Fiction Realism

Embers Before Dreams gathers five gentle, soothing tales from the Before Your Dream series—each crafted to quiet the mind, loosen the breath, and guide you toward restful calm. These are bedtime stories for adults, written with soft pacing and warm imagery, offering companionship for quiet evenings and slow nights. Across moonlit coasts, desert dunes, ancient cities, and candlelit rooms, the collection carries you through landscapes shaped by stillness, memory, and the soft magic of places where time moves differently.

Meshkwadoon is a tale that delves into the minds of a woman, a man, and a boy as they are dragged through an experience of fear, obsession, trauma, and terror. The foundational spirit of the land seeks to fulfill its obligation to an exchange of life for the life of all.

A ship. A garden. A library. A key. In Kaleidoscope, the incomparable Brian Selznick presents the story of two people bound to each other through time and space, memory and dreams. At the center of their relationship is a mystery about the nature of grief and love which will look different to each listener. Kaleidoscope is a feat of storytelling that illuminates how even the wildest tales can help us in the hardest times.

On the glistening surface of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel is the Ramsay family, a seemingly stable group of characters, but a group that is ultimately subject to the same alterations and losses that come with the passing of time. Set at the Ramsays’ summerhouse over two September days, ten years apart, Woolf’s influential landmark of twentieth-century literature explores the hopes, frustrations, and small moments of grace and change that permeate everyday life.

A dazzling, kaleidoscopic debut novel about the life of a precocious girl in Philadelphia trying to figure out who—or what—she is. One afternoon, on a visit to the Bronx Zoo, a jaguar tells six-year-old Grace Goldberg-Li she isn’t human. Not that this comes as a total surprise. Her life...

The Death Gate is down and Izzy Sage is at a crossroads. What will happen when they throw the switch and bring it back? She’s all atwitter on the big day...and then things only get more twisted when Zoe Lake-Winters, a powerful mage, walks through the door with her husband and daughter in tow. Two very different worlds are colliding, and Izzy and Zoe are at the center of it. The mystery of the other side is dark and deep and Zoe finds she’s intrigued...even if her methods are a bit extreme for the Grimlocks.

Bay Winchester is at a crossroads in her life. Her powers are growing, her personal life is settled, and there’s a young witch in crisis under her care. Things are...difficult. Bay has no idea what to do. She needs to keep her teenage protégé hidden while uncovering a deadly story of an affair gone wrong and greed run amok. All the while she wonders what will happen if she can’t turn things around for her new teenage responsibility. What will she have to do to protect the people that she loves?

Welcome to the Midwest, America's Heartland, home to a hidden community of witches and wizards. When Maria Apple receives a strange music box for her 19th birthday, everything changes. She begins to showcase odd magical abilities, glowing blue, seeing ghosts, and talking to creatures that shouldn't be able to talk, all while trying to juggle the task of being a typical teenage girl. Now, not only does Maria learn she is a witch, but her grandfather, Ignatius, reveals he was once a famous warrior from a planet named Oriceran.

On the day Concord Webster turned eighteen, the Devil died. The Devil's real name was Judge Martin, but Concord's mother called him the Devil. She said he boiled babies for dinner and made lampshades out of human skin. So why did she, who hated him so venomously, have a key to his house? The key will unlock more than just Judge's front door. It will also unlock a multitude of stories - where magic children talk to crows, men disappear in piles of leaves, and James Dean lookalikes kiss in dark alleys - and reveal a secret history that will change Concord's life forever.

Scott McKenzie's father killed his mother and himself. Scott vowed to do anything in his power to stop similar murders. He longed to be a police officer, but a tour in Vietnam in 1970 derailed that career. Two years later, wounded in body and soul, Scott died. He didn't go on to what was next, though. Instead, he woke up with a chance to live his life over and over until he got it right. Murderers will never see him coming. But, by using violence to save others, is he losing his own soul?

Celeste Mason is the Pinterest stay-at-home supermom of other mothers’ nightmares. Despite her all-organic, SunButter-loving, free-range kids, her immaculate home, and her volunteering awards, she still has time to relax with a nice glass of pinot at the end of the day. The only thing that ruins it all is her workaholic, career-obsessed neighbor, who makes no secret of what she thinks of Celeste’s life choices every chance she gets.

A demon who runs story time at the local library. A robot that guards nuclear waste. A vampire who gives relationship advice. Death’s personal lawyer. The Strange Garden and Other Weird Tales is a collection of stories that mix the mundane and bizarre, that both disturb and delight. From the creator of The Stench of Adventure comes a set of mystifying stories with an undercurrent of warmth and heart.

A Tall History of Sugar tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a man who was "born without skin", so that no one is able to tell what race he belongs to; and Arrienne Christie, his quixotic soul mate who makes it her duty in life to protect Moshe from the social and emotional consequences of his strange appearance. The narrative begins with Moshe's birth in the late 1950s, four years before Jamaica's independence from colonial rule, and ends in the era of Brexit and Donald Trump.

When Louie drifts off to sleep, he wakes in a place that shouldn’t exist—Dreamland, a strange world where his dead father is alive. Every night, he’s drawn back. Every morning, he wakes more desperate to stay. But the longer he lingers, the more the dream twists into a nightmare…and the harder it becomes to leave.

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 of the...

Al pueblo ha llegado «la mala hora» de los campesinos, la hora de la desgracia. La comarca ha sido «pacificada» después de tanta guerra civil. Han ganado los conservadores, que se dedican a perseguir cruel y pertinazmente a sus adversarios liberales. Al alba de una mañana, mientras el padre Ángel se dispone a celebrar la misa, suena un disparo en el pueblo. Un comerciante de ganado, advertido de la infidelidad de su mujer por un pasquín pegado a la puerta de su casa, acaba de matar al presunto amante de ésta.

Canary Islands, 1882: Explorer and plant biologist Niklas Bruunis researches a species alleged to have hallucinogenic qualities capable of eliminating the psychic limits between one human mind and another. Buenos Aires, 1983: Born to a white Argentinian anthropologist and a black Brazilian engineer, Cassio comes of age with the Internet, and demonstrates the skills and personality that will make him one of the first great Argentine hackers. The southern Argentinian techno-hub of Bariloche, 2024: Piera, on the same research group as Cassio, studies human DNA.

With a dash of magic and a cast of oddball, small-town characters, this feel-good novel explores forgiveness, family, and the sense of humor it takes to live with the ones we love the most. Ebey’s End is a small town on an island off the Pacific coast, reachable only by ferry (assuming the...

Érase una vez un pueblo donde las noches eran largas y la muerte contaba su propia historia. En el pueblo vivía una niña que quería leer, un hombre que tocaba el acordeón y un joven judío que escribía bellos cuentos para escapar del horror de la guerra. Al cabo de un tiempo, la niña se convirtió en una ladrona que robaba libros y regalaba palabras. Con estas palabras comienza una historia hermosa y cruel que ahora ya es una novela inolvidable.

“Is me - Bob. Bob Marley.” Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of Marcus Garvey and King Edward VII are there too, drinking whiskey and playing solitaire. No one sees that Fall-down is Bob Marley, no one but his long-ago love, the deaf woman, Leenah, and, in the way of this otherworldly book, when Bob steps into the street each day, five years have passed.