Literary Realism

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.

Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”

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.

The tales in Mark Haddon's lyrical and uncompromising new collection take many forms - Victorian adventure story, science fiction, morality tale, contemporary realism - but they all showcase his virtuoso gifts as a stylist and the deep well of empathy that made his three best-selling novels so compelling. The characters here are often isolated physically or estranged from their families, yet they yearn for connection.

Our protagonist, an unnamed junior at a prestigious university in Kyoto, is on the verge of dropping out. After rebelling against the dictatorial jock president of the film club, he and his worst and only friend, the diabolical creep Ozu, are personas non grata on campus. For two years, our protagonist has made all the wrong decisions, and now he's about to make another mistake. He and Ozu are preparing for revenge—a fireworks attack at the film club's welcoming party for new members.

Lolly Blanchard's life only seems to give her lemons. Ten years ago, after her mother’s tragic death, she broke up with her first love and abandoned her dream of opening a restaurant in order to keep her family’s struggling Seattle diner afloat and care for her younger sister and grieving father. Now, a decade later, she dutifully whips up the diner’s famous lemon meringue pies each morning while still pining for all she's lost. As Lolly’s thirty-third birthday approaches, her quirky great-aunt gives her a mysterious gift.

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient - frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism.

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.

Anthropologist Calliope Santiago awakens to find herself in a strange and sinister wasteland, a shadow of the New Mexico she knew. Empty vehicles litter the road. Everyone has disappeared - or almost everyone. Calliope, heavy-bellied with the twins she carries inside her, must make her way across this dangerous landscape with a group of fellow survivors in search of answers. Long-dead volcanoes erupt, the ground rattles and splits, and monsters come to ominous life. Calliope will be forced to reconcile the geological record with the heritage she once denied.

Simon Watson, a young librarian on the verge of losing his job, lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home - a house, perched on the edge of a bluff, that is slowly crumbling toward the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a traveling carnival reading tarot cards and seldom calls.

Irene Beltrán is a force to be reckoned with. As a magazine journalist, an unusual profession for a woman with her privileged upbringing, she is constantly challenging the oppressive regime. Her investigative partner is photographer Francisco Leal, the son of impoverished Spanish Marxist émigrés. Together, they are an inseparable team and - despite Irene’s engagement to an army captain - form a passionate connection.

Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it's a symphony conducted from an overpass, grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself - from an author who has received the California Book Award and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, among other literary honors.

Eva Luna is a young woman whose powers as a storyteller bring her friendship and love. Lying in bed with her European lover, refugee and journalist Rolf Carlé, Eva answers his request for a story "you have never told anyone before" with these 23 samples of her vibrant artistry. Interweaving the real and the magical, she explores love, vengeance, compassion, and the strengths of women, creating a world that is at once poignantly familiar and intriguingly new.

From the town’s founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives.

A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In “Who Will Greet You at Home”, a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, a woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild”, a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good", three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war.

Original, honest and thought-provoking, Roar is Cecelia Ahern's unforgettable story collection. With her trademark honesty, Cecelia Ahern gives us 30 linked stories, all titled 'The Woman Who...', that capture the different facets of women's lives. Humorous, moving, surreal and poignant, the stories capture the moments the characters are overwhelmed by guilt, confusion, frustration, intimidation, exhaustion - the private moments when they feel the need to roar.

Beck and Vivian never could stand each other, but they always tried their best for their mutual friend, Cassie. After the town moves on from Cassie’s murder too fast, Beck and Vivian finally find common ground: vengeance. They memorialize Cassie by secretly painting murals of her around town, a message to the world that Cassie won’t be forgotten. But Beck and Vivian are keeping secrets, like the third passenger riding in Beck’s VW bus with them - Cassie’s ghost.

When Darren Bennett meets Eric Lederer, there's an instant connection. They share a love of drawing and the bottom rung on the high-school social ladder. These things (combined with absentee parents, Darren's evil older brother, and a pathological fear of girls) drive them toward an ambitious project: a comic book that evolves into a series of graphic novels that become a movie trilogy, all before they even put pen to paper. Then Eric reveals a secret: He doesn't sleep. Ever.

La inspiración para escribir este libro le llegó a García Márquez con una insólita noticia que tuvo que cubrir como periodista. El 26 de octubre de 1949 el reportero Gabriel García Márquez fue enviado al antiguo convento de Santa Clara, que iba a ser demolido para edificar sobre él un hotel de cinco estrellas, a presenciar el vaciado de las criptas funerarias y a cubrir la noticia. Se exhumaron los restos de un virrey del Perú y su amante secreta, un obispo, varias abadesas, un bachiller de artes y una marquesa.