Magical Realism Fiction

In 17th-century England, civil war rages and witches have become pawns in a plot to oust the king. Red-haired Evey does not want to be a witch, but she cannot deny the magick coursing through her veins. In a country seething with civil war, superstition, dread and dark forces are at work. A storm is coming. After witnessing the brutal murder of her mother by witch-hunters, Evey vows to avenge her and track down her killers. Fury burns in her bright and strong. But she has promised her mother that she will keep Dill, her little sister, safe.

Sarah has some confessing to do. Meanwhile, Ajax is faced with more and more things crossing between the real world and inside the game Legendary Rule. He's forced to confront the idea that the world of LR might be just as real as his own.

Welcome to Darkblood - oops, I mean Darkhen Academy. There are three rules to survive the elite supernatural school: Do not talk or even look at The Seven, the uber-powerful supes that rule the academy. Never go into the Fae forest on a full moon...or else. And most definitely do not fall for one of the extremely hot and unattainable instructors. Too bad I’ve never really been a rule follower...If word gets out that humans are no longer safe from the supes, our worlds will once again be closed off. It’s up to us to stop that from happening.

The Russell women have always lived in a house that is as special as they are—a century-old Victorian with a radio that tunes itself to the listener’s mood and a pantry that rearranges to provide just the right ingredients for any baking need. Lilith Russell was the exception. She left the family home in Ivy Ridge, Georgia, and has been flitting like a hummingbird from place to place with her daughter, Mattie, in the decades since, only returning each summer to drop Mattie off with Lilith’s sister, Penelope.

“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who goes unnamed. “In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out.

The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.

Lyman Frank Baum was an American children's book writer best-known for creating the popular Wizard of Oz series. Baum was a prolific writer who wrote 14 novels in the Oz series, plus 41 other novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and about 42 scripts. He often wrote under pseudonyms. Of all the books, the one that made Baum a household name was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Born in the Argentine town of Mina Clavero, Camila is designated male but begins to identify from an early age as a girl. She is well aware that she’s different from other children and reacts to her oppressive, poverty-stricken home life, with a cowed mother and abusive, alcoholic father, by acting out—with swift consequences. Deeply intelligent, she eventually leaves for the city to attend university, slipping into prostitution to make ends meet. And in Sarmiento Park, in the heart of Córdoba, she discovers the strange, wonderful world of the trans sex workers who dwell there.

Rising star Jules Costa loves re-creating vintage recipes for her popular online cooking show. But when personal and professional disaster strikes, her only chance of saving her career is to complete her new cookbook before the end of the summer. Panicked, Jules returns to her family’s beloved olive farm on the shores of Italy’s stunning Lake Garda. Seeking culinary inspiration, she's hoping to convince her spunky eighty-year-old Nonna Bruna to share her precious collection of family recipes. Jules’ plans quickly go awry as she discovers Nonna’s cookbook has magical and unpredictable powers.

Imagine that there are American MIAs who chose to remain missing after the Vietnam War. Imagine that there is a family in which four generations of strong, alluring women have shared a mysterious connection to an outlandish figure from Japanese folklore. Imagine just those things (don’t even try to imagine the love story) and you’ll have a foretaste of Tom Robbins’s eighth and perhaps most beautifully crafted novel--a work as timeless as myth yet as topical as the latest international threat.

With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she’s descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her way to her new home.

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of unhoused people bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains, and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.

A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it?

Amber Sand's matchmaking business is threatened by a YouTube star with a flair for showbiz, but when she meets Jane, the fairy behind the new fad, Amber finds a kindred spirit. Jane never got her wings and, like Amber, feels like an outsider in her family. Meanwhile, the gang is enjoying the summer after senior year and gearing up for college. They team up with Jane to track down the rare and difficult-to-obtain fairy dust and try to restore Ivy's siren powers. Perhaps most risky of all, Jane offers to tell Amber who her match truly is.

Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant. As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world, they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.

Born to a wealthy Virginian family, privileged Jordan's got her life all planned out. Get her PhD, find the perfect Virginian man to marry, pop out a few more Kacys, and make her state senator father proud. If only Jordan could let the past rest. When your mother disappears without a trace, it carves a gash that bleeds a long time. Jordan has never given up hope that her mother is alive. So when Jordan's old nanny shows up with a mysterious locket containing a portrait of Jordan's mother, Jordan believes her hope was not in vain.

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.

RUNNER-UP FOR THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE Set in the near future, this hopeful story of survival and resilience follows Wanda—a luminous child born out of a devastating hurricane—as she navigates a rapidly changing world: A “symphony of beauty and heartbreak” (Associated Press). USA...