Literary Realism

Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating chronic back pain, a failed marriage and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theatre director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hell-bent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat, Cabbage, for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week....

Everyone else knows the truth about you. Now you can know it, too. That's the slogan. The product: a junky contraption that tattoos personalized revelations on its users' forearms. It's an old con, playing on the fear that we are obvious to everybody except ourselves. This particular one's been circulating New York since the 1960s. The ad works. And, oddly enough, so might the device....

A bold novel that reimagines two of the most legendary characters in American literature - Captain Ahab and Ishmael of Moby-Dick. At the end of a long journey, Captain Ahab returns to the mainland to confront the true author of the novel Moby-Dick, his former shipmate, Ishmael. For Ahab was not pulled into the ocean’s depths by a harpoon line, and the greatly exaggerated rumors of his untimely death have caused him grievous harm - after hearing about Ahab’s demise, his wife and child left Nantucket for New York, and now Ahab is on a desperate quest to find them.

A nameless narrator awakens to the muddle of middle age, no longer certain who or what he is. He finds himself at a party talking to a woman he doesn't know who proves to be his wife. Soon separated but still living in the same apartment, he is threatened by a litigious dachshund and saddled with a stubborn case of erectile dysfunction in a world that seems held together by increasingly mercurial laws and elusive boundaries.

Jeanie Masterson has a gift: she can hear the recently dead and give voice to their final wishes and revelations. Inherited from her father, this gift has enabled the family undertakers to flourish in their small Irish town. Yet she has always been uneasy about censoring some of the dead's last messages to the living. Unsure, too, about the choice she made when she left school 17 years ago: to stay or leave for a new life in London with her charismatic teenage sweetheart.

Ah Q is an indolent and spiteful man from the rural peasant class. He has scant education, no clear job, and a ludicrously high opinion of himself. This unique combination of traits makes him a perpetual target of derision and abuse, yet Ah Q is nonetheless convinced that the indignities leveled against him amount to something of a “spiritual victory” - even as he finds himself succumbing to the tyranny of his oppressors.

Best friends Evie, Krista, and Willow are just trying to make it through their mid-twenties in New York. They're regular girls, with regular looks and typical quarter-life crises: making it up the corporate ladder, making sense of online dating, and making rent.

Growing up in Alaska, young David Winkler is crippled by his dreams. At nine he dreams a man is decapitated by a passing truck on the path outside his family's home. The next day, unable to prevent it, he witnesses an exact replay of his dream in real life. The premonitions keep coming, unstoppably. He sleepwalks during them, bringing catastrophe into his reach. Then, as unstoppable as a vision, he falls in love at the supermarket (exactly as he already dreamed) with Sandy.

What’s in a name? For Judas Thomas, named after the infamous betrayer, a great many things. For centuries, Judas Iscariot has been the most despised figure in Western civilization. Betrayer or scapegoat? For a young boy born in 1970, his greatest obstacle in life is not his conception by a violent rape or his difficult and strict upbringing in a Catholic orphanage nor his mixed race. For this young orphan, his greatest challenge is his name: Judas, named for the infamous betrayer-disciple.

Orphaned into an unforgiving foster home and raised as an outsider, Weird-Eye shoulders her unflattering nickname. She relies on her vivid imagination to sustain her work as a midwife bringing newborns into the world while World War II overruns her native Finland, desecrating life. She finds herself drawn to the handsome, otherworldly Johannes Angelhurst, a war photographer working for the SS.

A nameless El Salvadoran man, fleeing torture and imprisonment, arrives in the United States - his only hope for asylum. The American woman who has volunteered to help him is searching for something to add meaning to her life. When these two lonely people meet, their haunting relationship fulfills their hearts' desires, but it also gives life to their darkest dreams.

Dans la Maison, vous allez perdre vos repères, votre nom et votre vie d'avant. Dans la Maison, vous vous ferez des amis, vous vous ferez des ennemis. Dans la Maison, vous mènerez des combats, vous perdrez des guerres. Dans la Maison, vous connaîtrez l'amour, vous connaîtrez la peur, vous découvrirez des endroits dont vous ne soupçonniez pas l'existence, et même quand vous serez seul, ça ne sera jamais vraiment le cas. Dans la Maison, aucun mur ne peut vous arrêter, le temps ne s'écoule pas toujours comme il le devrait, et la Loi y est impitoyable.

The first Tuesday of every month, Clarisse Rivière leaves her husband and young daughter to take the train to Bordeaux and visit her mother, Ladivine. Clarisse has concealed nearly every aspect of her adult life from this woman whom she dreads and despises but also pities, and who knows her as Malinka.

Only very special people are chosen by children's author Laura White to join 'The Society', an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a 10th member has been selected: Ella, literature teacher and possessor of beautifully curving lips. But soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual, 'The Game'? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura's winter party, in a whirlwind of snow? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves?

Over the course of the 20th century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic - as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca - will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world...until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts.

A year after his dad's death, 12-year-old Lincoln wonders whether his strait-laced but clearly struggling mom will ever tell him what really happened the night of the car accident. How did she walk away, and his dad didn't? When would life return to normal? As it turns out, never again.

Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach, her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life. But these are human concerns. The concerns of those confined to land. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep, of the oceans and the rivers. Stories that called sailors to their doom. Stories that dragged them down and drowned them.

A long time ago, in a bountiful land not so far away, the animal denizens lived quite happily. Then the colonisers arrived. After nearly a hundred years, a bloody War of Liberation brought new hope for the animals—along with a new leader. A charismatic horse who commanded the sun and ruled and ruled and kept on ruling. For 40 years he ruled, with the help of his elite band of Chosen Ones, a scandalously violent pack of Defenders and, as he aged, his beloved and ambitious young donkey wife, Marvellous.

In Jos, Nigeria, Dareng Pamson is slowly winning back the trust of his pregnant wife after his infidelity shook their marriage. When a young Muslim woman comes in out of the rain looking for work in Dareng’s auto repair shop, Dareng cautiously agrees—against his better judgment. She’s passionate and willing to learn. Besides, it’s time he started doing things differently. After being back in her hometown for only a week, Murmula Denge finds who she’s looking for: Dareng, the Christian man whose coldhearted ambition and greed shattered her family.