Historical Magical Realism

Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the 20th century. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and, ultimately, his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: How could he have lost it all? Here, for the first time, is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up.

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 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.

The American West, 1850. Former French dandy Didier Rain’s weakness for saloon girls, money, and whiskey keeps derailing his plan to join the pantheon of epic poets. So when he’s approached by holy men claiming he’s part of a prophecy, he agrees to transport an infant bride for a soul-selling sum of $30,000. But to fulfill his foretold role, he’ll have to succeed at two tasks at which he's always failed: keeping the cork in the bottle, and his pants buttoned.

Years later, when Grace Laporte Nyberg's grandson refused to go to kindergarten, she remembered the day when the Lake stole her childhood.

In the 1950s, tensions remain high in the border town of La Frontera. Penny loafers and sneakers clash with boots and huaraches. Bowling shirts and leather jackets compete with guayaberas. Convertibles fend with motorcycles. Yet amidst the discord, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist’s daughter. But as they’ll soon find out, their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they could have known.

In late 19th-century British India, the Swordsman is called to duty. His mission: battle a deadly and cunning enemy. At stake are India’s cultural heritage and the fight for its independence. Against the backdrop of the third-highest mountain in the world, Kanchenjunga, The Early Years chronicles the transformative journey of a sheltered boy of unknown origin becoming the formidable Swordsman who wields his sword against General Dier, a mass murderer. Follow the epic journey as the Swordsman and a nation are put to the ultimate test and pushed to their breaking point.

Ben Upson is a broken man, a high school history teacher with dark secrets and deep resentments. As racial tensions run high on a school trip to Washington, DC, Ben meets a mysterious woman in the Capitol who knows more about him than he does himself. An explosion rocks the Capitol, and the woman sends Ben on an odyssey through time in search of the one weapon that can save the nation in this - the last battle of the American Revolution.

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.

In the small Tuscan town of Collodi, a lonely woodcarver longs for the companionship of a son. One day, "as if the wood commanded me", Giuseppe - better known as Geppetto - carves for himself a pinewood boy, a marionette he hopes to take on tour worldwide. But when his handsome new creation comes magically to life, Geppetto screams...and the boy, Pinocchio, leaps from his arms and escapes into the night.

Abrán González always knew he was different. Called a coyote because of his fair skin, the kid from Barelas found escape through boxing and became one of the youngest Golden Gloves champs. But the arrival of a letter from a dying woman turns his entire life into a lie. The revelation that he was adopted makes him feel like an orphan and sends him on a quest to find his birth father.

Cyclonic hordes of insects, a telepathic despot, body-swapping sex - just a few of the surprises Salvador Samuels encounters when he’s swept back to precolonial times, walking in the moccasins of a blind Indian - who, in turn, has been transported into Salvador’s body in present-day America. Four hundred years apart, they’re bound by a mission to rescue our world, aided by the mysterious presence of the mounds. Thousands of these ancient earthworks once dotted the landscape of North America.

By turns thrilling, witty, and heartbreaking, this dramatic conclusion to the Brilliant Death duet transports us to a Vinalia on the verge of transformation and radiates with the electric power of love. With her power over magic finally in hand, and her love for Cielo at last confessed, Teodora di Sangro should be on top of the world. But the country of Vinalia is in chaos as the dictator like Capo threatens to plunge them all into war and capture every strega in the land - including Teo and Cielo.

As a child, have you ever been told to behave or else you'd be sold to the gypsies? Elophia was adopted by a Romani caravan for the price of five pieces of gold and a bushel of apple, raised to perform in exchange for food and lodging. The reason for her adoption is a dark one: If she could gaze into another person's reflection, even for an instant, she is granted a vision of their death. Unable to control this power, she tries to hide it the best she can, always in fear of the next accident.

These are the final days of the tsars and Alexei Shafirov, an infirm skeptic, is bedridden after a fall. Throughout the long recovery his loved ones speak to him of fables, uprisings, and a royal family under house detention. At the heart of their stories is Alexei Romanov, the heir apparent. Like him, the Romanov boy is a hemophiliac, near the center of a decades-old political cabal. Both children are prone to mischief, self-indulgence, and illness. But some insist their connection runs deeper than that.

A pause-resisting novel about a traveling salesman who arrives to sell dreams to a town rocked by a child's disappearance, both a thoughtful mediation on grief and a magical exploration of our innermost desires.

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.

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.

A bold novel that reimagines two of the most legendary characters in American literature - Captain Ahab and Ishmael of Moby-Dick. At the end of a long journey, Captain Ahab returns to the mainland to confront the true author of the novel Moby-Dick, his former shipmate, Ishmael. For Ahab was not pulled into the ocean’s depths by a harpoon line, and the greatly exaggerated rumors of his untimely death have caused him grievous harm - after hearing about Ahab’s demise, his wife and child left Nantucket for New York, and now Ahab is on a desperate quest to find them.

In the wake of World War I in the small, Southern town of Bellhaven, South Carolina, the town folk believe they've found a little slice of heaven in a mysterious chapel in the woods. But they soon realize that evil can come in the most beautiful of forms. The people of Bellhaven have always looked to Ellsworth Newberry for guidance, but after losing his wife and his future as a professional pitcher, he is moments away from testing his mortality once and for all. Until he finally takes notice of the changes in his town...and the cardinals that have returned.