Fiction Realism

McCormack's myth-tinged debut novel gives us the unforgettable Crowe and his endlessly curious and self-mythologizing stories. Crowe is born in the remote village of Furnace in the West of Ireland and raised by his grandfather, a man of "madness and bullying love", who teaches him grim lessons about existence. Entirely silent until his third birthday, Crowe becomes an observant and isolated teenager, eventually leaving Furnace for university in a "wrong-footed" and bewildering city. There he meets a woman who will change his life and outlook.

Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb, Hajime - beginning in Japanese - has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career as the proprietor of two jazz clubs. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime's happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.

García Márquez traza la historia de un amor que no ha sido correspondido por medio siglo. Aunque nunca parece estar propiamente contenido, el amor fluye a través de la novela de mil maneras: alegre, melancólico, enriquecedor, siempre sorprendente.

Fed up with playing the normal game, recent university graduate, ex-cum laude, ex-soccer star, ex-popular, and mostly broke Kera MacDonagh changed her life when she read How to be a Badass Witch and shockingly, the spells worked. She barely made it out of the first few weeks of on-the-job training before her powers got her in trouble. Hunted as a magical vigilante, the Kims sacrificed to keep her safe. Kera hunts criminals in the darkness of LA, but will she be able to hide the signature of her powers, too?

This modern morality tale by gifted writer and speaker Andy Andrews teaches seven fundamental strategies for creating a successful life. Much like the best-selling books by Og Mandino, this unique narrative is a blend of entertaining fiction, allegory, and inspiration. Storyteller Andy Andrews gives a front-row seat for one man's journey of a lifetime. David Ponder has lost his job and the will to live.

In a mysterious town hidden in our collective subconscious there's a department store that sells dreams. Day and night, visitors both human and animal shuffle in to purchase their latest adventure. Each floor specializes in a specific type of dream: childhood memories, food dreams, ice skating, dreams of stardom. Flying dreams are almost always sold out. Some seek dreams of loved ones who have died. For Penny, an enthusiastic new hire, working at Dallergut is the opportunity of a lifetime.

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of unhoused people bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains, and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.

When 38-year-old Conner O’Rourke returns to Ireland, he’s running from his past. His advertising agency in Sydney is going broke, the bank is foreclosing on his mortgage, and he’s hearing voices in his mind urging him to return to Inis Mór. His grandmother, whom he hasn’t seen in years, has contacted him saying she's critically ill and must speak with him, but when he arrives on Inis Mór, a wild, windswept, rocky little island some 30 miles off the West Coast of Ireland, she’s already passed, leaving him a cottage and a dilapidated sailing boat.

A woman in her 30s begins to question the routine and predictability of her days. In everybody's eyes, she has a perfect life: happy marriage, children, and a career. Yet what she feels is an enormous apathy. All that changes when she encounters a successful politician who had, years earlier, been her high school boyfriend. As she rediscovers the passion missing from her life, she will face a life-altering choice.

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers quickly close up shop. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her—feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.

Eliza Dragonsong is a lawyer by day and a Wiccan high priestess by night. Her unique skill set comes in handy in the courtroom, and also when she’s asked to guard an ancient cursed stone from the dangerously charming Ivan Rochat. Although he’s a former art thief with a questionable past, Eliza still finds herself drawn to him and soon realizes she has to guard more than just the stone. She has to guard her heart as well.

After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together, their fates become intertwined as they work side-by-side at this Sisyphean task.

The Shape of Water is set in Cold War-era Baltimore at the Occam Aerospace Research Center, which has recently received its most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man captured in the Amazon. What unfolds is a stirring romance between the asset and one of the janitors on staff, a mute woman who uses sign language to communicate with the creature.

In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The result: two remarkable short novels—Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973—that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age—the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat—are stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami’s later books, and form the first two-thirds, with A Wild Sheep Chase, of the trilogy of the Rat.

Something evil has swept into the small Western Maine town of Castle Rock on the heels of the latest winter storm. Sheriff Norris Ridgewick and his team are desperately searching for two missing girls, but time is running out to bring them home alive. In Washington, DC, 37-year-old Gwendy Peterson couldn’t be more different from the self-conscious teenage girl who once spent a summer running up Castle Rock’s Suicide Stairs. That same summer, she was entrusted - or some might say cursed - with the extraordinary button box by Richard Farris, the mysterious stranger in the black suit.

With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

Here is a short, sleek novel of encounters, set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami's masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically different from her own.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn 19, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens 32 years in the future in her 51-year-old body.

As a little girl, Jane has no one. Her mother, Vivienne Margaux, the powerful head of a major New York theater company has no time for her. She does have one friend - Michael - but no one can see him except her. When Jane is in her 30s, working for her mother's company, she is just as alone as she was as a child. Then she finds Michael again - handsome and just the same as she remembers him, only now he's not imaginary.