Showing titles in Magical Realism

In the mid-1800s, Saint, an enigmatic and powerful conjure woman, always flanked by a silent companion, travels the South annihilating plantations and liberating the enslaved by means of purposeful violence and powerful magic. She founds a town for those she has freed–and for them alone. They name the town Ours. Surrounded by an impenetrable magical border raised by Saint's powers, Ours is invisible to the outer world and sits blissfully away from prying eyes and violent hands. Saint's mission is to kill slavery–to scourge its damage from the minds of her charges and to keep them safe forever.

Nestled in the mountain shadows of Alabama lies the little town of Wicklow. It is here that Anna Kate has returned to bury her beloved Granny Zee, owner of the Blackbird Café. It was supposed to be a quick trip to close the café and settle her grandmother’s estate, but despite her best intentions to avoid forming ties or even getting to know her father’s side of the family, Anna Kate finds herself inexplicably drawn to the quirky Southern town her mother ran away from so many years ago, and the mysterious blackbird pie everybody can’t stop talking about.

Èkó, the spirit of Lagos, and his loyal minion Tatafo weave trouble through the streets of Lagos and through the lives of the ‘vagabonds’ powering modern Nigeria: the queer, the displaced and the footloose. With Tatafo as our guide we meet these people in the shadows. Among them are a driver for a debauched politician, a lesbian couple whose tender relationship sheds unexpected light on their experience with underground sex work, a mother who attends a secret spiritual gathering that shifts her reality.

In a postapocalyptic Africa, the world has changed in many ways; yet in one region genocide between tribes still bloodies the land. A woman who has survived the annihilation of her village and a terrible rape by an enemy general wanders into the desert, hoping to die. Instead, she gives birth to an angry baby girl with hair and skin the colour of sand. Gripped by the certainty that her daughter is different - special - she names her Onyesonwu, which means 'who fears death?' in an ancient language.

After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, 14-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house - a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.

Young Irish nurse Ellen arrives at May Day House, tasked with helping the men there rehabilitate. But there’s something strange about the house, surrounded by water, on its own island in the Thames. And then there are the men: traumatised by their experiences of war, and subject to troubling methods in a desperate race to get them back to duty. As Ellen gets drawn into the world of May Day House, she starts to realise this will be no place to hide away from her own troubles…

They say a tiger that devours too many humans can take the form of a man and walk amongst us.... In 1930s colonial Malaya, a dissolute British doctor receives a surprise gift of an 11-year-old Chinese houseboy. Sent as a bequest from an old friend, young Ren has a mission: to find his dead master's severed finger and reunite it with his body. Ren has 49 days, or else his master's soul will roam the earth forever.

Delhi, 1997: It is India's fiftieth year of independence, the year of Hindu nationalists and atomic bombs. But twelve-year-old Adi has a bigger problem: his Ma has gone missing - again. Left with an ailing grandmother, a raging father and no answers, he finds an unlikely ally: a talking vulture who reveals itself to be a bureaucrat from the 'Department of Historical Adjustment'.

In the fifth book in the sensational Before the Coffee Gets Cold series translated from Japanese, the mysterious café where customers arrive hoping to travel back in time welcomes four new guests. They must follow the café's strict rules, however, and come back to the present before their coffee goes cold. Another moving and heartwarming tale from Toshikazu Kawaguchi, in Before we forget kindness our new visitors wish to go back into their past to move on their present, finding closure and comfort so they can embark on a beautiful future.

Mexico City, 1988. Long before iTunes or MP3s, you said "I love you" with a mixtape. Meche, awkward and fifteen, discovers how to cast spells using music, and with her friends Sebastian and Daniela will piece together their broken families, and even find love.

Tom is a photographer and dreamer, capturing snapshots of the city around him, talking to the people on the fringes of his world, always searching for something he knows is missing but can never quite grasp. He speaks to a beggar. He saves a woman from a gang on a darkened alley. He takes his photos...but only as he develops the negatives does he see the magical, hidden world he has brushed up against in all its beauty, and menace, and danger. And deep in those negatives is the clue he needs to continue his search.

Growing up in Alaska, young David Winkler is crippled by his dreams. At nine he dreams a man is decapitated by a passing truck on the path outside his family's home. The next day, unable to prevent it, he witnesses an exact replay of his dream in real life. The premonitions keep coming, unstoppably. He sleepwalks during them, bringing catastrophe into his reach. Then, as unstoppable as a vision, he falls in love at the supermarket (exactly as he already dreamed) with Sandy.

Emer is just a woman living in New York City who takes the subway, buys ice cream from the bodega on the corner, has writerly aspirations, and lives with her boyfriend, Con. But is this life she lives the only path she’s on?

Emery Blackwood's life was forever changed on the eve of her high school graduation, when the love of her life, August Salt, was accused of murdering her best friend, Lily. She'd once dreamt of running away with August, eager to escape the misty, remote shores of Saoirse Island and chase new dreams together. Now, she is doing what her teenage self swore she never would: living a quiet existence among this tight-knit community steeped in folklore and tradition, ruled by the seasons and ancient superstitions.

In the 1990s, Carter Wills was the lead singer of the English alt-rock band Mayluna, securing his place among music legends. His tortured-heart lyrics struck a chord. And so did his secret connection to a woman whose love changed all their lives. Who was she? Evie Waters’s two grown children discover an iconic photo in an old magazine of a “mystery girl” with Carter: their mother. It all started in a wistful time and place for Evie, her twenty-fifth summer.

Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant. As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world, they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.

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.

Relocated to a coastal town, widowed teacher Sarah Grey is slowly rebuilding her life, along with her young son Alfie. But after an inadvertent séance one drunken night, her world is shaken when she starts to experience frightening visions. She tries to explain them away. But Alfie sees them too and Sarah believes that they have become the targets of a haunting attack.

Fifteen years ago, two boys went missing at a state park in West Virginia. Six months later they mysteriously reappeared. Jeremy wouldn't say where they went and Rafe was unable, having no memory of their time lost in the woods though he bears terrible scars on his back that no one can explain. Now adults, Jeremy is a missing persons investigator with an uncanny ability to find lost and kidnapped girls. Meanwhile, Rafe has become a recluse, an artist unable to stop creating fantastical paintings and sculptures he shows to no one.

Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She's often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean 11 years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid.