Literary Realism

Un viejo coronel retirado va al puerto todos los viernes a esperar la llegada de la carta oficial que responda a la justa reclamación de sus derechos por los servicios prestados a la patria. Pero la patria permanece muda.

The novel follows the adolescent Arturo through his days on the isolated Neapolitan island of Procida, where - his mother long deceased, his father often absent, and a dog as his sole companion - he roams the countryside and the beaches or reads in his family's lonely, dilapidated mansion. This quiet, meandering existence is upended when his father brings home a beautiful 16-year-old bride, Nunziatella.

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight-year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.

As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz’s heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes’ masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.

A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is funny and smart but struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his family and their Asian American enclave. He tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal.

Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup d'état. She survives by hunting, farming, trading, and forgetting the contours of what was once a normal life. But her quiet stability is disrupted when an army unit, led by a young female soldier, comes to the mountains on government orders in search of a legendary creature called the rain heron - a mythical, dangerous, form-shifting bird with the ability to change the weather. Ren insists that the bird is simply a story, yet the soldier will not be deterred, forcing them both into a gruelling quest.

Si bien somos capaces de contemplar sin espanto viajes interplanetarios y clonaciones de seres vivos, tal vez nos falte, en cambio, el valor suficiente para sumergirnos en la más íntimo de nuestro ser. Los textos que se reúnen en este libro nos recuerdan que en cada uno de nosotros vive un guerrero de la luz, alguien capaz de escuchar el silencio de su corazón, de aceptar las derrotas sin dejarse abatir por ellas y de alimentar la esperanza en medio del cansancio y el desaliento.

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.

En el prólogo de estos Doce cuentos peregrinos, García Márquez nos regala su explicación de por qué doce, por qué cuentos y por qué peregrinos. En Barcelona, una prostituta que va entrando en la vejez entrena a su perro para llorar ante la tumba que ha escogido para sí misma. En Viena, una mujer se vale de su don de ver el futuro para convertirse en la adivina de una familia rica.

Estamos en Macondo y su región una vez más, entre personajes y episodios reconocibles, pero ahora caen pájaros muertos sobre el poblado, rompiendo mosquiteros y alambradas, un cura ve al diablo o afirma haber encontrado al judío errante, y visitar la tumba de un ser querido supone un riesgo impredecible. Y hay que enterrar a la Mamá Grande, soberana absoluta de este mundo, que falleció en olor de santidad a los noventa y dos años, tras haber conservado la virginidad durante toda su vida, y a cuyos funerales acude el presidente de la República y hasta el Sumo Pontífice en su góndola papal.

One of Carlos Fuentes’s greatest works, The Old Gringo tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, and journalist, and of his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa’s soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict.

Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this moving, richly imagined novel is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a 13-year-old girl, whose family is compelled to flee their home in Tehran for a new life in a small village, hoping in this way to preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives. But they soon find themselves caught up in the post-revolutionary chaos that sweeps across their ancient land. Bahar's mother, after a tragic loss, embarks on a long, eventful journey in search of meaning in a world swept up in the post-revolutionary madness.

A spellbinding work of literature, Latitudes of Longing follows the interconnected lives of characters searching for true intimacy. The novel sweeps across India, from an island, to a valley, a city, and a snow desert, to tell a love story of epic proportions. We follow a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who speaks to them; a geologist working to end futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a mother struggling to free her revolutionary son; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who transforms first into a boat and then a woman.

At the border with another world, a line of people wait for the gates to open; on the floor of a lonely room, a Born Winner runs through his life’s achievements and losses; in a suburban garden, a man witnesses a murder that pushes him out into the community. Struggling to realise the human ideals of love and freedom, the characters of Dark Neighbourhood roam instead the depths of alienation, loss and shame.

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.

Cursed. Maisie Cothay has never known the feel of human flesh: born with the power to kill or resurrect at her slightest touch, she has spent her childhood sequestered in her family’s manor at the edge of a mysterious forest. Maisie’s father, an anthropologist who sees her as more experiment than daughter, has warned Maisie not to venture into the wood. Locals talk of men disappearing within, emerging with addled minds and strange stories.

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend's future is destroyed in an accident while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt. What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor filled with emotion, from dark suffering to true happiness - a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world.

Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant. As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world, they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.

Training to become a therapist, Marissa discovers an unforeseen talent for helping others, and for a while at least, puts her own needs and concerns to one side. An unexpected windfall prompts a spontaneous trip to Peru, and an encounter while she is there triggers an astonishing series of events.