Fiction Realism

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.

The secrets of the house are the secrets of the heart. It begins with an act of betrayal that destroys the tenuous bonds of Celestina Errantes’s family. For years afterwards, Celestina longs for an escape from her unhappy home. Then an unexpected gift from her wealthy Lolo offers that chance: a long-forsaken property in Manila’s bohemian district, close to where ladies of the evening ply their trade. It is no place for a proper young woman, but this house, even with its ghosts, makes Celestina feel at home.

When the Night Foxes boldly break into the Fourth Precinct’s Evidence Building, it causes quite the stir. As a Magical Examiner, Henri Davenforth is immediately called in. To his astonishment, Captain Gregson has him work the case like a detective. More astounding, he assigns Henri a partner - The Shinigami Detective. The woman is famous for killing the most destructive rogue witch of the century, and no one is quite certain where she’s from. Every officer in the precinct is either in awe of her, or a little frightened by her. Henri is just baffled.

Amy Hilton, born Wu Aimee in the tiny Chinese village of Eternal Spring, has been living and working as a photographer in New York City for so long she’s started to dream in English. When in the fall of 1999 she receives a letter from her sister, written in her birth tongue of Manchu, she needs to take it to a Chinatown produce vendor to get it translated. And so it is this stranger who tells Amy that her mother has died of a broken heart.

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest.

Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is raised by the notorious leader of a California crime syndicate, who trains him to be his deadly enforcer. But when Ming falls in love with Ada, the daughter of a powerful railroad magnate, and the two elope, he seizes the opportunity to escape to a different life. Soon after, in a violent raid, the tycoon's henchmen kidnap Ada and conscript Ming into service for the Central Pacific Railroad. Battered and yet defiant, Ming partners with a blind clairvoyant. Together the two set out to rescue his wife and to exact revenge.

Mexico City, 1988. Long before iTunes or MP3s, you said "I love you" with a mixtape. Meche, awkward and fifteen, discovers how to cast spells using music, and with her friends Sebastian and Daniela will piece together their broken families, and even find love.

As a child living in his family's apple orchard, Ahmad Torkash-Vand treasures his great-great-great-great grandfather's every mesmerizing world. On the day of his father's death, Ahmad listens closely as the seemingly immortal elder tells him the tale of a centuries-old family curse...and the boy's own fated role in the story.

An Ojibwe boy runs away from a North Ontario Indian School, not realizing just how far away home is. Along the way he's followed by Manitous, spirits of the forest who comment on his plight, cajoling, taunting, and ultimately offering him a type of comfort on his difficult journey back to the place he was so brutally removed from.

Ixtepec se ubica en la tierra caliente del corazón de México, en un sitio que es todos y es ninguno, pues se trata del pueblo imaginario en que Elena Garro ambientó su representación de los convulsos años posrevolucionarios de un México en el que la injusticia del despojo de tierras, el racismo y la violencia contra las mujeres eran, como lo son hoy, un asunto de todos los días. Fábula poderosa de las heridas históricas de un país y una época, Los recuerdos del porvenir está llamada a ocupar, finalmente, su sitio como un clásico indiscutible de la literatura hispanoamericana.

It is the nineteenth century, the twilight of Europe’s bloody bacchanals, and a vampire must escape. She arrives to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city. She adapts, intermingles with humans, and attempts to be discreet.

Like many teenagers, there's a lot about Daniel Meadows' life that's out of his control. For example, having to start in a new school district for his freshman year of high school thanks to his dad's new job. Inside the realm of his control, however, is the decision to try a brand-new sport purely to impress a girl. But the day of tennis tryouts proves far more fateful than Dan ever could have imagined, when a failed attempt by Truck-kun and the powers that be to kill him and transport his consciousness to a fantasy realm leaves him on Earth with miraculous abilities instead.

For generations, the Winston women have possessed an unspoken magical gift: they can heal with the touch of a hand. It’s a tradition they’ve always had to practice in secret, in the moonlight hours, when the fireflies dance and the whippoorwill birds sing. But not every healer has rightfully passed on this knowledge to her descendants, and for young Louise Winston, the discovery of her abilities comes in less-than-ideal circumstances—she brings her best friend back from death following an accident, the day after he professed his long-held feelings for her.

A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike. Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door.

As children, Goldie, Liyana, Scarlet, and Bea dreamed of a strange otherworld: a nightscape of mists and fog, perpetually falling leaves and hungry ivy, lit by an unwavering moon. Here, in this shadowland of Everwhere, the four girls, half-sisters connected by blood and magic, began to nurture their elemental powers together. But at 13, the sisters were ripped from Everwhere and separated. Now, five years later, they search for one another and yearn to rediscover their unique and supernatural strengths.

Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society - she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.

Before Dan opened his door to find a wounded woman who had escaped from the tormentors in the mountain, his life had become rather quiet. He and the eight other people in the mostly abandoned town had become friends. They spent peaceful evenings around the campfire and even made vague plans to journey east one day and leave the ominous mountain behind. But the woman's arrival changes everything.

Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She's often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean 11 years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid.

When he arrives in Cuba at the close of the eighteenth century, Victor Hugues, a merchant sailor from Marseille, brings with him not only the idealism of the French Revolution but also its ambition and bloodlust. Landing at the Havana doorstep of a trio of wealthy, eccentric Creole orphans, he sweeps them across the Caribbean Sea to Guadeloupe, whose enslaved Africans he frees only then to exploit them in his fight against the British for colonial sovereignty. What ensues in Alejo Carpentier’s magical realist masterpiece is an explosive clash between the New World and the Old World.

After the death of his brother, a grief-stricken young man seeks refuge and oblivion in a secluded fishing village dominated by a family of brujas in this haunting debut novel, inspired, in part, by the ramifications of Diné history and thought—a mesmerizing, original tale in the tradition of works by Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Gabriel García Márquez.