire (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
Egg & Spoon
Summary
Elena Rudina lives in the impoverished Russian countryside. Her father has been dead for years. Her brothers have been conscripted into the Tsar's army and taken as servants in the house of the local wealthy landowner. Her mother is dying, slowly, in their tiny cabin. And there is no food. But then a train arrives in the village, a train carrying untold wealth, a cornucopia of food, and a noble family destined to visit the Tsar in St. Petersburg - a family that includes Ekaterina, a girl of Elena's age. When the two girls' lives collide, an adventure is set in motion, an adventure that includes mistaken identity, a monk locked in a tower, a prince traveling incognito, and - in a starring role only Gregory Maguire could have conjured - Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian folklore, in her moving house perched on chicken legs.
©2014 Gregory Maguire, original book published by Candlewick Press (P) (P) 2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
What-the-Dickens
Summary
On the darkest night, amidst a terrifying storm, Dinah's parents go missing. While anxious Dinah and her brother and sister worry and huddle for warmth, their cousin, Gage, tells them an unlikely story - that tooth fairies, known as skibbereen, are living in warring colonies right in the neighborhood. According to Gage, they actually put those teeth to good use. And he, Gage, has met them. Dinah is skeptical, but as the story unfolds and the storm rages on, she begins to believe.
By turns touching and comic, What-the-Dickens is a decidedly imaginative journey into myth that could only have been penned by that premier interpreter of the fairy-tale world, Gregory Maguire.
©2007 Gregory Maguire (P)2007 Scholastic Inc.
Missing Sisters
Summary
Alice's life is about to change. She's a skinny orphan. She's never been able to hear too well. And she can't speak too well, either. The only person who seems to care for her - one of the nuns at the orphanage - gets taken away from Alice in a freak accident. And then one day somebody calls Alice by the wrong name. Miami, she says. Miami Shaw. Miami Shaw, who may be Alice's twin sister. Who lives only a few miles away. Who has what Alice has always dreamed of - a whole wonderful family. But is there a place in that family for Alice? From best-selling author Gregory Maguire comes a funny, heartrending story of the strength of sisterhood and the struggle to find a family of one's own.
©1994 Gregory Maguire (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers
The Next Queen of Heaven
Summary
With the new millennium approaching, the eccentric town of Thebes grows even stranger. Mrs. Leontina Scales begins speaking in tongues after being clocked by a Catholic statuette. Her daughter, Tabitha, and her sons scheme to save their mother or surrender her to Jesus - whatever comes first. Meanwhile, choir director Jeremy Carr, caught between lust and ambition, fumbles his way toward Y2K. The ancient Sisters of the Sorrowful Mysteries join with a gay singing group. The Radical Radiants battle the Catholics. A Christmas pageant goes horribly awry. And a child is born. Only a modern master like Gregory Maguire could spin a tale as frantic, funny, and farcical as The Next Queen of Heaven.
©2010 Gregory Maguire (P)2010 Gregory Maguire and HarperCollins Publishers
Leaping Beauty
Summary
Who better to wreak havoc with eight beloved fairy tales than Gregory Maguire, the brilliant, funny, and nationally best-selling author of the adult novel Wicked as well as the hilarious middle-grade series The Hamlet Chronicles. Zany animals of all species run through these fractured tales with alarming speed and dexterity. Who would have thought that the ageless, exquisite Cinderella could be recast as the silly story of an enormous yet lovable elephant who plods along to the ball with glass pie plates on her feet; or that Sleeping Beauty, that most regal of all fairy tales, could be twisted into the story of a frog with a most unusual and promising dance career? Get ready to meet a gorilla queen and a psycho chimp, seven giant giraffes, and one very bad walrus.
©2004 Gregory Maguire (P)2004 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.