Showing results for "the-women" in Magical Realism

Five generations of Sadie Duncan’s descendants claimed the beautiful Wild Hill as their home, each generation of witches stronger than the last. Then, in the aftermath of a tragedy, the last of the Duncans, prophesised to be the most powerful of their kind, abandoned Wild Hill forever. Brigid moved to California and turned her gift into fame and fortune. Her sister Phoebe settled on a ranch in Texas, where women visit in secret for her tonics, and Phoebe’s daughter, Sybil, became a famous chef.

The pale-skinned, black-eyed baby is a bad omen. That’s one thing the people on the old plantation are sure of. The other is that Miss Rue - midwife, healer, crafter of curses - will know what to do. But for once Rue doesn’t know. Times have changed since her mother, Miss May Belle, held the power to influence the life and death of her fellow slaves. Freedom has come. The master’s Big House lies in ruins. But this new world brings new dangers, and Rue’s old magic may be no match for them.

A Year of Marvellous Ways is the much anticipated and utterly beguiling new novel from Sarah Winman, author of the international best seller When God Was a Rabbit. Cornwall, 1947. Marvellous Ways is a 90-year-old woman who's lived alone on a remote creek for nearly all her life. Recently she's taken to spending her days sitting on a mooring stone by the river with a telescope. She's waiting for something - she's not sure what, but she'll know it when she sees it.

When Caitlin inherits a significant sum of money on her fortieth birthday, she decides to break the habits of a lifetime and throw caution to the winds. She's about to tell her husband Paul that they're leaving London on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to Eat Pray Love their way around the world, only ... she doesn't tell Paul that, because before the candles are lit, he tells her that he's very much in love with someone else. After a drunken night trying to console herself, Caitlin books tickets to Australia - anything to get as far away as possible.

After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together, their fates become intertwined as they work side-by-side at this Sisyphean task.

For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives. But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder…where nothing is as it seems.

When Tilda Finch is diagnosed with invisibility, she's not overly surprised—she's felt invisible for years. She has a good life and a successful business called This Is A Sign, selling inspirational quotes on merchandise. But she's never really recovered from her divorce. Or, if she's honest, her childhood. Tilda's past has taken a toll and she's lost sight of herself. Now, with the possibility of completely disappearing, she must face the trauma of her past and rewrite the way she perceives the world, and herself.

The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday - school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents - with the surreal-rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats - Cassie's realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.

Meet Endurance Proudfoot, the bonesetter’s daughter: clumsy as a carthorse, with a tactless tongue and a face she’s sure only a mother could love. Durie only wants one thing in life—to follow her father and grandfather into the family business of bonesetting. It’s a physically demanding job, requiring strength, nerves of steel and discretion—and not the job for a woman. But Durie isn’t like other women.

When Tartelin Brown accepts a job with the reclusive Marianne Stourbridge, she finds herself on a wild island with a mysterious history. Tartelin is tasked with hunting butterflies for Marianne’s research. But she quickly uncovers something far more intriguing than the curious creatures that inhabit the landscape. Because the island and Marianne share a remarkable history, and what happened all those years ago, has left its scars and some terrible secrets. As Tartelin pieces together Marianne’s connection to the island, she must confront her own reasons for being there.

"THE OLD WOMAN IZERGIL" is a short romantic story by Maxim Gorky. Originally published at the end of the nineteenth century, the book is composed of three chapters in the format of "a story within a story." The narration is done on behalf of the author and the heroine, the old woman Izergil. The book explores the ideas of freedom, the true meaning of life and of love.

Carrie Morgan expects trouble when she returns to Woodsmoke after ten years. What she does not predict is the beautiful stranger who walks into her life with the first frost and with whom Carrie begins to fall in love. Bound to her family’s book of spells and a deep magic that flows from the mountains, Carrie’s family warn that her new love is a curse who will disappear when the frost thaws.

After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises. The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles.

For centuries, the Owens family has been cursed in matters of love. When beloved Aunt Jet Owens hears the sound of the deathwatch beetle, she knows that it is a signal. She has finally discovered the secret to breaking the curse, but time is running out. She has only seven days to live. Unaware of the family’s witchcraft lineage and all it entails, one of the young sisters of the new Owens generation has fallen in love. As the curse strikes once again, her love’s fate hangs in the balance, spurring three generations of Owens to venture back to where it all began.

Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating chronic back pain, a failed marriage and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theatre director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hell-bent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

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.

Emmeline lives on a remote island with her father, who teaches her about the natural world through her senses. What he won’t explain are the mysterious scents stored in glass bottles that line the walls of their cabin, or the origin of the machine that creates them. As Emmeline grows, however, so too does her curiosity, until one day the unforeseen happens, and Emmeline is vaulted out into the real world—a place of love, betrayal, ambition, and revenge. To understand her past, Emmeline must unlock the clues to her identity.

On the outskirts of Tokyo, in a neighbourhood crossed by a commuter railway, local cats weave their way through the lives and homes of their owners as they navigate difficult times. A cat named Chobi sends silent messages of courage to a young woman, willing her to end a faltering relationship; a gifted artist fatally misunderstands her boss's enthusiasm for her paintings; a manga fan shuts herself away after the death of her friend, while her cat Cookie hatches a plan to persuade her outside.

Everyone knows that Addie Fullbright can’t keep a secret. Yet, twelve years ago, as her best friend lay dying, she entrusted Addie with the biggest secret of all. One so shattering that Addie felt she had to leave her hometown of Starlight, Alabama, to keep from revealing a devastating truth to someone she cares for deeply. Now she’s living a lonely life, keeping everyone at a distance. But when her beloved aunt gets a shocking diagnosis and asks her to come back to Starlight to help run the family bakery, Addie knows it’s finally time to go home again.

When best-selling author Carrie McClelland visits the windswept ruins of Slains Castle, she is enchanted by the stark and beautiful Scottish landscape. The area is strangely familiar to her but she puts aside her faint sense of unease to begin her new novel, using the castle as her setting, and one of her own ancestors, Sophia, as her heroine. Then Carrie realizes her writing is taking on a life of its own and the lines between fact and fiction become increasingly blurred.