Audiobooks by Gregory Maguire

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Cynthia Erivo Narration)

"The New York Times bestseller and basis for #1 smash hit movie starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. A brand-new recording narrated by Elphaba herself, Cynthia Erivo! With millions of copies in print around the world, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked is established not only as a commentary on our time but as a novel to revisit for years to come. Wicked relishes the inspired inventions of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while playing sleight of hand with our collective memories of the 1939 MGM film starring Margaret Hamilton (and Judy Garland). In this fast-paced, fantastically real, and supremely entertaining novel, Maguire has populated the largely unknown world of Oz with the power of his own imagination. Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin—no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and by the time she enters Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz’s most promising young citizens. But Elphaba’s Oz is no utopia. The Wizard’s secret police are everywhere. Animals—those creatures with voices, souls, and minds—are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals—even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas. Recognized as an iconoclastic tour de force on its initial publication, the novel has inspired the blockbuster musical of the same name—one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. Popular, indeed. But while the novel’s distant cousins hail from the traditions of magical realism, mythopoeic fantasy, and sprawling nineteenth-century sagas of moral urgency, Maguire’s Wicked is as unique as its green-skinned witch."

Gregory Maguire (Author), Cynthia Erivo (Narrator)

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[German] - Wicked: Die Hexen von Oz - Die Vorlage zum Kinofilm

"Was hat es mit der geheimnisvollen Hexe des Westens auf sich? Von wem stammt sie ab? Wie wurde sie so böse? 'Wicked' erzählt die aufregende Vorgeschichte des 'Zauberer von Oz'. Elphaba ist als junge Hexe ein ernsthaftes, intelligentes und unglücklicherweise grünhäutiges Mädchen. Ihr Vater ist ein sittenstrenger Prediger, ihre Mutter eine leichtfertige Schönheit. An der Universität studiert sie Biologie und forscht besonders über grundlegende Ähnlichkeiten zwischen Menschen und Tieren. Unterdessen ist aber der Zauberer von Oz dabei, die Rechte der Tiere grausam einzuschränken. Kaum jemand scheint sich daran zu stören – bis auf Elphaba. Die etwas linkische und leuchtend grüne Studentenhexe bereitet radikale Aktionen vor, um den tyrannischen Zauberer von Oz aus dem Amt zu jagen."

Gregory Maguire (Author), André Grotta (Narrator)

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The Witch of Maracoor: A Novel

"The multimillion-copy bestselling story of Wicked comes full circle in The Witch of Maracoor, the final installment of Gregory Maguire’s Another Day series Following a confrontation with her reclusive great-grandfather, the onetime Wizard of Oz, Rainary Ko, the granddaughter of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, has re-upped in a mission to settle a few scores and right a wrong or two. Her memory and her passions reviving, Rain turns her gaze back to her native Oz. While the Grimmerie, which she had cast into the sea, retains its arcane power over her, the lover she left behind in Oz proves no less haunting. Once bewitched, twice bewitching, Rain Ko must consider how to achieve a life less suffused with grief than the one she is enduring. Traveling such a distance is not without its perils to a young person more or less alone in a strange land. And, by now, Rain has debts to repay. To make good on promises, she must insist on a layover on an island emptied of its human population by a deadly plague. Revived there by love or magic (and is there a difference?), she sustains an assault on the high seas by pirates. The accumulation of her experience awakens within her a certain nascent knowledge and power, which prepares her finally to touch down upon the far shores of Oz and address her own doubts and hesitations. Traveling companions and arrivistes can befuddle a young witch coming into her own. In her fast-paced and stately progress, Rain may remind readers of the courage it takes to accept one’s full identity, unbridled and unruly though it may be. The Witch of Maracoor delivers on the promises of its predecessors, The Brides of Maracoor and The Oracle of Maracoor, and concludes the epic tale of Rain’s castaway life with nothing less than enchantment."

Gregory Maguire (Author), Debra Wise (Narrator)

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The Oracle of Maracoor: A Novel

"Multimillion-copy bestselling author Gregory Maguire brings us the enchanting second novel in the series Another Day, returning to the world he first created in Wicked. The Oracle of Maracoor, the second in the trilogy called Another Day, continues the story of Elphaba’s green-skinned granddaughter, Rain. That strange land, Maracoor—across the ocean from Oz—is beset by an invading army. In the mayhem, Rain and Cossy, a child felon, break out of prison. Helped by a few flying monkeys, they struggle to escape the city before it falls under siege. Their arresting officer, Lucikles, also retreats with his family to a highland redoubt. But safety eludes them all. Chaos thunders upon them in the form of warriors, refugees, and brigands. The very fabric of reality loosens, liberating creatures of myth and legend—huge blue wolves, harpies, and giants made of the very landscape. Cued in by secrets known only to the most highly placed members of the royal court, Rain and her companions hunt the fabled Oracle of Maracoor for guidance and soothsaying. Rain has to recover her forgotten past if she is to consider returning home. Cossy, the ten-year-old convicted of murder, must become invisible to avoid being taken into custody again. Meanwhile, the Fist of Mara, an arcane artifact that renders all around it barren, hammers against human lives. If the reclusive Oracle should spin a prophecy, might the desperate wicked years promise another day, one less perilous? "

Gregory Maguire (Author), Debra Wise (Narrator)

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The Brides of Maracoor: A Novel

