Maria Dahvana Headley has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 20 ratings. The most-rated is Magonia.
Magonia
Summary
“Maria Dahvana Headley is a firecracker: she’s whip smart with a heart, and she writes like a dream.” (Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of The Graveyard Book and Coraline Aza) Ray Boyle is drowning in thin air. Since she was a baby, Aza has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak - to live. So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of her medication. But Aza doesn't think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name. Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who's always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea, something goes terribly wrong. Aza is lost to our world - and found, by another. Magonia. Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power - but as she navigates her new life, she discovers that war between Magonia and Earth is coming. In Aza's hands lies fate of the whole of humanity—including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie? Neil Gaiman’s Stardust meets John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars in this New York Times best-selling story about a girl caught between two worlds, two races, and two destinies. Don’t miss Aerie, the stunning, highly anticipated sequel!
©2015 Maria Dahvana Headley (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Beowulf: A New Translation
Summary
"Narrator JD Jackson addresses his listener as 'bro' in this decidedly contemporary retelling of the classic saga...His brilliant performance captures all the artistry, wit, and immediacy of this fresh translation, and breathes new life into what for most has been a literary fossil." (AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner) A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife Nearly 20 years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf - and 50 years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world - there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history - Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation. A Macmillan Audio production from MCD x FSG Originals "Brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand." (Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker) "The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualizes the tale." (Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today)
©2020 Maria Dahvana Headley (P)2020 Macmillan Audio
Aerie
Summary
The stunning sequel to Maria Dahvana Headley's best-selling, critically acclaimed Magonia tells the story of one girl who must make an impossible choice between two families, two homes - and two versions of herself. Aza Ray is back on Earth. Her boyfriend, Jason, is overjoyed. Her family is healed. She's living a normal life, or as normal as it can be if you've spent the past year dying, waking up on a sky ship, and discovering that your song can change the world. As in, not normal. Part of Aza still yearns for the clouds, no matter how much she loves the people on the ground. When Jason's paranoia over Aza's safety causes him to make a terrible mistake, Aza finds herself a fugitive in Magonia, tasked with opposing her radical, bloodthirsty, recently escaped mother, Zal Quel, and her singing partner, Dai. She must travel to the edge of the world in search of a legendary weapon, the Flock, in a journey through fire and identity that will transform her forever. Told in Maria Headley's trademark John Green-meets-Neil Gaiman style, Aerie is sure to satisfy the many listeners who can't wait to return to the spellbinding world of Magonia.
©2016 Maria Dahvana Headley (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
The Mere Wife
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Maria Dahvana Headley’s fierce, feminist retelling of the classic tale of Beowulf. To those who live there, Herot Hall is a paradise. With picket fences, gabled buildings and wildflowers that seed themselves in ordered rows, the suburb is a self-sustaining community, enclosed and secure. But to those who live secretly along its periphery, Herot Hall is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras and motion-activated lights. Dylan and Gren live on opposite sides of the perimeter, neither boy aware of the barriers erected to keep them apart. For Dylan and his mother, Willa, life moves at a charmingly slow pace. They flit between mothers’ groups, playdates, cocktail hours and dinner parties. Gren lives with his mother, Dana, just outside the limits of Herot Hall. A former soldier, Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren and doesn’t know how she got Gren. But now that she has him, she’s determined to protect him from a world that sees him only as a monster. When Gren crosses the border into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, he sets up a collision between Dana’s and Willa’s worlds that echoes the Beowulf story - and gives sharp, startling currency to the ancient epic poem.
©2018 Maria Dahvana Headley (P)2018 Audible, Ltd
The Mere Wife
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers - a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran - fight to protect those they love in The Mere Wife. From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings - high and gabled - and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside - in lawns and on playgrounds - wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights. For Willa, the wife of Roger Herot (heir of Herot Hall), life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between mommy groups, playdates, cocktail hour, and dinner parties, always with her son, Dylan, in tow. Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives Gren, short for Grendel, as well as his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. When Gren, unaware of the borders erected to keep him at bay, ventures into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, Dana’s and Willa’s worlds collide.
©2018 Maria Dahvana Headley (P)2018 Macmillan Audio