Fiction Realism

The year is 1922. The carnival is Pontilliar's Spectactular Star Light Miraculum, set up on the Texas-Louisiana border. One blazing summer night, a mysterious stranger steps out onto the midway, lights a cigarette, and forever changes the world around him. Tattooed snake charmer Ruby has traveled with her father's carnival for most of her life and, jaded though she is, can't help but be drawn to the tall man in the immaculate black suit who has joined the carnival as a geek, a man who bites the heads off live chickens.

This collection of eight stories paints a vivid image of people who don't do what you might expect them to living on the fringes in America. Not stories of triumph over adversity but something completely other. Described in language that is brilliantly sardonic, Woods' characters return repeatedly to places where they don't belong - often the places where they were born. In the background are the endless American wars and occupations and too many early deaths of friends and family. This is fiction that is fresh and of the moment, even as it is timeless.

Moss has lived with her pa on a remote island for as long as she remembers. The Old World has disappeared beneath the waves - only Pa's magic, harnessing the wondrous stormflowers on the island, can save the sunken continents. But a storm is brewing, promising cataclysmic changes. Soon, two strange boys wash up on the shore. As the clouds swell and the ocean churns, Moss learns to open her eyes to the truth about her isolated world....

In the sandy Mojave Desert, Madison is a small town on the road between nothing and nowhere. But Eldon wouldn't want to live anywhere else because in Madison, everyone gets one wish - and that wish always comes true. Some people wish for money; some people wish for love. But Eldon has seen how wishes have broken the people around him. And with the lives of his family and friends in chaos, he's left with more questions than answers. Can he make their lives better?

Based on true events, Hannah Assadi's fierce and raging debut novel tracks the shattered, illuminated psyche of a young woman seizing her own adulthood. Ahlam, the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and his Israeli wife, grows up in the arid lands of desert suburbia outside of Phoenix. In a stark landscape where coyotes prowl and mysterious lights occasionally pass through the nighttime sky, Ahlam's imagination reigns.

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.

Sixteen-year-old Sabine Braxton and her identical twin, Blythe, don’t have much in common. When their father dies from an unexpected illness, each copes with the loss in her own way. Neither can offer each other much support...at least not until their emotionally detached mother moves them into a ramshackle Bay Area mansion owned by a stranger named Charlie. Soon the sisters are united in a mission to figure out who Charlie is and why he seems to know everything about them. Neither is prepared for the secret they uncover....

It’s the 1950s, and Lorrie is unimpressed when her family moves to the remote Scottish island where her grandad runs a whisky distillery. She befriends Sylvie, the shy girl next door: ‘The slightest smile from Sylvie was a fluffy elephant at the fair. It had to be won with a clear aim,’ writes Lorrie. Yet fun-loving Lorrie isn’t sure Sylvie’s is the friendship she wants to win.

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.

El protagonista y narrador de esta novela va en busca de la cita definitiva con la lady en forma de polvo blanco, y para ello emprende un viaje al final de la noche en el que se sucederán encuentros con personajes inquietantes, con los fantasmas de los amigos muertos por el camino, con los recuerdos de la gran ciudad que ha dejado atrás y con su propio pasado.

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel.

Lou feels like she is stuck on the wrong path: alone, in a city far from home, watching other people be happy. When the man she’s in love with announces his engagement to someone else, Lou is consumed by what-ifs. That’s when she finds herself slipping back in time to a night two years ago, where one small decision changed everything …

A powerful, uplifting story of female friendship and resilience—with just a hint of magic—as three young women whose bond was shattered years before by tragedy rediscover their connection, with the help of a long-lost gift they were meant to share.

Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn’t there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller’s dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.

Zac Riggs would not have survived on Ludus for very long without his adopted sister, Gazra-tam. Gazra-tam is an ocelot-race Mo'hali, and Riggs is an engineering student from Earth who was transported to Ludus. The two make an unlikely team. Riggs and his sister had been comfortable living in a trap-filled dungeon before bandits attacked. But now there are bodies all over the floor and it doesn't quite feel like home anymore.

Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold indigenous parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches.

The Russos look like an average family: Mom and Dad run a Manhattan deli, while their kids, Alex, Justin, and Max, deal with school, friendships, and first dates. But things are not exactly as they seem because these kids are all wizards in training! To make things more complicated, only one of them will remain a wizard after the age of 18. Talk about sibling rivalry! This collection includes the first four books in the Wizards of Waverly Place series.

The tight-knit Izquierdo family is grappling with misfortunes none of them can explain. Their beloved patriarch has suffered from an emotional collapse and is dying; eldest son Gonzalo’s marriage is falling apart as he tries to care for his father; daughter Dina, beleaguered by fear that her nightmares are real, is a shut-in. When Gonzalo digs up a strange object in the backyard of the family home, the Izquierdos take it as proof that a jealous neighbor has cursed them―could this be the reason for all their troubles?

If Tipsy Collins learned one thing from her divorce, it’s that everyone in Charleston is a little crazy - even if they’re already dead. Tipsy, a gifted artist, cannot ignore her nutty friends or her vindictive ex-husband, but as a lifelong reluctant clairvoyant, she has always avoided dead people. When Tipsy and her three children move into the house on Bennett Street, she realizes that some ghosts won’t be ignored. Till death do us part didn’t pan out for Jane and Henry Mott, who have haunted the house for nearly a century.

Georges Blanchard is revered in the small French town of Mireville both as a master serinette maker and for a miraculous incident in his childhood that earned him the title "The Sun-Bringer". As his firstborn son, Henri Blanchard is expected to follow in his footsteps, but Henri would rather learn to make lace than music boxes. When Henri discovers a stash of American letters in his father's drawer, he learns he's not the firstborn son of Georges Blanchard at all: Henri has an older half-brother born to one of Georges' American customers.