Fiction Realism

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.

Powers are determined by geographic birth locations, and only the rich and powerful are permitted access to prized sites. SC is the first person born in space. The punishment for unauthorized births is death. Out of fear, SC keeps his strange abilities as his darkest secret. But when his mother is kidnapped by an unknown organization, SC has no choice but to act.

J. Sutter is a bonafide junketeer - a freelance writer, travelling from city to city, hungry for free meals and the discarded sales receipts of others to claim on his expense account. Travelling into the backwoods of West Virginia to write a piece on the unveiling of the new John Henry postage stamp and the ensuing John Henry Days festival, J. continues his nearly record-setting, three-month junket binge.

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 third novel in the international bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, following four new customers in a cafe where customers can travel back in time. On the hillside of Mount Hakodate in northern Japan, Cafe Donna Donna is fabled for its dazzling views of Hakodate port. But that’s not all. Like the charming Tokyo cafe Funiculi Funicula, Cafe Donna Donna offers its customers the extraordinary experience of travelling through time.

The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.

With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she’s descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her way to her new home.

A community devoured by greed, cowardice, and fear. A man persecuted by his painful past. A woman searching for happiness. In one eventful week, each of them will face questions of life, death, and power, and each will choose their own path. Will they choose good or evil?

Before marrying, Emma Bovary believed she would enter a life of luxury and passion like the sentimental stories she'd read in her novels and magazines. Now married to an ordinary country doctor her life is not the romantic ideal she imagined and seeks an escape through having extra-marital affairs. This devastating spiral into deceit and despair leads to catastrophic consequences. Emma Bovary continues to be enjoyed to this day because of its profound humanity, still as fresh today as when it was first written.

In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening", where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice - the one and only Carver Canute - set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine.

Mark Sandoval - resolutely arrogant, covered head to foot in precise geometric scarring, and still marginally famous after Hollywood made an Oscar-winner based off his memoir years before - has been strongly advised by his lawyer to leave the country following a drunken and potentially fatal hit and run. When a woman sends Sandoval grainy footage of what appears to be a unicorn, he quickly hires an assistant and the two head off to the woman's farm in Hvildarland, a tiny, remote island off the coast of Iceland.

When Ishmael places an advertisement for pupils with “an earnest desire to save the world”, he does not expect a child to answer him. But 12-year-old Julie Gerchak is undaunted by Ishmael’s reluctance to teach someone so young and convinces him to take her on as his next student. Ishmael knows he can't apply the same strategies with Julie that he used with his first pupil, Alan Lomax - nor can he hope for the same outcome. But young Julie proves that she is ready to forge her own spiritual path and arrive at her own destination.

In the town of St. Hilaire, most make their living by talking to the dead. In the summer, the town gates open to tourists seeking answers while all activity is controlled by The Guild, a sinister ruling body that sees everything. Dec Hampton has lived there his entire life, but ever since his parents died, he's been done with it. He knows he has to leave before anyone has a chance to stop him.

After disappearing amidst a spray of bullets, antiques dealer Sarah Lester leaves behind no body, only questions. Sarah’s friends are left dealing with the aftermath of her disappearance, including an investigation into the provenance of her antiques, which threatens to crush The Old Curiosity Shop. As Sarah struggles to reunite with her father, she continues the search for her mother, unaware the violent colonial past has followed her home, putting herself, and those she loves in danger.

Lolly Blanchard's life only seems to give her lemons. Ten years ago, after her mother’s tragic death, she broke up with her first love and abandoned her dream of opening a restaurant in order to keep her family’s struggling Seattle diner afloat and care for her younger sister and grieving father. Now, a decade later, she dutifully whips up the diner’s famous lemon meringue pies each morning while still pining for all she's lost. As Lolly’s thirty-third birthday approaches, her quirky great-aunt gives her a mysterious gift.

A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In “Who Will Greet You at Home”, a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, a woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild”, a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good", three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war.

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”

It was supposed to be my first summer on my own, but then I meet Seth, Axel, Jasper, and Cody. There's something about them that drew me closer, and they seemed hell-bent on protecting me. I didn't think I needed protecting until people started showing up dead in the woods.

The charm of spending the Christmas holidays in South Wales, with its crumbling castles and ancient myths, seems the perfect distraction from the nightmares that have plagued literary agent Lyn Ravenshaw since the loss of her baby five years ago. Instead she meets an emotionally fragile young widow who's convinced that Lyn's recurring dreams have drawn her to Castle Farm for an important purpose - and she's running out of time.