Magical Realism Fiction

Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.

For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He will retain most of his consciousness, memories, and intellect, but his physical body will gradually turn into a great white shark. As Lewis develops the features and impulses of one of the most predatory creatures in the ocean, his complicated artist’s heart struggles to make peace with his unfulfilled dreams.

Ever since she can remember, Vanessa has been able to see people's fortunes at the bottom of their teacups. To avoid blurting out their fortunes, she converts to coffee, but somehow, fortunes escape and find a way to complicate her life and the ones of those around her. To add to this plight, her romance life is so nonexistent that her parents enlist the services of a matchmaking expert from Shanghai.

When Alyssa inherits her late grandmother's house in the quiet town of Kotahi Bay, she hopes for a fresh start. But as she settles into her new home, Alyssa quickly learns that her family legacy is more than just property—it's a powerful magic and a centuries-old ghost desperate to break free. The townspeople expect her to step into the role of local witch, but haunting memories of a night filled with fire and loss make that impossible. Torn between a restless spirit and mounting pressure from the town, Alyssa faces an impossible choice.

The regulars at the magical Café Funiculi Funicula are well acquainted with its famous legend and extraordinary time-travel offer. Many patrons have reunited with old flames, made amends with estranged family and visited loved ones. But the journey is not without risks, and there are rules to follow.

Tilda Finch is a successful businesswoman, a mother to two wonderful adult daughters, and besides an unexpected divorce, she’s living a relatively happy life. Until she wakes up one morning and her finger seems to have disappeared. She thinks back to the kombucha she drank the night before—perhaps it was spiked? Studying herself in the mirror, she discovers one of her ears has also disappeared! She rushes to the doctor, who after a multitude of tests says she’s sorry to inform her that she has invisibility, a disorder that affects millions of women worldwide, mostly after the age of forty.

Tucked away down a Kyoto backstreet lies the extraordinary Kamogawa Diner, run by Chef Nagare and his daughter, Koishi. The father-daughter duo have reinvented themselves as “food detectives,” offering a service that goes beyond cooking mouth-watering meals. Through their culinary sleuthing, they revive lost recipes and rekindle forgotten memories.

When Gwendy Peterson was twelve, a mysterious stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous. Pushing any of its eight colored buttons promised death and destruction. Years later, the button box reentered Gwendy’s life. A successful novelist and a rising political star, she was once again forced to deal with the temptation the box represented. Now, malignant forces seek to possess the button box, and it is up to Senator Gwendy Peterson to keep it from them at all costs.

June O'Donnell - aka Junior, aka Jack, aka Jonathan O'Donnell IV, aka the first female O'Donnell firstborn - has always been haunted by her family's mythic but complicated legacy. As she prepares to begin her final year of high school, June is itching to leave behind her ghosts in Five Fingers, Michigan, and travel the world. And then, just like it always happens to the O'Donnells, a painful glimmer from her past returns to mess everything up. Enter Saul Angert, the eldest son of Eli Angert, aka June's late father's mortal enemy.

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends. Nainoa’s family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods - a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities.

Ce jeune homme qui rentre à l’issue d’une nuit blanche passée avec les derniers fêtards d’un mariage ignore, en regagnant sa demeure, que le destin l’attend et qu’il mourra poignardé. Pourtant tout le monde le sait et Santiago Nasar, livré à ses bourreaux avec l’assentiment collectif, sera la victime de ce crime d’honneur. Qu’il soit ou non coupable, il n’échappera pas à cette mort annoncée. Car la mariée n’était plus vierge.

The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own. Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it - and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother.

In a world where vampires and witches live in secrecy, 16-year-old Larissa Norton's life is turned upside down when her vampire parents are murdered and a dark presence begins pursuing her. Forced to flee into hiding, Larissa discovers she is not who she thought she was. She learns her real name is Larissa Dubois, a powerful witch born in 1920s New Orleans.

Three strangers, each isolated by his or her own problems: Adaora, the marine biologist. Anthony, the rapper famous throughout Africa. Agu, the troubled soldier. Wandering Bar Beach in Lagos, Nigeria's legendary mega-city, they're more alone than they've ever been before. But when something like a meteorite plunges into the ocean and a tidal wave overcomes them, these three people will find themselves bound together in ways they could never imagine.

To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. Roses grow out of Miel's wrist, and rumors say that she spilled out of a water tower when she was five. Sam is known for the moons he paints and hangs in the trees and for how little anyone knows about his life before he and his mother moved to town. But as odd as everyone considers Miel and Sam, even they stay away from the Bonner girls, four beautiful sisters rumored to be witches.

Sinai Tapestry, the brilliant first novel of the Jerusalem Quartet, is an epic alternate history of the Middle East in which the discovery of the original Bible links a disparate group of remarkable people across time and space. In 1840, Plantagenet Strongbow, the twenty-ninth Duke of Dorset, seven-feet-seven-inches tall and the greatest swordsman and botanist of Victorian England, walks away from the family estate and disappears into the Sinai Desert carrying only a large magnifying glass and a portable sundial.

In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The result: two remarkable short novels—Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973—that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age—the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat—are stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami’s later books, and form the first two-thirds, with A Wild Sheep Chase, of the trilogy of the Rat.

Bullied to the point of dropping out of school, Kokoro's days blur together as she hides in her bedroom, unable to face her family or friends. As she spirals into despair, her mirror begins to shine; with a touch, Kokoro is pulled from her lonely life into a resplendent, bizarre fairytale castle guarded by a strange girl in a wolf mask. Six other students have been brought to the castle, and soon this marvelous refuge becomes their playground.

When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive. Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets.

Alice Sun has always felt invisible at her elite Beijing international boarding school, where she’s the only scholarship student among China’s most rich and influential teens. But then she starts uncontrollably turning invisible—actually invisible. When her parents drop the news that they can no longer afford her tuition, even with the scholarship, Alice hatches a plan to monetize her strange new power—she’ll discover the scandalous secrets her classmates want to know, for a price.