Magical Realism Fiction

From charity to deceit, benevolence to violence, fear of God to extreme cruelty, the dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch embodies the best and the worst of human nature. Gabriel García Márquez, the renowned master of magical realism, vividly portrays the dying tyrant caught in the prison of his own dictatorship. Employing an innovative, dreamlike style, and overflowing with symbolic descriptions, the novel transports the listener to a world that is at once fanciful and real.

In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind. The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.

Sixteen-year-old Sabine Braxton and her identical twin, Blythe, don’t have much in common. When their father dies from an unexpected illness, each copes with the loss in her own way. Neither can offer each other much support...at least not until their emotionally detached mother moves them into a ramshackle Bay Area mansion owned by a stranger named Charlie. Soon the sisters are united in a mission to figure out who Charlie is and why he seems to know everything about them. Neither is prepared for the secret they uncover....

On Tommy Llewellyn’s first birthday, his doting parents awoke in a home without baby blankets and bottles in the fridge, without the photos of their newborn once scattered about, and without any idea that the one-year-old sleeping in their home was their child. That’s because Tommy Llewellyn is a boy who, in the very cosmic sense of things, will never be remembered—stuck in a universal Reset that causes everyone to forget he exists when the clock strikes midnight on his birthday each year.

Chandrakanta is a romantic fantasy novel written by Devaki Nandan Khatri, a popular writer from the first generation of modern Hindi novelists. This book is considered to be one of his finest works, and it has spawned numerous sequels related to the original story. The story centres around a romantic couple, each of whom came from kingdoms at dissent with each other. Chandrakanta is the princess of Vijaygarh while Virendra Singh is the prince of Naugarh. Kroor Singh, one of the courtiers in the King’s court at Vijaygarh, is a schemester with grand plans of his own.

A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most ordinary lives, from one of South Korea’s most acclaimed novelists.

The tight-knit Izquierdo family is grappling with misfortunes none of them can explain. Their beloved patriarch has suffered from an emotional collapse and is dying; eldest son Gonzalo’s marriage is falling apart as he tries to care for his father; daughter Dina, beleaguered by fear that her nightmares are real, is a shut-in. When Gonzalo digs up a strange object in the backyard of the family home, the Izquierdos take it as proof that a jealous neighbor has cursed them―could this be the reason for all their troubles?

Stanley Maddox lives a mundane life in a nondescript town. His wife is cheating on him, his colleagues at work don’t recognize him, and he has recently noticed a mysterious creature darting its way through his house. When he notices a flap of skin on his face, he begins pulling. Beneath his skin lies another person, an evil person, with the power to change his life forever.

The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing—where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods—and he’s a loser. Well into his forties, he’s divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall. He gets by just by making customized old-fashioned amplifiers for the occasional rich audio-obsessive. Then an old friend tips him off about a special job....

Georges Blanchard is revered in the small French town of Mireville both as a master serinette maker and for a miraculous incident in his childhood that earned him the title "The Sun-Bringer". As his firstborn son, Henri Blanchard is expected to follow in his footsteps, but Henri would rather learn to make lace than music boxes. When Henri discovers a stash of American letters in his father's drawer, he learns he's not the firstborn son of Georges Blanchard at all: Henri has an older half-brother born to one of Georges' American customers.

Necropolis follows Sajan Dayal, a detective in pursuit of a serial (though nonlethal) collector of fingers. He encounters would-be vampires and werewolves, and a woman named Razia who may or may not be centuries old.

Queen Isadora reigns with secrets and lies and will do whatever it takes to keep her throne, including killing the rightful heir. Hunted by the queen, Kenna is thrust into the center of a rebellion that seeks to end her tyranny. Now, she must learn what it means to rise up and rule, but does she have what it takes? Or will the cost of the rebellion be more than she can give? As the stirrings of war threaten to tear the country apart, Kenna must fight to hold her Chosen together before they too become another causality.

I’m an occultist living in a haunted brownstone in upstate New York. The building is a ghostly double-image of itself, like a picture painted brightly over an older, weirder picture. It’s an equinox place, my mother once said, where dark and light things are equally in power. I want to tell you, dear strangers, why I was there and what I found.

After a bad breakup, Helene Janssen runs away to Alaska to find some peace and quiet. She’s been dreaming up bits and pieces of a novel for years and hopes to finally have time to write it. On her first night there, Helene meets Sebastien Montague, a crab fisherman who looks exactly like the hero in the book she’s working on. But how is that even possible? Sebastien seems to recognize Helene, too, but he lies about it and brushes her off, even though their chemistry is immediate and undeniable.

Follow Me to Ground is fascinating and frightening, urgent and propulsive. In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. Short but authoritative, Follow Me to Ground lingers long after listening, pulling the listener into a dream between fairy tale and nightmare, desire and delusion, folktale and warning.

Elmwood Springs, Missouri, is a small town like any other, but something strange is happening out at the cemetery. Still Meadows, as it's called, is anything but still. Funny and profound, this novel in the tradition of Flagg's Can't Wait to Get to Heaven and Thornton Wilder's Our Town deals with universal themes of heaven and earth and everything in between, as Flagg tells a surprising story of life, afterlife, and the mysterious goings-on of ordinary people.

Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble. That it's been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and Neal still loves her, deeply-but that almost seems beside the point now. Maybe that was always beside the point. Two days before they're supposed to visit Neal's family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells Neal that she can't go. She's a TV writer, and something's come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles.

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree, and the tree talks back. Add to this a Mongolian gangster, an English spy, a despondent "zookeeper", a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ. All of them have tales to tell, and all must play their part as they are caught up in the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

Singer's famous and never-before-recorded novel about a passionate, forbidden love affair between Jew and Gentile in 17th century Poland.

To-do: Stop the bad guys. Rescue the wizard. Find the perfect outfit for New Year's Eve. At last, Owen Palmer, the dreamboat wizard at Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc., has conjured up the courage to get Katie Chandler under the mistletoe at the office holiday party. But just when it looks like Katie has found her prince, in pops her inept fairy godmother, Ethelinda, to throw a wand into the works. Ethelinda's timing couldn’t be worse. A plot hatched by MSI's rogue ex-employees, Idris and his evil fairy gal pal Ari, threatens to expose the company's secrets - and the very existence of magic itself.