Literary Realism

Canary Islands, 1882: Explorer and plant biologist Niklas Bruunis researches a species alleged to have hallucinogenic qualities capable of eliminating the psychic limits between one human mind and another. Buenos Aires, 1983: Born to a white Argentinian anthropologist and a black Brazilian engineer, Cassio comes of age with the Internet, and demonstrates the skills and personality that will make him one of the first great Argentine hackers. The southern Argentinian techno-hub of Bariloche, 2024: Piera, on the same research group as Cassio, studies human DNA.

Anaïs Echeverría left Peru, the country where she grew up, many years ago. She has built a new life for herself in London: engaged and pregnant, she dares to believe that she has left the ghosts of her family's past behind. But now she must return to Lima to sell her ancestral home, the notorious yellow house that looms over the sprawling city below. Concealed within its walls are spectres from the past that demand her attention, remnants of the injustices on which both her country and her house were built.

Evie has been raised in the heart of Aboriginal Redfern, by a proud trailblazing Wiradjuri family. She remembers so much about the previous world – the Dreamtime, the ancestors, and the knowing – but she also harbours a dark pain that is becoming almost too much to bear. And then Evie meets James, a young man radiating pure love who fills her life with light. On the cusp of adulthood, with their whole lives ahead of them, they travel to Evie’s beloved country, the central west of New South Wales and the Riverina regions.

Parents comblés à qui tout sourit, le ciel d'Éric et Barbara s'assombrit le jour où un drame emporte leur univers et fait basculer leur vie. Lorsqu'arrive le temps de la reconstruction, ils sont alors confrontés au comportement étrange de l'un de leurs fils. Pour tenter de le comprendre, ils vont s'efforcer de regarder le monde à travers ses yeux d'enfant et se lancent dès lors dans des recherches qui ne cesseront de les surprendre autant que les bouleverser. Par amour pour leur petit garçon, ils abandonneront peu à peu leurs repères.

Delhi, 1997: It is India's fiftieth year of independence, the year of Hindu nationalists and atomic bombs. But twelve-year-old Adi has a bigger problem: his Ma has gone missing - again. Left with an ailing grandmother, a raging father and no answers, he finds an unlikely ally: a talking vulture who reveals itself to be a bureaucrat from the 'Department of Historical Adjustment'.

A year after his dad's death, 12-year-old Lincoln wonders whether his strait-laced but clearly struggling mom will ever tell him what really happened the night of the car accident. How did she walk away, and his dad didn't? When would life return to normal? As it turns out, never again.

Sometimes, la sangre atrae, "the blood calls you back," and when Maya gets the call to go back to her agave roots to claim the body of her long-missing father, her world changes forever. Set against the backdrop of her childhood in Mexico, Agave Blues is the story of ailing attorney Maya, in a broken relationship and butting heads with her teenage daughter, Lily.

What if the remarkable story of Ebenezer Scrooge was true? What if the account was relayed to Dickens, and he turned it into A Christmas Carol? What if the ghostly visitations did not begin or end with Scrooge, but the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and yet to come visit one misanthropic soul in need of reclamation every Christmas Eve? This modern-day sequel to the Charles Dickens classic assumes all of the above. And this time, the spiritual trio’s attentions have been directed to a not-so-nice woman in Philadelphia.

El celebrado libro de Cristina García cuenta la sobrecogedora y agridulce historia de una familia que experimenta la revolución de un país y las revelaciones que ello conlleva. La vidas de Celia del Pino y de su esposo, sus hijas y nietas reflejan el realismo mágico de Cuba, un paisaje de belleza y miseria, idealismo y corrupción. Soñar en cubano es “una obra que posee tanto la intimidad de un relato de Chejov como la magia alucinatoria de una novela de García Márquez” (The New York Times).

Ayant fui Téhéran pour échapper à la Révolution Islamique de 1979, Hashang, Roza et leurs trois enfants tentent de reconstruire leur vie dans le petit village de Razan, au cœur de la région montagneuse de Mazandaran. Mais personne n'échappe longtemps à la violence et au chaos... et la répression finira fatalement par les rattraper.

Two extraordinary women in 1865 establish a trading post in a southern jungle that grows to be a safe haven for cast-off women and the dispossessed. When a murderous forger sets up shop and the mayor on the right-side-of-the-tracks becomes intent on their destruction, the village fights for survival in its own special way. Told in evocative magical realism, Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar is a tale of wronged women who stand up to be counted.

When Yusuf fled Syria, he lost everything. Now the circus, with its middle-eastern flair, is the only home he knows. When the lights go on, the refugees dazzle their audience, but off-stage tensions flare. Ellie is passionate about the circus and drawn to its broken people. Even so, if she wants to keep her job at the newspaper, she must head up a campaign against it.

In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol's daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy's spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light.

Living the unexamined life may not be the most successful way to proceed through this world. It certainly hasn't worked for 30-year-old Arthur Loveday, who has failed to impress both his employers and the woman he's fallen in love with. An industrial psychologist attempting to assess him for future employment says he can never succeed at anything until he works out who he really is. From that point on, Arthur finds himself persistently chivvied by fate into a spiritual quest to find his true self.

Having lost his mother and been shunned by his father, Zabor grows up in the company of books, which teach him a new language. Ever since he can remember, he has been convinced that he has a gift: If he writes, he will stave off death; those captured in the sentences of his notebooks will live longer. Like a kind of inverted Scheherazade saving his fellow men, he experiments night after night with the delirious power of the imagination.

Jailbird. Klepto. Spectacular failure to launch. Nicole Wood’s sticky fingers have earned her many names, but it’s not that she’s stealing—some objects just need to be moved elsewhere, and the universe has chosen her to do it. Still, being a relocator of objects isn’t easy. With her marriage on the rocks, no real-world skills, and the threat of prison hanging over her head, Nicole is determined to change her ways.

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.

Concierto para delinquir es una divertida aventura de exiliados. La historia se inicia en París y concluye en Puerto Galeón, un pintoresco puerto del Caribe, al que van a parar, un anarquista uruguayo - de profesión grabador y pintor - y un trotamundos español - que sobrevive del oficio de cuentero - para incendiar de amor, irreverencia y poesía a los habitantes del lugar.

On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, the impossible has come to pass. Women control the civic institutions. Decide how the islands’ money is spent. Run the businesses. Tend to their families. Teach the children hope for a better world. They say that this gynotopia is Eva Levi’s life’s work, and that now she has disappeared, it will be destroyed. But they don’t know about Cwen. Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. The clouds are her children, and the waves.

For listeners of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, this “sublime” and “delightfully unhinged” (Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums) metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet’s spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist?