Showing titles in Magical Realism

This is Nadia. She is fiercely independent, with an excellent sense of humour and a love of smoking alone on her balcony late at night. This is Saeed. He is sweet and shy and kind to strangers. He also has a balcony but he uses his for stargazing. This is their story: a love story, but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow.

Despite his warriors' lineage, Erroh would rather waste his potential stumbling alone from one tavern to the next, drinking and gambling. Fate, however, has greater plans for him. After decades of peace, a great war draws near, and though he doesn't know it, he is standing in the way of the first wave. What is more, and very much to his dismay, he's about to find out he's not entirely alone either. But Erroh has a plan, a simple plan.

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of the same lavish culty spa her mother to which her mother was devoted.

This is the story of a man who embarks on a highly provocative intellectual adventure with a gorilla - a journey of the mind and spirit that changes forever the way he sees the world and humankind’s place in it. In Ishmael, which received the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for the best work of fiction offering positive solutions to global problems, Daniel Quinn parses humanity’s origins and its relationship with nature, in search of an answer to this challenging question: How can we save the world from ourselves?

You’ve heard of the Afterlife. Welcome to the Beforelife. There are four of us: Samuel, Lucy, Thomas, and me – Eliza. We came into being the day Becca Valentine was born. We’ve been by her side ever since. What she doesn’t know yet, is that one day she might become our mother. Then two men come into her life. Both seeking her heart. And then we realise: everything rests on Becca’s love story. Because one of the men is Lucy and Thomas’s father. And the other is mine and Samuel’s. And there’s simply no way we can all be born.

They say a tiger that devours too many humans can take the form of a man and walk amongst us.... In 1930s colonial Malaya, a dissolute British doctor receives a surprise gift of an 11-year-old Chinese houseboy. Sent as a bequest from an old friend, young Ren has a mission: to find his dead master's severed finger and reunite it with his body. Ren has 49 days, or else his master's soul will roam the earth forever.

Fifteen years ago, two boys went missing at a state park in West Virginia. Six months later they mysteriously reappeared. Jeremy wouldn't say where they went and Rafe was unable, having no memory of their time lost in the woods though he bears terrible scars on his back that no one can explain. Now adults, Jeremy is a missing persons investigator with an uncanny ability to find lost and kidnapped girls. Meanwhile, Rafe has become a recluse, an artist unable to stop creating fantastical paintings and sculptures he shows to no one.

Carrie Morgan expects trouble when she returns to Woodsmoke after ten years. What she does not predict is the beautiful stranger who walks into her life with the first frost and with whom Carrie begins to fall in love. Bound to her family’s book of spells and a deep magic that flows from the mountains, Carrie’s family warn that her new love is a curse who will disappear when the frost thaws.

It has been a year since Penny first walked through the doors of DallerGut Dream Department Store, and surviving a year at the store means one thing . . . She is now an official employee of the dream industry! She can finally take the express commuter train to the Company District, where all the dream production companies are located and discover how all raw dream materials and testing equipment are produced. But the Company District is not quite what she expected, it hides the darker underbelly of the magical industry that Penny thought she was a part of.

A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from police and the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat. They've found themselves a home inside a van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the edge of the Brisbane River. The girl has no name because names are dangerous when you're on the run. But the girl has a dream. A vision of a life as an artist of international acclaim. A life outside the grip of the Brisbane underworld drug queen 'Lady' Flora Box. A life of love with the boy who's waiting for her on the bridge that stretches across a river.

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the listener’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother.

Father Jared Osborne has received an extraordinary assignment from his superiors: Investigate an itinerant preacher stirring up deep trouble in Central Europe. His followers call him B, but his enemies say he’s something else: the Antichrist. However, the man Osborne tracks across a landscape of bars, cabarets, and seedy meeting halls is no blasphemous monster - though an earlier era would undoubtedly have rushed him to the burning stake. For B claims to be enunciating a gospel written not on any stone or parchment but in our very genes....

The Prisoner of Heaven returns to the world of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the Sempere & Sons bookshop. It begins just before Christmas in Barcelona in 1957, one year after Daniel and Bea from The Shadow of the Wind have married. They now have a son, Julian, and are living with Daniel's father at Sempere & Sons.

Fermin still works with them and is busy preparing for his wedding to Bernarda in the New Year. However something appears to be bothering him.

Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby is the last in line of a crooked and fantastical dynasty of spice merchants and crime lords from Cochin. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As we travel with him on a route that takes him from India to Spain, he spins his labyrinthine family tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

Present day. As a love affair comes to an end, and with it her dreams for her future, artist Selena needs a retreat. The picture-postcard Sloe Cottage in the Somerset village of Ashcombe promises to be the perfect place to forget her problems, and Selena settles into her new home as spring arrives. 1682: Grace Cotter longs for nothing more than a husband and family of her own. Separated by three hundred years, two women are drawn together by a home bathed in blood and magic.

Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked aeroplane blows apart high above the English Channel and two figures tumble, clutched in an embrace, towards the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India’s legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices. Washed up, alive, on an English beach, their survival is a miracle. But there is a price to pay. Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But chosen by whom? And which is which? And what will be the outcome of their final confrontation?

