Fiction Realism

Though Owen Tanner has never met anyone else who has a chatty bird in their chest, medical forums would call him a Terror. From the moment Gail emerged between Owen’s ribs, his mother knew that she had to hide him away from the world. After a decade spent in isolation, Owen takes a brazen trip outdoors and his life is upended forever.

Gemma Turner once dreamed of stardom. Now the actress is on the cusp of obscurity. When she’s offered the lead in a radical new horror film, Gemma believes her luck has changed—but her dream is about to turn into a nightmare. One night, between the shadows of an alleyway, Gemma disappears on set and is never seen again. Yet, Gemma is alive. She’s been pulled into the film. And the script—and the monsters within it—are coming to life. Gemma must play her role perfectly if she hopes to survive.

The first time Eby Pim saw Lost Lake, it was on a picture postcard. Just an old photo and a few words on a small square of heavy stock, but when she saw it, she knew she was seeing her future. That was half a lifetime ago. Now Lost Lake is about to slip into Eby’s past. Her husband, George, is long passed. Most of her demanding extended family are gone.

El campo ha cambiado frente a nuestros ojos sin que nadie se diera cuenta. Y quizá no se trate solo de sequías y herbicidas, quizá se trate del hilovital y filoso que nos ata a nuestros hijos, y del veneno que echamos sobre ellos. Nada es un cliché cuando finalmente sucede. Distancia de rescate sigue esta vertiginosa fatalidad haciéndose siempre las mismas preguntas: ¿Hay acaso algún apocalipsis que no sea personal? ¿Cuál es el punto exacto en el que, sin saberlo, se da el paso en falso que, ahora sí, nos condena?

In prison, accused of murder, Tully Truegood begins to write her life story. A story that takes her from a young girl in the backstreets of 18th-century London to her stepmother Queenie's Fairy House - a place where decadent excess is a must. Trained by Queenie to become a courtesan and by Mr. Crease - a magician who sees that Tully holds similar special powers to his own - Tully soon becomes the talk of the town.

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.

Generations of Montrose women—Augusta, Victoria, Willow—have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them. But when seventeen-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. For the other women have been withholding a secret from Nickie that will end her relationship before it’s even begun: the decades-old family curse that any person they fall in love with dies.

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree, and the tree talks back. Add to this a Mongolian gangster, an English spy, a despondent "zookeeper", a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ. All of them have tales to tell, and all must play their part as they are caught up in the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

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.

Life has gone according to plan for Anna—she stays in the background, letting her sister, Emily, shine in the spotlight. But on Emily’s wedding night, Anna learns that her sister is moving away, abandoning her—and all their shared dreams. Devastated, Anna leaves the reception in the middle of a raging storm, taking shelter in a hotel she’s never seen before: the Houdini. The Houdini is a hotel unlike any other, with sumptuous velvet couches, marble tiled floors, secret restaurants, winding passageways, and an undercurrent of magic in the air.

Penniless and stranded in France after a bid to escape her cruel uncle goes awry, Cornelia Shaw is far from the Parisian life of leisure she imagined. Desperate and out of options, she allows herself to be recruited to Napoleon’s Grande Armée. As a naturalist, her mysterious ability to heal any wound with herbal mixtures invites awe amongst the soldiers…and suspicion.

The Russell women have always lived in a house that is as special as they are—a century-old Victorian with a radio that tunes itself to the listener’s mood and a pantry that rearranges to provide just the right ingredients for any baking need. Lilith Russell was the exception. She left the family home in Ivy Ridge, Georgia, and has been flitting like a hummingbird from place to place with her daughter, Mattie, in the decades since, only returning each summer to drop Mattie off with Lilith’s sister, Penelope.

In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind. The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.

Jon successfully killed Belphegor...but he forgot that everything comes with a cost. The cost may need to be paid with money...or life. With his archenemy alive in the game, Jon's days are going to be troublesome. But killing Kurush in-game is not simple as killing Kurush was in real life. Here, Kurush holds power. The power of a whole second-tier guild. With his puny prowess, can Jon go against a second-tier guild and complete his mission that put him in prison in real life? Find out where Jon's life will take him next.

Like many teenagers, there's a lot about Daniel Meadows' life that's out of his control. For example, having to start in a new school district for his freshman year of high school thanks to his dad's new job. Inside the realm of his control, however, is the decision to try a brand-new sport purely to impress a girl. But the day of tennis tryouts proves far more fateful than Dan ever could have imagined, when a failed attempt by Truck-kun and the powers that be to kill him and transport his consciousness to a fantasy realm leaves him on Earth with miraculous abilities instead.

Love, be it wild or tender, often defies logic. In fact, at times, the only rationale behind the instant connection of two souls is plain magic. Bibiña Aranda, runaway bride, wakes up in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao still wearing her wedding dress, draped in the loving arms of a naked man whose name she doesn’t know. She and the man with no clothes, Indar Zubieta, attempt to explain to the authorities how they got there. It’s a story of love at first sight and experience beyond compare, one that involves a dreamlike journey through the museum.

Follow Me to Ground is fascinating and frightening, urgent and propulsive. In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. Short but authoritative, Follow Me to Ground lingers long after listening, pulling the listener into a dream between fairy tale and nightmare, desire and delusion, folktale and warning.

With a singular voice in the narrative-bending tradition of Kafka, Cortázar, and Bulgakov, Lima speaks to Brazilian-American immigrant experiences—of ambition, fear, heartbreak, and home—with equal parts warmth and agitation. Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a powerful experience: once listened to, you’re as much a part of the stories as they’re a part of you.

Effie Edenson is many things: a bestselling author, a runaway bride, a woman who cannot see the gifts she possesses. Though she is an adult, her mother dominates her life to a point that she feels she will never be able to break free. But Effie lives in Middle Falls, where all things are possible. After an untimely death, Effie wakes up at a critical juncture in her life. The question is, what can she do with this second chance?

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.”