Maggie Service has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 11 authors, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 265 ratings. The most-rated is The Pearl Thief.
The Pearl Thief
Summary
From the internationally acclaimed best-selling author of Code Name Verity comes a stunning new story of pearls, love and murder. Sixteen-year-old Julie Beaufort-Stuart is returning to her family's ancestral home in Perthshire for one last summer. It is not an idyllic return to childhood. Her grandfather's death has forced the sale of the house and estate, and this will be a summer of good-byes. Not least to the McEwen family - Highland travellers who have been part of the landscape for as long as anyone can remember, loved by the family, loathed by the authorities. Tensions are already high when a respected London archivist goes missing, presumed murdered. Suspicion quickly falls on the McEwens, but Julie knows not one of them would do such a thing and is determined to prove everyone wrong. And then she notices the family's treasure trove of pearls is missing. This beautiful and evocative novel is the story of the irrepressible and unforgettable Julie, set in the year before the Second World War and the events of Code Name Verity. It is also a powerful portrayal of a community under pressure and one girl's determination for justice.
©2017 Elizabeth Gatland (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Hag
Summary
Winner of the Bronze Fiction Podcast award at the 2020 British Podcast Awards Exploring otherness, identity, faith, religion, gender and sexual trauma, Hag brings together a gripping collection of tales that are unsettlingly timely and wickedly sinister. Each story is inspired by a forgotten folk tale sourced from across the UK by Professor Carolyne Larrington, a specialist in Old Norse and British fairy tales at St John’s College, Oxford. Drawn from illuminated manuscripts and other folkloric traditions, these stories have been revised and reimagined by authors local to each region. Just as the Brothers Grimm codified Germany’s rural folk lore, Hag catalogues the early myths and legends that have shaped the UK’s storytelling heritage. Each story has been richly sound-designed, combining subtle vocal effects, atmospheric textures and an original score. Listeners who want to find out more about the forgotten folk tales that inspired Hag will be able to explore further with a series of accompanying interviews between Professor Carolyne Larrington and the authors. This is an Audible Original Podcast. Free for members. You can download all 8 episodes to your Library now.
©2019 Daisy Johnson, Eimear McBride, Kirsty Logan, Mahsuda Snaith, Naomi Booth, Emma Glass, Natasha Carthew, Liv Little (P)2019 Audible, Ltd.
The Great Level
Summary
Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Great Level by Stella Tillyard, read by Boris Hiestand and Maggie Service. ‘I am an engineer and a measured man of the world. I prefer to weigh everything in the balance, to calculate and to plan. Yet my own heart is going faster than I can now count.’ In 1649, Jan Brunt, a Dutchman, arrives in England to work on draining and developing the Great Level, an expanse of marsh in the heart of the fen country. It is here he meets Eliza, whose love overturns his ordered vision and whose act of resistance forces him to see the world differently. Jan flees to the New World, where the spirit of avarice is raging and his skills as an engineer are prized. Then one spring morning a boy delivers a note that prompts him to remember the Fens and confront all that was lost there. The Great Level is a dramatic and elemental story about two people whose differences draw them together then drive them apart. Jan and Eliza’s journeys, like the century they inhabit, are filled with conflict, hard graft and adventure - and see them searching for their own piece of solid ground.
©2018 Stella Tillyard (P)2018 Random House Audiobooks
Call upon the Water
Summary
This “story of passion, possession, and a painful education in love” (Sarah Dunant, author of In the Name of the Family), spanning several decades in 17th-century Great Britain and America, evocatively explores the power of nature versus man and man versus woman by “a lovely writer [who] can take your breath away” (The New York Times Book Review). I am an engineer and a measured man of the world. I prefer to weigh everything in the balance, to calculate and to plan. Yet my own heart is going faster than I can now count. In 1649, Jan Brunt arrives in Great Britain from the Netherlands to work on draining and developing an expanse of marshy wetlands known as the Great Level. It is here in this wild country that he meets Eliza, a local woman whose love overturns his ordered vision. Determined to help her strive beyond her situation, Jan is heedless of her devotion to her home and way of life. When she uses the education Jan has given her to sabotage his work, Eliza is brutally punished, and Jan flees to the New World. In the American colonies, profiteers on Manatus Eyland are hungry for viable land to develop, and Jan’s skills as an engineer are highly prized. His prosperous new life is rattled, however, on a spring morning when a boy delivers a note that prompts him to remember the Great Level and confront all that was lost there. Eliza has made it to the New World and is once again using the education Jan gave her to bend the landscape - this time to find her own place of freedom. Perfect for fans of Hilary Mantel and Geraldine Brooks, Call upon the Water is “a haunting book with characters who stay with the reader as their lives unfold like a sea mist” (Philippa Gregory, New York Times best-selling author). *Note: This work was published in the UK under the title The Great Level.
©2019 Stella Tillyard (P)2019 Simon & Schuster