Showing titles in Magical Realism

March 1976: St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch, at the start of the rainy season. A fisherman sings to himself in his pirogue, waiting for a catch but attracts a sea-dweller he doesn't expect. Aycayia, a beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid, has been swimming the Caribbean Sea for centuries. And she is entranced by this man David and his song.

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.

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.

Anne Gallagher grew up enchanted by her grandfather’s stories of Ireland. Heartbroken at his death, she travels to his childhood home to spread his ashes. There, overcome with memories of the man she adored and consumed by a history she never knew, she is pulled into another time. The Ireland of 1921, teetering on the edge of war, is a dangerous place in which to awaken. But there Anne finds herself, hurt, disoriented, and under the care of Dr. Thomas Smith, guardian to a young boy who is oddly familiar.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm - and the mysterious curse that has haunted them for generations. The madness that led to Susanna Farrow's disappearance left her daughter, June, to be raised by her grandmother. Everyone in Jasper is certain it's only a matter of time before she finds the same end, but June has kept secret that her unravelling has already begun.

As children, sisters Gillian and Sally were forever outsiders in their small New England town, teased, taunted and shunned for the air of magic that seems to sparkle in the air around them. All Gillian and Sally ever wanted was to get away. And eventually they do - one marries, the other runs as far from home as she can manage. Years later, however, tragedy will bring the sisters back together. And they'll find that no matter what else may happen, they'll always have each other.

In the fifth book in the sensational Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, the mysterious cafe where customers arrive hoping to travel in time welcomes four new guests: - The father who could not allow his daughter to get married - A woman who couldn’t give Valentine’s Day chocolates to her...

In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet. These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives.

On the evening of July 4th, Sylviane Rochas scatters her mother's ashes in New York and lets the changing wind blow her to the French seaside town of Marseille. For the first time in her life, Vianne holds the future in her own hands. Charming her way into a job as a waitress in a local bistrot, she knows that she is not here to stay - by the time her child is born in a few months' time, she must be gone.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn't one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she's the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they're long-stemmed roses, she's a dandelion: an adorable bloom that's actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her. When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning.

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. “If it keeps me awake,” says Marnie's husband Rob, a farmer, “I'll have to wring its neck.” But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple's future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds—and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them—bleed into one another.

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.

Haruki Murakami’s highly anticipated first novel in six years follows the narrator as his enduring memory of his formative teenage relationship leads him to the mysterious City, and a disruption to the barriers between the real and shadow worlds.

Saint-Malo, Brittany, 1758. To Lucinde Leon, the youngest daughter of a wealthy French shipowner, the high walls of Saint-Malo are more hindrance than haven. While her sisters are busy trying to secure advantageous marriages, Luce spends her days secretly being taught to sail by Samuel, her best friend—and an English smuggler. Only he understands how the waves call to her. Then one stormy morning, Luce rescues a drowning man from the sea. Immediately drawn in by the stranger's charm, Luce is plunged into a world of glittering balls and faerie magic, seduction and brutality.

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.

You’ve heard of the Afterlife. Welcome to the Beforelife. There are four of us: Samuel, Lucy, Thomas, and me – Eliza. We came into being the day Becca Valentine was born. We’ve been by her side ever since. What she doesn’t know yet, is that one day she might become our mother. Then two men come into her life. Both seeking her heart. And then we realise: everything rests on Becca’s love story. Because one of the men is Lucy and Thomas’s father. And the other is mine and Samuel’s. And there’s simply no way we can all be born.

In a village at the edge of the wilderness of Northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, a stranger with piercing blue eyes presents a new father with a gift - a precious jewel on a delicate chain, intended for his young daughter. Uncertain of its meaning, the father hides the gift away, and his daughter, Vasya, grows up a wild, willful girl, to the chagrin of her family. But when mysterious forces threaten the happiness of their village, Vasya discovers that she may be the only one who can keep the darkness at bay.

In Robbie Arnott’s widely acclaimed and much-loved first novel, a young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his sister, Charlotte - who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire. The answers to these riddles are to be found in this tale of grief and love and the bonds of family, tracing a journey across the southern island.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic and chilli peppers, creeping honeysuckle, and in the centre, growing through a cavity in the roof, a fig tree. The fig tree witnesses their hushed, happy meetings; their silent, surreptitious departures. The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish.