Fiction Realism

It is 1980, and the Democratic People's Republic of Laos is proud to be competing in its first-ever Olympics. Ex-national coroner of Laos Dr. Siri Paiboun may be retired, but he and his wife, Madame Daeng, would do just about anything to have a chance to visit Moscow, so Siri finagles them the job of medical oversight for the Olympians. As the competition heats up, however, Siri begins to suspect that one of the athletes is not who he says he is. Then another Lao Olympian is accused of murder.

When down-on-her-luck writer Eva Blake returns to her seaside hometown to inherit her grandmother’s crumbling bookstore, the last thing she expects is a magical typewriter—or a talking cat who edits her prose. But when the characters she writes come to life, Eva finds herself caught in a whirlwind of imagination, responsibility, and redemption.

Barrie Anne Blythe and her aunt Charlotte have always known that the other residents of their small coastal community find them peculiar - two women living alone on the outskirts of town. It is the price of concealing their strange and dangerous family secret. But two events threaten to upend their lives forever. The first is the arrival of a mysterious abandoned baby with a hint of power like their own. The second is the sudden reappearance of Barrie Anne's long-lost husband - who is not quite the man she thought she married.

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Discover the internationally bestselling novels of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, now a worldwide phenomenon and BookTok sensation, in this special new book set. Step inside Tokyo’s whimsical Café Funiculi Funicula and travel back in time with a cast of unforgettable characters.

It is spring 1919, and John Sawtelle’s imagination has gotten him into trouble … again. Now John and his newlywed wife, Mary, along with their two best friends and their three dogs, are setting off for Wisconsin’s northwoods, where they hope to make a fresh start—and, with a little luck, discover what it takes to live a life of meaning, purpose and adventure. But the place they are headed for is far stranger and more perilous than they realize, and it will take all their ingenuity, along with a few new friends—human, animal, and otherworldly—to realize their dreams.

Widowed at thirty-five, Josephine Reynolds wishes she could disappear, but her concerned sister convinces her to buy their ancestral home, a Craftsman bungalow in disrepair and foreclosure. It's a welcome distraction, and Josephine can't believe her luck when she finds the home's original door in a salvage yard. When she installs the door and steps through it, Josephine is transported into 1927, where she meets her great-grandmother Alma, a vivacious and daring woman running an illegal speakeasy in the bungalow's basement.

Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal.

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.

Fed up with playing the normal game, recent university graduate, ex-cum laude, ex-soccer star, ex-popular, and mostly broke Kera MacDonagh changed her life when she read How to be a Badass Witch and shockingly, the spells worked. She barely made it out of the first few weeks of on-the-job training before her powers got her in trouble. Hunted as a magical vigilante, the Kims sacrificed to keep her safe. Kera hunts criminals in the darkness of LA, but will she be able to hide the signature of her powers, too?

Something evil has swept into the small Western Maine town of Castle Rock on the heels of the latest winter storm. Sheriff Norris Ridgewick and his team are desperately searching for two missing girls, but time is running out to bring them home alive. In Washington, DC, 37-year-old Gwendy Peterson couldn’t be more different from the self-conscious teenage girl who once spent a summer running up Castle Rock’s Suicide Stairs. That same summer, she was entrusted - or some might say cursed - with the extraordinary button box by Richard Farris, the mysterious stranger in the black suit.

In Killing Commendatore, a 30-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna.

When Ava Harrison receives a letter containing an unusual job listing one month after the sudden death of her ex-boyfriend, she thinks she’s being haunted. The listing—a job as a live-in caretaker for a peculiar old man and his cranky cat in Driftwood, Alabama—is the perfect chance to start a new life. A normal life. Ava has always been too fearful to even travel, so no one’s more surprised than she is when she throws caution to the wind and drives to the distant beachside town.

Tita is the youngest daughter of Mama Elena, the tyrannical owner of the De la Garza ranch. As the youngest, she is expected to remain single and stay at home to care for her mother. So when Tita falls in love, Mama Elena arranges for Tita's older sister to marry Tita's young man.

In 1692, Bridget Bishop was hanged as a witch. Two hundred years later, her legacy lives on in the scions of two very different lines: one dedicated to using their powers to heal and help women in need; the other, determined to grasp power for themselves by whatever means necessary. This clash will play out in the fate of Annis, a young woman in Gilded Age New York who finds herself a pawn in the family struggle for supremacy. She'll need to claim her own power to save herself - and resist succumbing to the darkness that threatens to overcome them all.

Emery Blackwood’s life changed forever the night her best friend was found dead and the love of her life, August Salt, was accused of murdering her. Years later, she is doing what her teenage self swore she never would: living a quiet existence on the misty, remote shores of Saoirse Island and running the family’s business, Blackwood’s Tea Shoppe Herbal Tonics & Tea Leaf Readings. But when the island, rooted in folklore and magic, begins to show signs of strange happenings, Emery knows that something is coming.

Catalina de Cerrato is being raised by her widowed father, Don Alonso, in 1551 Guatemala, scarcely thirty years since the Spanish invasion. A ruling member of the oppressive Spanish hierarchy, Don Alonso holds sway over the newly relegated lower class of Indigenous communities. Fiercely independent, Catalina struggles to honor her father and her late mother, a Maya noblewoman to whom Catalina made a vow that only she can keep: preserve the lost sacred text of the Popol Vuh, the treasured and now forbidden history of the K’iche’ people.

Born in Cuba after her mother Yemaya’s adventures in the New World, Oya has inherited otherworldly powers from her Yoruba Orisha lineage. While Yemaya is known for her healing abilities, Oya’s influence over the storm proves to be destructive, posing a threat to her mother and the island’s safety. Sent to New Orleans to study under Marie Laveau, the Queen of Voodoo, Oya begins a journey across the still young America, encountering a myriad of historical figures, including Mary Ellen Pleasant, Jesse James, Lew Hing, and more.

Stormy Morgan left her hometown of Shadow Hills, Michigan, with one goal: To write the great American novel and strike it rich. Now, without a book contract, she’s back at her family restaurant in a one-stoplight town...and she’s convinced things couldn’t possibly get worse. That feeling only lasts until her first shift, when on a trip to the storage building behind the restaurant, she literally trips over a body. Stormy is a woman - or maybe a witch - lost in a sea of magic and despair...but murder might just lead her out of it.

The next step in Ellie Baker’s marriage: divorce. She and her husband, Jonah, are heading to Florida to break it to the family. No great drama to share. After twenty years of marriage, they’ve just fallen out of love. Simple. Not to their college-age daughter, Maggie, who is devastated. Or to Ellie’s father, Frank, who grows as cold as a retiree can get in Orlando. As for Ellie’s mother, Bunny: no, no, no. She doesn’t want to hear it. After a dreadful weekend, Ellie and Jonah return home to New Jersey with hearts and minds still set on a split.

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.