Based on the Japanese myth of cats returning favours to humans who are kind to them, "The Full Moon Coffee Shop" is the name of a peculiar cake cafe that is run by talking cats, which has no fixed location and instead materialises unpredictably on the night of a full moon. The protagonists of this story - a successful female scriptwriter in crisis, a heartbroken tv director, and two male entrepreneurs - all end up there in the middle of the night, in a dream-like state, and receive life-changing advice on love, work, and relationships from a cat who interprets his guests' astrological chart.

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. When she decides she wants a living wake - a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she's led - her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death? Or someone else's? Does she have other motives? But Flor isn't the only person with secrets.

London, 1927. On the morning of Friday 5th February, 1927, Miss Agnes Humphries – the landlady of the attractive, if-slightly shabby, white-fronted townhouse at Number 23 Burlington Square – has a decision to make. The rooms of the second floor lie empty, since poor Mr Blandford’s unfortunate demise, God rest his soul. And Agnes must make up her mind as to who will be her new lodger. Agnes must choose between them. But what will her decision lead to? One of the choices could result in scandal, one in devastation, and one could even lead to happiness. If only she gets it right.

Before Gods and mortals, there were The Fates - three sisters born out of Nyx's darkness, destined to weave the lives, and deaths, of humankind for eternity. But immortality is a heavy burden, and Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos are captivated by the gloriously human lives of the mortals below, especially those of the great warrior Atalanta and her ill-fated lover, Meleager. However, being a Goddess of Fate doesn't make you a master of it. Will these three sisters find a way to free the couple, and themselves, from their destinies? Or will they be bound by Fate forever?

De jóvenes, Florentino Ariza y Fermina Daza se enamoran apasionadamente, pero Fermina eventualmente decide casarse con un médico rico y de muy buena familia. Florentino estáanonadado, pero es un romántico. Su carrera en los negocios florece, y aunquesostiene 622 pequeños romances, su corazón todavía pertenece a Fermina. Cuandoal fin el esposo de ella muere, Florentino acude al funeral con toda intención.

For centuries, the Owens family has been cursed in matters of love. When beloved Aunt Jet Owens hears the sound of the deathwatch beetle, she knows that it is a signal. She has finally discovered the secret to breaking the curse, but time is running out. She has only seven days to live. Unaware of the family’s witchcraft lineage and all it entails, one of the young sisters of the new Owens generation has fallen in love. As the curse strikes once again, her love’s fate hangs in the balance, spurring three generations of Owens to venture back to where it all began.

When Ishmael places an advertisement for pupils with “an earnest desire to save the world”, he does not expect a child to answer him. But 12-year-old Julie Gerchak is undaunted by Ishmael’s reluctance to teach someone so young and convinces him to take her on as his next student. Ishmael knows he can't apply the same strategies with Julie that he used with his first pupil, Alan Lomax - nor can he hope for the same outcome. But young Julie proves that she is ready to forge her own spiritual path and arrive at her own destination.

Natsuki Books was a tiny second-hand bookshop on the edge of town. Inside, towering shelves reached the ceiling, every one crammed full of wonderful books. Rintaro Natsuki loved this space that his grandfather had created. He spent many happy hours there, reading whatever he liked. It was the perfect refuge for a boy who tended to be something of a recluse. After the death of his grandfather, Rintaro is devastated and alone. It seems he will have to close the shop. Then, a talking tabby cat called Tiger appears and asks Rintaro for help.

Machado de Assis’ classic novel, the precursor of Latin American fiction, is finally rendered as a stunningly relevant work for 21st-century audiences. In eloquent, contemporary prose, Costa and Patterson breathe new life into the dynamic character of Brás Cubas and reveal the vivid, tempestuous Rio de Janeiro of his time. The recently deceased Cubas narrates his life story, admitting glibly: “I am not so much a writer who has died, as a dead man who has decided to write.”

Even the greatest love stories end. But what if this one didn’t have to? Emma is having the worst day of her life. Frustrating. Chaotic. And the only person who could make it better is dead by the end of the day. Yet even worse than all of that: Emma keeps waking up to the same day, over and over again. But what if this is a sign things could be different? Can Emma change the heartbreaking end to this love story?

Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers' fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men.

In the fifth book in the sensational Before the Coffee Gets Cold series translated from Japanese, the mysterious café where customers arrive hoping to travel back in time welcomes four new guests. They must follow the café's strict rules, however, and come back to the present before their coffee goes cold. Another moving and heartwarming tale from Toshikazu Kawaguchi, in Before we forget kindness our new visitors wish to go back into their past to move on their present, finding closure and comfort so they can embark on a beautiful future.

Birdie's keeping it together, of course she is. So she's a little hungover sometimes on her shifts, and has to bring her daughter Emaleen to work while she waits tables but it's a tough town to be a single mother, and she needs to get by. Maybe the shine is starting to wear off life at Wolverine Lodge. Maybe Birdie's ready for a fresh start. And then Birdie meets Arthur, who is quieter than most men, but makes her want to listen; who is gentle with Emaleen, and understands Birdie's fascination with the mountains in whose shadow they live.