"The first in a three-book series spun off the iconic Wicked Years from multimillion-copy bestselling author Gregory Maguire, featuring Elphaba’s granddaughter, the green-skinned Rain. Ten years ago this season, Gregory Maguire wrapped up the series he began with Wicked by giving us the fourth and final volume of the Wicked Years, his elegiac Out of Oz. But “out of Oz” isn’t “gone for good.” Maguire’s new series, Another Day, is here, twenty-five years after Wicked first flew into our lives. Volume one, The Brides of Maracoor, finds Elphaba’s granddaughter, Rain, washing ashore on a foreign island. Comatose from crashing into the sea, Rain is taken in by a community of single women committed to obscure devotional practices. As the mainland of Maracoor sustains an assault by a foreign navy, the island’s civil-servant overseer struggles to understand how an alien arriving on the shores of Maracoor could threaten the stability and wellbeing of an entire nation. Is it myth or magic at work, for good or for ill? The trilogy Another Day will follow this green-skinned girl from the island outpost into the unmapped badlands of Maracoor before she learns how, and becomes ready, to turn her broom homeward, back to her family and her lover, back to Oz, which—in its beauty, suffering, mystery, injustice, and possibility—reminds us all too clearly of the troubled yet sacred terrain of our own lives."

Gregory Maguire (Author), Debra Wise (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Wild Winter Swan: A Novel

"After brilliantly reimagining the worlds of Oz, Wonderland, Dickensian London, and the Nutcracker, the New York Times bestselling 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."

Gregory Maguire (Author), John Mcdonough (Narrator)

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Egg & Spoon

"“A beautiful reminder that fairy tales are at their best when they illuminate the precarious balance between lighthearted childhood and the darkness and danger of adulthood.” —School Library Journal (starred review)Elena Rudina lives in the impoverished Russian countryside, and there is no food. But then a train arrives in the village, a train carrying a cornucopia of food, untold wealth, and a noble family destined to visit the Tsar in Saint 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 escapade 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, witch of Russian folklore, in her ambulatory house perched on chicken legs."

Gregory Maguire (Author), Michael Page (Narrator)

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Out of Oz: Volume Four in the Wicked Years

"“Maguire’s work is melodic, symphonic, and beautiful; it is dejected and biting and brave. How great that people flock to these magical novels.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review Bestselling author Gregory Maguire’s remarkable series, The Wicked Years, comes full circle with this, his fourth and final excursion across a darker, richer, more complex landscape of “the magical land of Oz.” Out of Oz brilliantly reimagines L. Frank Baum’s world over the rainbow as wracked with social unrest—placing Glinda the good witch under house arrest and having the cowardly Lion on the lam from the law as the Emerald City prepares to make war on Munchkinland. Even Dorothy makes a triumphant return in Maguire’s magnificent Oz finale—tying up every loose green end of the series he began with his classic Wicked, the basis for the smash hit Broadway musical."

Gregory Maguire (Author), John McDonough (Narrator)

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A Lion Among Men: Volume Three in The Wicked Years

"Return to a darker Oz with Gregory Maguire. In A Lion Among Men, the third volume in Maguire’s acclaimed, New York Times bestselling series The Wicked Years, a fuller, more complex Cowardly Lion is brought to life and gets to tell his remarkable tale. It is a story of oppression and fear in a world gone mad with war fever—of Munchkins, Wizards, and Wicked Witches—and especially of a gentle soul and determined survivor who is truly A Lion Among Men."

Gregory Maguire (Author), John McDonough (Narrator)

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Mirror Mirror

"“A brilliant achievement.” —Boston Herald “Entertaining…profound….A novel for adults that unearths our buried fascination with the primal fears and truths fairy tales contain.” —Christian Science Monitor Gregory Maguire, the acclaimed author who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Land of Oz in his New York Times bestselling series The Wicked Years, offers a brilliant reinvention of the timeless Snow White fairy tale: Mirror Mirror. Setting his story amid the cultural, political and artistic whirlwind of Renaissance Italy—and casting the notorious Lucrezia Borgia as the Evil Queen—Maguire and Mirror Mirror will enthrall a wide array of book lovers ranging from adult fans of Harry Potter to readers of the sophisticated stories of Angela Carter."

Gregory Maguire (Author), John Mcdonough (Narrator)

Audiobook

Lost: A Novel

"“A brilliant, perceptive, and deeply moving fable.” —Boston Sunday Globe Publishers Weekly calls Gregory Maguire’s Lost “a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story.” Brilliantly weaving together the literary threads of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and the Jack the Ripper stories, the bestselling author of The Wicked Years canon creates a captivating fairy tale for the modern world. With Lost, Maguire—who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Oz, and inspired the creation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway blockbuster Wicked—delivers a haunting tale of shadows and phantoms and things going bump in the night, confirming his reputation as “one of contemporary fiction’s most assured myth-makers” (Kirkus Reviews)."

Gregory Maguire (Author), Jenny Sterlin (Narrator)

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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

"The New York Times bestseller that inspired the Tony-winning hit musical and major motion picture OVER 6 MILLION COPIES SOLD Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin—no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and not long after entering Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz's most promising young citizens. But Elphaba's Oz is no utopia. The Wizard's secret police are everywhere. Animals—those creatures with voices, souls, and minds—are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals—even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas. 'An astonishing achievement.'—Philip Pullman"

Gregory Maguire (Author), John McDonough (Narrator)

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