“It was such a rewarding thing to get to the top of my game in YA, to hit 40, and to think, I’m going to learn a new trick,” says Maggie Stiefvater. Stiefvater published her first young adult fantasy novel at 27 and has since written dozens of books that have sold over 5 million copies around the world. Also a portrait artist and a musician, Stiefvater’s old tricks include rally-car driving and a TEDx talk called “How Bad Teens Become Famous People.”

So what’s the new trick? It’s an adult novel titled The Listeners (Viking, June 3) that will, according to the starred Kirkus review, “remind readers why they fell in love with reading in the first place.” Set in the Shenandoah Valley where Stiefvater was born and still lives, its action takes place at the Avallon, a luxury hotel built over underground mineral springs that have supernatural powers, soon after the U.S. entry into World War II.

Despite this magical element, the plot is based on a real situation that occurred after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when diplomats from Germany, Italy, and Japan were briefly stuck in the United States while arrangements were being made to send them home.

We recently talked to Stiefvater about the book over Zoom from her home in eastern Virginia. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you come across the story behind The Listeners?

As a novelist who was on tour one day out of every three, I’d wanted to write a hotel novel for the longest time. I was fascinated with the question of what it means to be the person creating service versus the person receiving service, and I began reading hotel history. There was a single line in one of these books saying that at the start of the war, Axis diplomats had been kept in mountain hotels, and I thought, wait! Those are my mountains. Those are my hotels.

From there, I took a deep dive. I read all the issues of Hotel Monthly from 1930 to 1942, and a bunch of hotel memoirs. I interviewed a professor at Cornell’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration and several luxury hoteliers, including a guy who manages a property in Switzerland that goes for $54,000 a night.

I recall from the author’s note that you incorporated a lot of true stories into the book.

Yes, there really was a journalist who jumped out the window to avoid being sent home. The Japanese really did request that the dining room be reconfigured as the Rising Sun. Documents really were hidden in a shoe and set on fire. So many tremendous and outrageous moments really happened in these detentions that it was difficult to decide what to keep and what became just a footnote.

The character of Hannelore, the silent child, is one of those historical elements, right?

Yes, one of the stories that stuck with me was this military attache whose 16-year-old son had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He conducted under-the-table dealings to try to leave the boy in the United States because in Germany he could have been put to death. My version of that child is Hannelore. She’s perhaps the most autobiographical character in the book.

I was a dreadful child. I didn’t speak until I was 3 years old. I threw terrible tantrums until I was 11. I wanted readers to recoil from the character, as they might if they saw a child that age throw a fit in a shopping mall.

Hannelore is you?! I pictured June, who runs the Avallon, as the autobiographical character—you even look like I imagined her. Can you tell us a bit about how you create characters?

I steal them! Back in my sordid youth, I was a full-time artist. One thing that stuck with me from my self-taught education was the image of the studio of Maxfield Parrish, the great Golden Age illustrator. On his desk, he had a pile of rocks, and those rocks were what he used to build his mountains.

Reality has these interesting nooks and crannies, and if you don’t look right at it, you tend to draw a copy of a copy of a copy. I feel the same way about my characters. But I rarely build a character based on just one person. I love the shapes between people, the shapes that people make in relation to each other—that show who they really are. That’s what I mean by stealing: I draw from life.

But it’s interesting that you say that I seem like a June. One of my interviewees pointed out that something hoteliers and novelists have in common is that we’re both all about curating people’s emotional experiences. He suggested I base the June character on myself. And I said, “Oh, no, no, Bill, you don’t write yourself into a novel. That’s extremely bad behavior.” And he said, “Well, just the important bits of you, the rules of you.” I resisted that for a long time, but it may have happened in spite of me.

Tell us about the decision to move into adult fiction.

While a lot of my YA colleagues enter adult fiction through the genre door—horror, romance, mystery—I knew I wanted to aim for literary fiction and knew it would take a lot more than just aging up the characters. I began reading hundreds of top-selling novels, trying to figure out what the common element was. What do Nicholas Sparks and Ann Patchett have in common? Meanwhile, I fired my YA agent and hired a new agent, because I wanted someone who didn’t know me as a famous author or a social media presence, someone who would just judge the book by the book.

I ended up with Richard Pine. He tells a wonderful story about receiving my first email. He went out into the hall and shouted, “Has anyone heard of Maggie Stiefvater?” Which was just what I wanted. So I had him read The Scorpio Races, my favorite of my YA novels, and I said, “All right, tell me what makes a Stiefvater novel.”

He said, “I think it’s about feeling like you’ve gone to a place that’s real, and you’re dying to return.” Even though you know it only exists in the book, there’s a sense of wistfulness and nostalgia, of aspiration.

That reminds me of what the Kirkus reviewer said about The Listeners—that readers will wish they could check into the Avallon and stay there indefinitely. Do you love staying in hotels?

I have to admit, left to my own devices, I’ll usually get an Airbnb or crash at a friend’s house. It’s not that I don’t like luxury, but today’s high-end hotels are not about luxury, they’re about security—about safety and not being uncomfortable, which is not the point of luxury at all.

There is one hotel I do adore, the Copley in Boston. It’s got a wonderful vibe to it, a bit of legendariness. When I’m there, I feel like I’ve been removed from modernity and placed in another world. And they have a wonderful waffle, in case you’re wondering.

Marion Winik hosts the Weekly Reader podcast on NPR.