Magical Realism Fiction

In 1941, a hand grenade explodes in a Cairo bar, taking the life of Stern, a petty gunrunner and morphine addict. His death could easily go unnoticed as Rommel's tanks charge through the desert in an attempt to open the Middle East to Hitler's forces. Yet the mystery behind Stern's death is a top priority for intelligence experts. Master spies from three countries converge on Joe O'Sullivan Beare, who is closer to Stern than anyone, in an effort to unravel the disturbing puzzle.

On the last day of December 1921, three enigmatic men - Cairo Martyr, a blue-eyed African who controls the Middle East's supply of aphrodisiac mummy dust; O'Sullivan Beare, a former Irish patriot and gunrunner who has made a fortune selling spurious, phallic-shaped Christian artifacts; and Mark Szondi, a dedicated Zionist who wagers only fried fish futures - sit down to a fateful game of poker in the back room of a Jerusalem antiquities shop owned by a 3000-year-old knight errant.

After disappearing amidst a spray of bullets, antiques dealer Sarah Lester leaves behind no body, only questions. Sarah’s friends are left dealing with the aftermath of her disappearance, including an investigation into the provenance of her antiques, which threatens to crush The Old Curiosity Shop. As Sarah struggles to reunite with her father, she continues the search for her mother, unaware the violent colonial past has followed her home, putting herself, and those she loves in danger.

Eleanor Zarrin has been distanced from her family for years. When she returns home after a violent incident at boarding school, trying to fit back into the space she left becomes even more difficult when their headstrong matriarch unexpectedly dies. Eleanor's bloodthirsty family is left unchecked for the first time in decades, and when her Grandmere arrives to help the family adjust, it's clear that something dark is lurking beneath her genteel exterior.

Margo Everson sees the call out for the cookbook club and knows she’s found her people. Recently dumped by her self-absorbed husband, who frankly isn’t much of a loss, she has little to show for her marriage but his "parting gift"—a dilapidated old farm house—and a collection of well-loved cookbooks. Aja Alexander just hopes her newfound friends won’t notice that that every time she looks at food, she gets queasy. It’s hard hiding a pregnancy, especially one she can’t bring herself to share with her wealthy boyfriend and his snooty mother.

By working together, Henry Sato and Jason Booth have managed to survive their unwanted trip to Ludus, an experiment planet. However, Delvers LLC has made some enemies...if monsters, bandits, mages, criminals, bounty hunters, and even dark cults can be called, "some enemies." After their latest battle, the two have been separated and must adapt or die. Henry in particular faces a trial by fire - perhaps literally - that may be impossible for him to overcome. The two American men will face their greatest challenges yet while working as conscripted Berber Intelligence agents. But even while outnumbered, and most likely outgunned, the former veteran EMT and resilient IT programmer will be armed with modern Earth know-how.

A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Donne, their wild, domineering leader, is obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting Indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior—their own hearts of darkness—deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock.

In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war, and she and her family flee. Years later her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners but a gay man in an unaccepting society.

Two young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while he's asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise that is floating in the air, while his ugly cousin hesitates on the stairs . . .

On the eve of his 90th birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit - he has purchased hundreds of women - he asks a madam for her assistance. The 14-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to a master's work.

A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination.

One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking - recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: She wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa's surreal dreams.

A nameless narrator awakens to the muddle of middle age, no longer certain who or what he is. He finds himself at a party talking to a woman he doesn't know who proves to be his wife. Soon separated but still living in the same apartment, he is threatened by a litigious dachshund and saddled with a stubborn case of erectile dysfunction in a world that seems held together by increasingly mercurial laws and elusive boundaries.

Once dubbed "The Deadliest Man Alive", Jarrod Torrealday is a former Olympic saber hopeful and medieval-weapons expert banned from competition for killing another fencer in a duel. Despondent, volatile, alcoholic, yet still one of the greatest swordsmen alive, he now works for third-rate fantasy films as a technical consultant and stuntman. When Jarrod accepts the gig of a lifetime from a sorcerer looking for a hero, he finds himself facing an invading army in a world inhabited by creatures from Earth's mythical past.

Ubicada en un pequeño pueblo del norte de Chile que verá alterada su tranquilidad con la llegada de algunos personajes, Albina y los hombres-perro relata la historia de dos mujeres, la amnésica giganta blanca Albina, cuya sensualidad transforma a los hombres en una jauría desenfrenada, y La Jaiba, mujer con bigote y joroba, unidas por un azar mágico que las relacionará con otros personajes igualmente fuera de lo común.

In publishing-speak, here's what we at the LQ office sometimes describe as the Queer lovechild of Sholem Aleichem and Philip Roth: Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shtetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young emigrants goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her.

Una comunidad dividida por la codicia, la cobardía y el miedo. Un hombre perseguido por el fantasma de un pasado doloroso. Una joven en busca de la felicidad. Siete días, un breve periodo durante el cual el bien y el mal librarán una batalla decisiva y cada personaje decidirá a cuál de los dos bandos pertenece.

Grace, as her friends call her, has a Ford Motor Company tattoo running down her leg and grease worked deep into her hands. She works at Sanchez Motorworks customizing hot rods. Finding the line in a classic car is her calling. Now Grace has to find the line in her own life. Grace loves John, and John loves her, and that would be wonderful, except that John, like Grace, has unfinished business: He's haunted by the childhood death of his younger brother. He's never stopped feeling responsible.

Nicolás Pureco, «Nick», es dueño de tres exitosos restaurantes de comida mexicana en Chicago. Una noche, mientras divaga sobre la pérdida de sus recuerdos, tiene una visión espectral en la que sus padres muertos le instan a que regrese a su tierra natal. Hace entonces varios viajes a la región de México de la que eran oriundos, acompañado por su mujer, Lily, quien teme por la posible demencia de su marido.

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest.