Literary Realism

It’s 1984 in Los Angeles. Jake Maldemer’s first book, Tales from the Back of a Bus, is a hit. It's a darkly comic, genre-bending roman à clef in which aspiring writer Jack Moses meets an odd little man name Kobold who keeps randomly feeding him handwritten horror stories as they travel across Los Angeles in the back of an RTD bus. Just as the life of Jake’s storybook-self gets stranger and more chaotic, so does Jake’s real life.

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.

Cherry has a hidden talent. She can see things other people can't, and she decided a long time ago to use this skill to help others. As far as the rest of the town is concerned, she's simply the kind-hearted young woman who runs the local bakery, but in private she uses her gift to add something special to her cakes so that after just one mouthful, the townspeople start to feel better about their lives.

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.

Set against the backdrop of Argentina's Dirty War and infused with magical realism, The Blue Line is a breathtaking story of love and betrayal by one of the world's most renowned writers and activists. Ingrid Betancourt, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Even Silence Has An End, draws on history and personal experience in this deeply felt portrait of a woman coming of age as her country falls deeper and deeper into chaos.

Róisín and François are immediately drawn to each other when they meet at a remote research base on the frozen ice sheets of Antarctica. At first glance the pair could not be more different. Older by a few years, Róisín, a daughter of Ireland and a peripatetic astronomer, joins the science team to observe the fracturing of a comet overhead. François, the base's chef, has just left his birthplace in Bayeux, France, for only the second time in his life.

In this masterful debut, an award-winning writer and first-rate storyteller explores the tenuous bonds of family - fathers and sons, husbands and wives - as they are tested by the sometimes brutal power of love. In each of the stories in this remarkable collection, David James Poissant delivers a moving portrayal of a relationship in turmoil. His strikingly true-to-life characters have reached a precipice, chased there by troubles of their own making. Some stand frightened, some ready to fight. Some seek atonement, others the atonement that is owed them.

Orphaned into an unforgiving foster home and raised as an outsider, Weird-Eye shoulders her unflattering nickname. She relies on her vivid imagination to sustain her work as a midwife bringing newborns into the world while World War II overruns her native Finland, desecrating life. She finds herself drawn to the handsome, otherworldly Johannes Angelhurst, a war photographer working for the SS.

Lydia is having a party - it's a party she hosts every year for six women friends who treasure the midwinter bash. Over a table laden with a feast of food and wine, the women revel in sharing newsy updates, simmering secrets, and laughter. As this particular evening unfolds, Lydia prepares to make a shattering announcement. Lydia's announcement shocks them all, they rediscover the enduring bonds of friendship and find their lives changing in unexpected ways.

For seven-year old Angela, happiness is exploring the lush countryside around her home in western Ukraine. Her wild imagination takes her into birds and flowers, and into the waters of the river. All that changes when, one morning, she sees her mother crying. As she tries to find out why, she is drawn on an extraordinary journey into the secrets of her family, and her mother's fateful choices.

The protagonist, Jesús, is ugly. Extraordinarily ugly. He is so ugly that his friends and relatives are convinced that behind that ugliness there must be something else. A malefic power or possibly a momentous fate. The truth is that fairly special things happen wherever Jesús is. His biological father is a mystery. His half-sister is a child-prodigy who excels at everything she does, his mother becomes the president of the country, his best-friend Vero is a computer tycoon, his brother-in-law also makes it in politics...But for all the success around him he still feels unsettled.

The ancient city burns and a thief named Omari leads the survivors into uncharted desert to a legendary place he doesn't believe exists. As the caravan struggles with nature and treachery, Omari must decide between love and the people's survival in this romantic tale of adventure, destiny and desert magic.

Raising the literary bar to a new level, Jerome Charyn re-creates the voice of Theodore Roosevelt, the New York City police commissioner, Rough Rider, and soon-to-be 26th president through his derring-do adventures, effortlessly combining superhero dialogue with haunting pathos. Beginning with his sickly childhood and concluding with McKinley's assassination, the novel positions Roosevelt as a "perfect bull in a china shop," a fearless crime fighter and pioneering environmentalist who would grow up to be our greatest peacetime president.

It’s the 1950s, and Lorrie is unimpressed when her family moves to the remote Scottish island where her grandad runs a whisky distillery. She befriends Sylvie, the shy girl next door: ‘The slightest smile from Sylvie was a fluffy elephant at the fair. It had to be won with a clear aim,’ writes Lorrie. Yet fun-loving Lorrie isn’t sure Sylvie’s is the friendship she wants to win.

Ori may seem like an idealist, but he understands how this world works. Powerful people want it to stay that way, and a degree of social order is needed to ensure that. However, through everything he has done as founder and CEO of Singularity Group, Ori has proven what good can come from granting people certain freedoms. Though he hoped otherwise, he knew the day might come when powerful forces would threaten what he has built. When a series of suspicious events escalates to an attempt on his life, Ori must use all he is capable of to see who, or what, is pulling the strings.

Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, Maria, Maria takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and its inverse, grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, these stories bubble over into the titular novella, "Maria, Maria"—a family drama set in a reimagined California rainforest that explores the legacies of three Marias, and possibly all Marias.

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.

Award-winning author Ven Begamudré spins three stories in a masterful blend of myth and realism.

A blue girl lives in the woods, eating secrets baked into moon pies and shaking up a small lakeside town. In this small lakeside town, mothers bake their secrets into moon pies they feed to a silent blue girl. Their daughters have secrets too - that they can’t sleep, that they might sleep with a neighbor boy, that they know more than they let on. But when the daughters find the blue girl, everyone’s carefully held silences shake loose.

A surgeon flees a scandal in the city and accepts a job at a village clinic. He buys antibiotics out of pocket, squashes roaches, and chafes at the interventions of the corrupt officer who oversees his work. But his outlook on life changes one night when a teacher, his pregnant wife, and their young son appear. Killed in a violent robbery, they tell the surgeon that they have been offered a second chance at living if the surgeon can mend their wounds before sunrise.