Historical Magical Realism

In Venice in 1566, Francesco paints a portrait of the woman he loves. In 1916, Edward Jamison returns to England from the trenches of the Western Front. Believing that the most life-changing events are behind him, he soon encounters something profoundly more powerful: the portrait of the painted lady. Partly deaf from his injuries in the trenches, he begins to hear the strangest things. But Edward Jamison is not the only person who has become a part of these mysterious happenings. From Renaissance Venice to the French Huguenots settling in England to the American Revolution in Virginia and beyond, the painted lady has touched the lives of many.

Paul is a reincarnated Knight Hospitaller from the 12th century. He is also a nurse, or the historical equivalent, in all of his incarnations. After so many lives, he just wants to die and get off the rebirth wheel. Then he becomes a father, and everything changes. Paul must train his adopted daughter to be the first new K-Nurse since the Crusades, but in teaching her to use her magic and in training her to fight, he must bring her into his own deadly world.

'Kid' Wolffe is an up-and-coming boxer in 1920s New York. An honest fighter's got little chance at success on the mob-controlled circuit—until ambitious lieutenant 'Hinky' Friedman starts making moves to take over her boss's business, and sees a use for the kid. Teitelstam is a struggling tattoo artist, whose natural talent for ink magic won't amount to much without formal training. So he's got no idea why Hinky would offer him 10 times what he's worth to come work for her.

Inspired by the life of legendary jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, Mauricio Segura’s Oscar evokes periods across time, from the Depression-era Montreal neighbourhood of Little Burgundy to the swinging cabarets of the 1950s, while offering a reflection on the bonds between an artist and the Caribbean diaspora from which he comes. But above all, Oscar is a poignant homage to a musical giant, a man who changed the face of jazz forever.

Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother.

At the dawn of the 20th century, a young Lebanese adventurer leaves the Levant to explore the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace in Tripoli and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan.

Renowned healer Lisbeth Vos concocts a cunning revenge against her childhood friend Hannah Brouwer for a wrong committed decades ago. The audacious scheme requires a marriage between Lisbeth's granddaughter and Hannah's widowed son. Desperate for her grandmother's attention and approval, Mila agrees to wed a man she doesn't know.

Finna is about to be taken on a journey that will change her life forever. Little does she know that when her mother appears on her doorstep it will begin a chain of events that will eventually impact even the baby she carries. How can she believe the wild stories her mother tells her: A parallel world right next to this one? Gods and goddess, druids? But for some reason she finds herself following the amazingly convincing Catriona, who has an uncanny way of eliminating her fears.

Imagine you looked up at just the right moment and saw something completely unexpected. What if it was something so marvelous that it transformed time and space forever? The Body in the Clouds tells the story of one such extraordinary moment - a man falling from the sky and surviving - and of the three men who see it, in different ways and at different times, as they stand on the same piece of land.

Now that Prohibition has ended, what the townspeople of Twisted Tree, Kentucky, need most is the revival of the Old Sam Bourbon distillery. But William McFee knows it'll take a miracle to convince his father, Barley, to once more fill his family's aging house with barrels full of bourbon. When a drifter recently buried near the distillery begins to draw crowds of pilgrims, the McFees are dubious, but miracles seem to come to those who once interacted with the deceased and to those now praying at his grave.

From the author of The Palace of Curiosities and Vixen comes a bold new novel exploring questions of identity, sexual equality and how well we really know ourselves. Rich are the delights of late 19th-century Manchester for young siblings Edie and Gnome. They bicker, banter, shout and scream their way through the city's streets, embracing its charms and dangers. But as the pair grow up, it is Gnome who revels in the nighttime while Edie wakes exhausted each morning.

In this grand saga of love, war, and magic set in the tenth century, young Sigrid is destined to be the mother of the king of the Nordic lands that would become Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and England. A devout believer in the old Nordic gods, Sigrid is visited regularly in her dreams by the goddess Freya, who whispers to her of the future. Though Sigrid is beautiful, rich, arrogant, and matchlessly clever, her uncanny ability to foresee the future and manipulate the present guides her through dangerous politics.

In The Campaign, a witty and enthralling saga of revolutionary South America, Carlos Fuentes explores the period of profound upheaval he calls "the romantic time". His hero, Baltasar Bustos, the son of a wealthy landowner, kidnaps the baby of a prominent judge, replacing it with the black baby of a prostitute. When he catches sight of the baby's mother, though, he falls instantly in love with her and sets off on an anguished journey to repent his act and win her love.

Lyman Frank Baum was an American children's book writer best-known for creating the popular Wizard of Oz series. Baum was a prolific writer who wrote 14 novels in the Oz series, plus 41 other novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and about 42 scripts. He often wrote under pseudonyms. Of all the books, the one that made Baum a household name was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Through the long years of the Great Depression, Harper Flute watches with a child's clear eyes her family's struggle to survive in a hot and impoverished landscape. As life on the surface grows harsher, her brother Tin escapes ever deeper into a subterranean world of darkness and troubling secrets, until his memory becomes a myth barely whispered around the countryside.

It is the late 1800s, and a shameful time in American history. The US Government has mandated native tribes send their young people to Indian schools where they are stripped of their native heritage by people they think of as The Others. Otter and Sun Song are betrothed to be married when they turn 18. But when they are sent east to school, Otter, renamed Gideon, tries to adapt, while Sun Song does not, resulting in brutal attacks from the school headmaster. Gideon turns for comfort to Wendy Thatcher, the daughter of a wealthy school patron.

James-Cyrus Hoffmann has just inherited his grandfather's farm, and with it a mysterious cabin deep in the woods on Hoffmann mountain, a cabin he has dreamed about since childhood. When James-Cyrus enters the cabin, he is vaulted back through time to the Civil War era, where he meets Elizabeth, the brave young woman who lives there, and Malachi, a runaway slave.

Heir apparent, young Prince Ahkin feels unprepared for leadership after his father's death. His royal blood controls the power of the sun, and he’s now responsible for the lives of all the Chicome people. Despite all Ahkin’s efforts, the sun is fading - and the end of the world may be near. For Mayana, the only daughter of the Chicome family whose blood controls the power of water, the old emperor’s death may mean that she's next. Ahkin must marry before ascending the throne, and Mayana is one of six noble daughters presented to him. Those who are not chosen will be sacrificed.

In the early 1900s an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea, just as the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule. Orphaned by the sunk vessel are two sisters and their half-brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them. Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic.

Alina yearns for freedom. She and her husband, Liviu, are teachers in their 20s, living under the repressive regime of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the Socialist Republic of Romania in the 1970s. But after her brother-in-law defects, Alina and Liviu fall under suspicion and surveillance, and their lives are suddenly turned upside down - just like the glasses in her superstitious aunt Theresa's house that are used to ward off evil spirits.