Magical Realism Fiction

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.

Tucked away down a Kyoto backstreet lies the extraordinary Kamogawa Diner, run by Chef Nagare and his daughter, Koishi. The father-daughter duo have reinvented themselves as “food detectives,” offering a service that goes beyond cooking mouth-watering meals. Through their culinary sleuthing, they revive lost recipes and rekindle forgotten memories.

For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. Little does she know she’s arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her mind: the text changes depending on when it’s being listened to and who’s doing the listening, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past and present.

As a little girl, Jane has no one. Her mother, Vivienne Margaux, the powerful head of a major New York theater company has no time for her. She does have one friend - Michael - but no one can see him except her. When Jane is in her 30s, working for her mother's company, she is just as alone as she was as a child. Then she finds Michael again - handsome and just the same as she remembers him, only now he's not imaginary.

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.

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.

Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window to the future - a future that she might not want to see.

Sadie Way Scott has been avoiding her family and hometown of Sugarberry Cove, Alabama, since she nearly drowned in the lake just outside her mother’s B&B. Eight years later, Sadie is the host of a much-loved show about Southern cooking and family, but despite her success, she wonders why she was saved. What is she supposed to do? Sadie’s sister, Leala Clare, is still haunted by the guilt she feels over the night her sister almost died. Now, at a crossroads in her marriage, Leala has everything she ever thought she wanted - so why is she so unhappy?

Here is a short, sleek novel of encounters, set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami's masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically different from her own.

After the death of his best friend, Eric Ly creates imaginary scenarios in his head to deal with his grief. Until one of them becomes real when a boy he met last summer in Japan finds his way back into his life. When he least expects it, Haru Tanaka walks into the coffee shop and sits down next to him. The only thing is, nobody else can see him. In a magical turn of events, Eric suddenly has someone to connect with, making him feel less alone in the world. But as they spend more and more time together, he begins to question what is real.

Spanning Gaiman’s career to date, The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction is a captivating collection from one of the world’s most beloved writers, chosen by those who know his work best: his devoted fans. A brilliant representation of Gaiman's groundbreaking, entrancing, endlessly imaginative fiction, this captivating volume includes excerpts from each of his five novels for adults—Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane—and nearly fifty of his short stories.

In Tome, a small, seemingly sleepy New Mexico hamlet, Sofia and her four fated daughters reveal a world of marvels where the comic and horrific, past and present, real and fantastic coexist and collide. Over two crowded decades, Sofia tries to hold things together following the disappearance of her husband, Domingo, he of the Clark Gable mustache and the uncontrollable gambling habit. Adventurous Esperanza, Chicana campus radical turned television news reporter, travels farthest from home only to be reeled back in spirit.

It's late summer, war is raging, and families are torn apart by divided loyalties and deadly secrets. In this complex and dangerous time, a young French Canadian lieutenant is captured and billeted with a Long Island family, an unwilling and unwelcome guest. As he begins to pitch in with the never-ending household tasks and farm chores, Jean-Philippe de Sabran finds himself drawn to the daughter of the house. Slowly, Lydia Wilde comes to lean on Jean-Philippe, true soldier and gentleman, until their lives become inextricably intertwined.

Carrie Morgan ran from Woodsmoke ten years ago, and the decision has haunted her ever since. Spending a decade painting and drifting around Europe, she tries to forget her family’s legacy and the friends she left behind. But the Morgan women have always been able to harness the power of the mountains surrounding the town, and their spells—and curses—are sewn into the soil. The mountains, they say, never forget. Sure enough, when Carrie’s grandmother dies and leaves behind her dilapidated cottage, she returns to renovate—certain she will only be there for one winter.

The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?

Fiona Farrow is ignoring her destiny. She has no interest in guarding the Sacred Scrolls from the evil Shadow Order; not after the same job took her parents away. But when a powerful demon mage from the Shadow Order steals one of the Sacred Scrolls and starts hunting down Protectors of Light, Fiona will have to put on her magical suit of armor and face her fears. If she doesn't, the Shadow Order will destroy humanity and banish Fiona to an obscure dimension for the rest of her nightmarish eternity.

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?

When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive. Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets.

After a devastating loss, Brynn Wilder escapes to Wharton, a tourist town on Lake Superior, to reset, and checks into a quaint boardinghouse. In her fellow lodgers, she finds a friendly company of strangers: the frail Alice, cared for by a married couple with a heartbreaking story of their own; LuAnn, the eccentric and lovable owner of the inn; and Dominic, an unsettlingly handsome man inked from head to toe in mesmerizing tattoos. But in this inviting refuge, a mystery begins to swirl. Alice knows things about Brynn, about all of them, that she shouldn’t.

In a remote seaside town outside of Tokyo, Kotoko makes her way along a seashell path, lured by whispers of an enigmatic restaurant whose kagezen, or traditional meals offered in remembrance of loved ones, promise a reunion with the departed. When a gust of wind lifts off her hat, she sees running after it a young man who looks like her recently deceased brother. But it’s not her brother; it’s Kai, the restaurant’s young chef, who returns her hat and brings her to the tiny establishment.