Fantasy Realism

Two strangers in a foreign city, Thora and Santi meet in a chance encounter. At once, they recognize in each other a kindred spirit - someone who is longing for more in life than the cards they’ve been dealt. Before their friendship can blossom, though, a tragic accident cuts their story short.

The series takes place in a world similar to our own, but one where vampires, witches, werewolves, and shape-shifters live among humans without their knowledge. These supernatural races make up a secret society known as the Night World, which enforces two fundamental laws to prevent discovery: (1) Never allow humans to gain knowledge of the Night World's existence, and (2) Never fall in love with one of them.

Original, honest and thought-provoking, Roar is Cecelia Ahern's unforgettable story collection. With her trademark honesty, Cecelia Ahern gives us 30 linked stories, all titled 'The Woman Who...', that capture the different facets of women's lives. Humorous, moving, surreal and poignant, the stories capture the moments the characters are overwhelmed by guilt, confusion, frustration, intimidation, exhaustion - the private moments when they feel the need to roar.

Marvin Deitz has some serious problems. His mob-connected landlord is strong-arming him out of his storefront. His therapist has concerns about his stability. He's compelled to volunteer at the local Children's Hospital even though it breaks his heart every week. Oh, and he's also the guilt-ridden reincarnation of Geoffroy Thérage, the French executioner who lit Joan of Arc's pyre in 1431. He's just seen a woman on a Los Angeles talk show claiming to be Joan, and absolution seems closer than it's ever been . . . but how will he find her?

Five years ago, Nora Wilder disappeared. The older of her two daughters, Zadie, should have seen it coming, because she can literally see things coming. But not even her psychic abilities were able to prevent their mother from vanishing one morning. Zadie’s estranged younger sister, Finn, can’t see into the future, but she has an uncannily good memory, so good that she remembers not only her own memories, but the echoes of memories other people have left behind. On the afternoon of her graduation party, Finn is seized by an “echo” more powerful than anything she’s experienced before.

Cursed. Maisie Cothay has never known the feel of human flesh: born with the power to kill or resurrect at her slightest touch, she has spent her childhood sequestered in her family’s manor at the edge of a mysterious forest. Maisie’s father, an anthropologist who sees her as more experiment than daughter, has warned Maisie not to venture into the wood. Locals talk of men disappearing within, emerging with addled minds and strange stories.

Luli Wei is beautiful, talented, and desperate to be a star. Coming of age in pre-Code Hollywood, she knows how dangerous the movie business is and how limited the roles are for a Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill—but she doesn't care. She’d rather play a monster than a maid. But in Luli's world, the worst monsters in Hollywood are not the ones on screen. The studios want to own everything from her face to her name to the women she loves, and they run on a system of bargains made in blood and ancient magic, powered by the endless sacrifice of unlucky starlets like her.

Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In “Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors”, two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. Plus much more.

Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She's often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean 11 years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid.

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?

On Tommy Llewellyn’s first birthday, his doting parents awoke in a home without baby blankets and bottles in the fridge, without the photos of their newborn once scattered about, and without any idea that the one-year-old sleeping in their home was their child. That’s because Tommy Llewellyn is a boy who, in the very cosmic sense of things, will never be remembered—stuck in a universal Reset that causes everyone to forget he exists when the clock strikes midnight on his birthday each year.

It’s 1987, and sixteen-year-old Gracie Byrne wishes her life were totally different. Shy and awkward, she has trouble fitting in at her new school, she’s still reeling from her parents’ divorce, and her grandmother Katherine’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse. So when Gracie finds a blank journal in Katherine’s vanity drawer, she begins writing stories about herself—a more popular version of herself, that is. But then the hot guy in her art class describes a dream he had about her—the exact scene she wrote about him in her journal—and Gracie realizes that she can create any reality she wants.

A ship. A garden. A library. A key. In Kaleidoscope, the incomparable Brian Selznick presents the story of two people bound to each other through time and space, memory and dreams. At the center of their relationship is a mystery about the nature of grief and love which will look different to each listener. Kaleidoscope is a feat of storytelling that illuminates how even the wildest tales can help us in the hardest times.

In this explosive sequel to Blessed Child, Jewish soldier-turned-archaeologist Rebecca Soloman leads a team deep into the Ethiopian desert to find the one man who may know the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Such a discovery would bring hope back to her people. Her search brings excitement and danger - including unexpected love and a discovery far more powerful than even the holy artifact.

Sinai Tapestry, the brilliant first novel of the Jerusalem Quartet, is an epic alternate history of the Middle East in which the discovery of the original Bible links a disparate group of remarkable people across time and space. In 1840, Plantagenet Strongbow, the twenty-ninth Duke of Dorset, seven-feet-seven-inches tall and the greatest swordsman and botanist of Victorian England, walks away from the family estate and disappears into the Sinai Desert carrying only a large magnifying glass and a portable sundial.

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.

On the last day of December 1921, three enigmatic men - Cairo Martyr, a blue-eyed African who controls the Middle East's supply of aphrodisiac mummy dust; O'Sullivan Beare, a former Irish patriot and gunrunner who has made a fortune selling spurious, phallic-shaped Christian artifacts; and Mark Szondi, a dedicated Zionist who wagers only fried fish futures - sit down to a fateful game of poker in the back room of a Jerusalem antiquities shop owned by a 3000-year-old knight errant.

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.

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.

Once dubbed "The Deadliest Man Alive", Jarrod Torrealday is a former Olympic saber hopeful and medieval-weapons expert banned from competition for killing another fencer in a duel. Despondent, volatile, alcoholic, yet still one of the greatest swordsmen alive, he now works for third-rate fantasy films as a technical consultant and stuntman. When Jarrod accepts the gig of a lifetime from a sorcerer looking for a hero, he finds himself facing an invading army in a world inhabited by creatures from Earth's mythical past.