Fiction Realism

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo’s regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail.

In the present day, Nena’s grandniece, Marta, balances a struggling legal aid practice with motherhood and the care of the now ninety-three-year-old Nena. When Marta agrees to help search for a daughter Nena left in the past, the two forge a fierce connection. Marta’s own supernatural powers emerge, awakening her to new possibilities that threaten the life she has constructed.

Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.

Type-A mathematician Catherine Lipton’s carefully calculated life goes awry when a university’s human resources system rejects her employment paperwork. Soon after, her credit card is declined. At the Social Security office, Catherine makes a shocking discovery—she’s disappeared from the government’s records, and there’s no evidence she exists at all. The one person who offers to help is Luca Morelli, her attractive but aggravating doorman who spends more time flirting with Catherine’s neighbors than he does enforcing the building rules.

“From exactly midnight until daybreak, the Namiya General Store advice box will be reopening for one night only.” When three delinquents hole up in an abandoned general store after their most recent robbery, to their great surprise, a letter drops through the mail slot in the store’s shutter. This seemingly simple request for advice sets the trio on a journey of discovery as, over the course of a single night, they step into the role of the kindhearted former shopkeeper who devoted his waning years to offering thoughtful counsel to his correspondents.

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient - frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism.

“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who goes unnamed. “In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.

The tales in Mark Haddon's lyrical and uncompromising new collection take many forms - Victorian adventure story, science fiction, morality tale, contemporary realism - but they all showcase his virtuoso gifts as a stylist and the deep well of empathy that made his three best-selling novels so compelling. The characters here are often isolated physically or estranged from their families, yet they yearn for connection.

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.

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 seventeen years ago: to stay or leave for a new life in London with her charismatic teenage sweetheart.

From their first meeting, it was clear that Gwen and Tancred were meant to be together. But, as we know, the course of true love never did run smooth. Gwen’s mother, intuiting that her daughter is in love, gives her a magic ring that has been passed down through endless generations of mothers and daughters. This ring grants its wearer the opportunity to change three things about her beloved. Like all blessings, this may also be a curse.

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.

Segunda novela de Isabel Allende, De amor y de sombra es un agudo testimonio de las dramáticas situaciones que se viven en ciertas regiones de América latina, al tiempo que un canto de amor y de esperanza. Con ternura e impecable factura literaria, Isabel Allende perfila el destino de sus personajes como parte indisoluble del destino colectivo de un continente marcado por el mestizaje, las injusticias sociales y la búsqueda de la propia identidad.

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest.

Dans la lignée du monumental "1Q84", un roman somme, ambitieux, profond. Deux tomes pour une odyssée initiatique étrange, inquiétante, envoûtante, où le maître Murakami dévoile ses obsessions les plus intimes. Quand sa femme lui a annoncé qu'elle voulait divorcer, le narrateur, un jeune peintre en panne d'inspiration, a voyagé seul à travers le Japon. Et puis, il s'est installé dans la montagne dans une maison isolée, ancienne propriété d'un artiste de génie, Tomohiko Amada. Un jour, le narrateur reçoit une proposition alléchante : faire le portrait de Wataru Menshiki, un riche homme d'affaires.

Hiromi Goto’s acclaimed debut novel is a feminist examination of the Japanese Canadian immigrant experience. Focusing on the lives of three generations of women in modern day Alberta, Goto uses their stories to examine the impacts of privilege and cultural identity on Asian Canadian immigrants.

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.

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?

Startling, unusual, and yet irresistably readable, Among Others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and SF, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment.

Born with mysterious powers she does not know how to control, young Jieun accidentally causes her family to vanish. She vows to live a million lives in search of them. Finally, one night, she brings the Marigold Mind Laundry into existence. Its service: to remove the deepest pain from our hearts. Jieun listens while customers share their unhappy memories. As they speak, she transfers their sadness onto T-shirts as stains. After a spin in the washing machine, the stains become flower petals that soar into the air, and Jieun’s customers find solace.