Literary Realism

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.

A literary jigsaw puzzle of a debut novel set in Colombia during the peak of its decades-long conflict, and in New York City. While her parents are away, a teenager finds herself home alone, with the household staff mysteriously gone, no phone connection, and news of an insurgency on the radio - and then she hears a knock at the door.

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.

C'era una volta il favoloso mondo di Lossiniere, un paese dove non suonano i telefoni e si viaggia in carrozza. Napoli, invece, è un inferno vero di traffico e spazzatura. Uno scrittore, appena arrivato da Roma, scopre che l'evento a cui doveva partecipare è stato annullato all'ultimo minuto. Il viaggio, in apparenza inutile, gli fa conoscere una enigmatica maestra e lo porta all'incontro fortuito con un manoscritto ambientato nel paese di Lossiniere, "Il libro di Clara e Riki", e con il mistero della sua autrice: una bambina di otto anni.

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.

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?

What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart? These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado’s strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically.

Wie in einem romantisch-erotischen Märchen lebt Boschardt mit seinen Fantasiegestalten und Dämonen und trifft, spät und nach lebenslanger Suche, plötzlich und unerwartet auf Shalibi, eine faszinierend exotische und bedingungslos liebende junge Frau, in der er sich verliert.

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.

A writer in a purgatory bar, an art-collecting housewife who time travels, a movie production assistant with stigmata, a codependent AA sponsor, a sex addict, a movie star with issues, a two-time liver transplant recipient, and an abusive TV costumer who gets what’s coming to her: All connected to one another but completely and utterly alone.

Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, A Fist or a Heart is a gripping, artfully interwoven novel of power, secrets, and isolation by one of the most bracing and original voices of the author’s generation.

Kimiko, giovane scrittrice di romanzi rosa, esce con Goro, che convive con Yukiko, una lontana parente molto più grande di lui. Una sera, dopo una visita all'acquario di Tokyo a vedere i delfini, Kimiko fa l'amore con Goro, ma capisce subito che la loro storia non ha futuro. Temendo di legarsi troppo a lui, decide allora di abbandonare Tokyo. Nel tempio vicino al mare in cui trova rifugio, conosce Mami, una ragazza con doti soprannaturali, e da lei viene a sapere di essere incinta.

An enchanting collection of 12 evocative and macabre stories delving into the magical, ordinary, and darker aspects of love in all its powerful forms.

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.

Sixteen-year-old Cade Curtis is an angel thief. After his mother’s family rejected him for being born out of wedlock, he and his dad moved to the apartment above a local antique shop. The only payment the owner Mrs. Walker requests: marble angels, stolen from graveyards, for her to sell for thousands of dollars to collectors. But there’s one angel that would be the last they’d ever need to steal; an angel, carved by a slave, with one hand open and one hand closed. If only Cade could find it....

The late Nobelist's masterpiece takes a candid look into the lives of Holocaust survivors during the late 40s. Set in New York City, Shadow on the Hudson, Volume 4, the fourth in a four volume audiobook series, draws us into the intertwined lives of circle prosperous Jewish refugees. At the center is Boris Makaver, a pious and wealthy businessman. His greatest trial is his daughter, Anna.

The late Nobelist's masterpiece takes a candid look into the lives of Holocaust survivors during the late 40s. Set in New York City, Shadows on the Hudson, Volume 1, the first in a four volume audiobook series, draws us into the intertwined lives of a circles of prosperous Jewish refugees.

Based on true events, Hannah Assadi's fierce and raging debut novel tracks the shattered, illuminated psyche of a young woman seizing her own adulthood. Ahlam, the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and his Israeli wife, grows up in the arid lands of desert suburbia outside of Phoenix. In a stark landscape where coyotes prowl and mysterious lights occasionally pass through the nighttime sky, Ahlam's imagination reigns.

At the dawn of the 20th century, a young Lebanese adventurer leaves the Levant to explore the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace in Tripoli and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan.