Fiction Realism

On the eve of the new millennium, in a city in southern Japan that progress has forgotten, sixteen-year-old Anna Obata looks to the stars for solace. An outcast at school, and left to fend for herself and care for her increasingly senile grandfather at home, Anna copes with her loneliness by searching the night sky for answers. But everything changes the evening the Low Earth Orbit satellite (LEO for short) returns her gaze and sees her as no one else has before.

Tilda Finch is a successful businesswoman, a mother to two wonderful adult daughters, and besides an unexpected divorce, she’s living a relatively happy life. Until she wakes up one morning and her finger seems to have disappeared. She thinks back to the kombucha she drank the night before—perhaps it was spiked? Studying herself in the mirror, she discovers one of her ears has also disappeared! She rushes to the doctor, who after a multitude of tests says she’s sorry to inform her that she has invisibility, a disorder that affects millions of women worldwide, mostly after the age of forty.

Effie Edenson is many things: a bestselling author, a runaway bride, a woman who cannot see the gifts she possesses. Though she is an adult, her mother dominates her life to a point that she feels she will never be able to break free. But Effie lives in Middle Falls, where all things are possible. After an untimely death, Effie wakes up at a critical juncture in her life. The question is, what can she do with this second chance?

Wren Warrender wants nothing more than to get off the waitlist at her dream school and survive the summer with an insufferable new coworker, so when a group of Magicians drag her sleeping consciousness into a magical realm called Skalterra to act as their weapon each night, she’s less than thrilled. An old evil is breaking free of his glacial prison, and now it’s up to Wren to keep him from unleashing chaos across two separate realities. The lines between waking and sleep start to blur, and Wren is forced to reckon with the fact that some bad dreams are more than Nightmares.

When ballet dancer Clara Campbell arrives in New Orleans, lonely and homesick, she is immediately captivated by the story of Windisle Plantation and the tragic tale that is said to have transpired beyond its gate. Legend has it that it is abandoned by all living souls, but to Clara’s great surprise, it is not a ghost she hears through the stone wall surrounding the property, but a flesh and blood man: a scarred stranger with a pain deeper and darker than the churning waters of the Mississippi river that flows beside his self-imposed prison.

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient - frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism.

In the 1990s, Carter Wills was the lead singer of the English alt-rock band Mayluna, securing his place among music legends. His tortured-heart lyrics struck a chord. And so did his secret connection to a woman whose love changed all their lives. Who was she? Evie Waters’s two grown children discover an iconic photo in an old magazine of a “mystery girl” with Carter: their mother. It all started in a wistful time and place for Evie, her twenty-fifth summer.

When Maximilian Ophuls is murdered outside his daughter's home by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, it appears to be a political killing. Ophuls is the former U.S. ambassador to India and America's leading figure in counter-terrorism. But there is much more to Ophuls and his assassin, a mysterious man calling himself "Shalimar the Clown", than meets the eye. One woman is at the center of their shared history, a history of betrayal and deception.

Whale, set in a remote village in South Korea, follows the lives of many linked characters, including Geumbok, an extremely ambitious woman who has been chasing an indescribable thrill ever since she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle. Brimming with surprises and wicked humor, Whale is an adventure-satire of epic proportions by one of the most original voices in international literature.

The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger.

When Argyle invites his best friend, Simon Kerrigan, home for the Christmas holidays, he wants to save Simon from staying at Guilder Boarding School on his own. Simon comes along and doesn’t expect to find much more excitement in the tiny Scottish town where Argyle’s family lives. Until he meets Beth, Argyle’s older sister. She’s beautiful, brash and clearly interested in him. When her father warns him to stay away from her, Simon tries, but sometimes destiny has a hope of it’s own.

Set in Denmark in the here and now, The Quiet Girl centers around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with a deep love for the music of Johan Sebastian Bach, and an even deeper gambling debt. Wanted for tax evasion and on the verge of extradition, Krone is drafted into the service of a mysterious order of nuns who promise him reprieve from the international authorities in return for his help safeguarding a group of children with mystical abilities - abilities that Krone also shares.

Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.

Powers are determined by geographic birth locations, and only the rich and powerful are permitted access to prized sites. SC is the first person born in space. The punishment for unauthorized births is death. Out of fear, SC keeps his strange abilities as his darkest secret. But when his mother is kidnapped by an unknown organization, SC has no choice but to act.

The sixth book in the phenomenal, bestselling series, translated from Japanese, Before I Knew I Loved You asks the irresistible question: what would you do if you were offered the chance to go back in time? In Before I Knew I Loved You, Toshikazu Kawaguchi takes us back to the warm heart...

When twelve year old Joseph tragically loses his mother, his world is shattered. Left with his angry, alcoholic father in their rundown apartment, he finds himself longing to be free of the life he’s been stuck with. Staring into a generic landscape painting in the church basement at his mother’s funeral, he almost gets his wish; a mysterious girl in an Iron Maiden vest steps out of the picture, opening his eyes to impossible and incredible worlds.

From the very first hour Cayden had set foot inside the massive, real-life game that was the Tower of Babel, nothing had gone according to plan. A unique skill, a handful of new friends, and the wrath of an ultra-wealthy, patricidal lunatic were just some of the complications to his best laid plans.
So why was he even surprised when a special event trapped him, his companions, and dozens of other players inside the tower, squaring them off against a murderous army of stone-faced warriors?

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.

As in Nigeria, vagabonds are those whose existence is literally outlawed: the queer, the poor, the displaced, the footloose and rogue spirits. They are those who inhabit transient spaces, who make their paths and move invisibly, who embrace apparitions, old vengeances and alternative realities. Eloghosa Osunde's brave, fiercely inventive novel traces a wild array of characters for whom life itself is a form of resistance.

May Rosevere has reached the grand old age of 110, thanks to several slices of toast with butter every morning, a glass (or two) of port, and the wonders of the Cornish sea air - or so she tells everyone. But there’s much more to May than her remarkable age. She has a secret. One that no one has ever discovered....