Fantasy Realism

In Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman's imagination and supreme artistry transform a mundane world into a place of terrible wonders - where an old woman can purchase the Holy Grail at a thrift store, where assassins advertise their services in the Yellow Pages under "Pest Control," and where a frightened young boy must barter for his life with a mean-spirited troll living beneath a bridge by the railroad tracks.

The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone - and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything....

In the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga—“victory city”—the wonder of the world.

A Spellbinding Contemporary Cozy Fantasy Full of Romance and Suspense. A mystical shop cloaked in secrets. Four enigmatic proprietors bound by ancient magic. A soulmate lost in a parallel world. And one woman desperate for a love that truly belongs to her. When Cassie Harris steps into The Four Guardians, she’s merely chasing hope—a flicker of a future better than the life she’s been living. But what the mysterious shopkeepers offer is far more than she ever imagined: a chance to experience the lives she could have had… if only she’d made different choices. Each day for seven days...

The Montoyas are used to a life without explanations. They know better than to ask why the pantry never seems to run low, or why their matriarch won’t ever leave their home in Four Rivers - not for graduations, weddings, or baptisms. But when Orquídea Divina invites them to her funeral and to collect their inheritance, they hope to learn the secrets that she has held onto so tightly their whole lives. Instead, Orquídea is transformed into a ceiba tree, leaving them with more questions than answers.

In Japan, cats are a symbol of good luck. As the myth goes, if you are kind to them, they'll one day return the favor. And if you are kind to the right cat, you might just find yourself invited to a mysterious coffee shop under a glittering Kyoto moon. This particular coffee shop is like no other. It has no fixed location, no fixed hours, and seemingly appears at random to adrift young people at crucial junctions in their lives. It's also run by talking cats.

Changing the future was never meant to be easy. My name's Aidan Grey. I'm a twelve-year-old student at P.O.E. Academy, where we don't just study Edgar Allan Poe's works—we decode them. His stories aren't just literature; they're riddles and warnings. Prophetic clues are cleverly buried in every line. Find the right words, and you might change someone's fate. The academy says kids like me aren't ready to handle something so unpredictable. My best friend and I disagree. We've been practicing in secret, testing the boundaries of what we've learned.

Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to Western European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories that have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the 20th century.

For Thaniel Steepleton, an unexpected posting to Tokyo can’t come at a better moment. The London fog has made him ill and doctor’s orders are to get out. His brief is strange: the staff at the British Legation have been seeing ghosts, and his first task is to find out what’s going on. But staying with his closest friend, Keita Mori, in Yokohama, Thaniel starts to experience ghostly happenings himself. For reasons he won’t say, Mori is frightened. Then he vanishes.

Magic most definitely resides in the Maine summerhouse where the mysterious Madame Zoya has granted the innermost wishes of its visitors. Now, three women have come to this special place with one thing in common: a painful past they would each like to rewrite. Amy, who hides a heartbreaking loss behind her seemingly perfect marriage and family...Faith, a widow in her 30s whose deepest grief is for a man from years ago...and Zoe, an artist shunned by her hometown for reasons she doesn’t know after a traumatic night erased her memory.

When best-selling author Carrie McClelland visits the windswept ruins of Slains Castle, she is enchanted by the stark and beautiful Scottish landscape. The area is strangely familiar to her but she puts aside her faint sense of unease to begin her new novel, using the castle as her setting, and one of her own ancestors, Sophia, as her heroine. Then Carrie realizes her writing is taking on a life of its own and the lines between fact and fiction become increasingly blurred.

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 Shadow Vale, where the locals bite, monsters are real and the witches play fast and loose with the rules. Kristen O’Mead left behind grief and the magical shenanigans of Shadow Vale ten years ago. Now she’s back, to dust off her magic and solve the riddle of her ex-husband’s ghost. Unfortunately he’s not the only ghost from her past she has to deal with. Shadow Vale isn’t your usual town tucked away amongst the rolling hills. It’s a haven for paranormals, protected by a Forget-Me spell, and the old stomping grounds of her teenage hormones. She’s barely settled into ...

When two teens discover that they were both sexually assaulted at the same party, they develop a cautious friendship through her family’s possibly magical pastelería, his secret forest of otherworldly trees, and the swallows returning to their hometown, in Anna-Marie McLemore's The Mirror Season....

The fiercely anticipated sequel to the Sunday Times best seller Once Upon a Broken Heart, starring Evangeline Fox and the Prince of Hearts on a new journey of magic, mystery and heartbreak.

I put out fires. He ignites them. When a naked man stumbled out of the wildfire we'd been battling for over a week, I figured he'd escaped from some psych ward in the middle of nowhere. We all did. Who else walks barefoot through hell with a grin on his face? But then Kaspian did the impossible. He stopped the fire—snapped his fingers, and it died. You save a firefighter’s life, and you become more than a mystery. You become family. After that, I didn’t care if he was a lunatic, an alien, or the Dragon he claimed to be. Family is family. So I brought the naked man home. And slowly, ...

“Tengdana – Rise of the High Priestess” is the seventh book in the Orisha series. In a realm where spiritual and political powers collide, a young Princess Tengdana is forced into a royal marriage that defies her fate to become the Orisha High Priestess. When her husband King Egbin dies mysteriously, his brother Olufe seizes the throne. Pregnant with Egbin’s child, Tengdana must survive his obsession in finding her and the unborn heir to the throne, fleeing his tyranny. Seeking sanctuary with the powerful Ominira tribe, Tengdana adapts to their ways and gives birth to a daughter, ...

Where did the Brothers Grimm get the inspiration for their classic fairy tales? Maybe from their own encounters with the strange and magical… Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm never believed in magic—until their mother fell ill, and tales of a rare and powerful magic that can bring back the dead became their only hope. Desperate to save her, the brothers venture into the dark forest, where myths come to life and danger lurks behind every tree. A water sprite speaks in riddles of love spells and lost souls. A witch lures children to a house covered in breads and cakes. An infuriating girl named ...

Fairies are being turned to stone! Seren is faced with a ruthless enemy who seems to have discovered a way to steal magic from fairies. All evidence points to Lana Clach—ex-queen of the Colorado Underground—but the Councils aren't convinced. Can Ambassador Seren prove Lana's guilt before it's too late? Or is the future already etched in stone?

This is the way the world ends...for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.