Showing results by publisher "--Tyson Hanks" in Magical Realism

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.

On a wild and rugged island cut off and isolated to some, artist Nell feels the island is her home. It is the source of inspiration for her art, rooted in landscape, folklore and the feminine. The mysterious Inions, a commune of women who have travelled there from all over the world, consider it a place of refuge and safety, of solace in nature. All the islanders live alongside the strange murmurings that seem to emanate from within the depths of the island, a sound that is almost supernatural – a Summoning as the Inions call it.

Father Jared Osborne has received an extraordinary assignment from his superiors: Investigate an itinerant preacher stirring up deep trouble in Central Europe. His followers call him B, but his enemies say he’s something else: the Antichrist. However, the man Osborne tracks across a landscape of bars, cabarets, and seedy meeting halls is no blasphemous monster - though an earlier era would undoubtedly have rushed him to the burning stake. For B claims to be enunciating a gospel written not on any stone or parchment but in our very genes....

This Audible production expertly brings to life Salman Rushdie’s postcolonial masterpiece Midnight’s Children, available for the first time unabridged in audio. Written in the magical-realist style that Rushdie is renowned for, Midnight’s Children follows Saleem Sinai - a child gifted with extraordinary powers after being born at the exact moment India becomes independent. The captivating events that unfold act as an allegory for India’s transition from colonialism to independence as Saleem finds himself 'handcuffed to history', with his fate entwined with that of his newly independent state.

Maisie Marlowe has come to America in the search of a new life. When she unearths a beautiful, neglected old carousel, she seizes the opportunity to carve a thrilling new destiny for herself. But Maisie doesn't know that beneath its glittering facade, the carousel is hiding a dark secret. Twenty years ago, it was linked to a number of people inexplicably vanishing into thin air—and now history has begun to repeat itself . . .

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. They must follow the cafe’s strict rules, however, and come back to the present before their coffee goes cold. In another moving and heartwarming tale from Toshikazu Kawaguchi, 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.

Norway, 1662. A dangerous time to be a woman, when even dancing can lead to accusations of witchcraft. When Zigri, desperate and grieving after the loss of her husband and son, embarks on an affair with the local merchant, it's not long before she is sent to the fortress at Vardø, to be tried and condemned as a witch. Zigri's daughter Ingeborg sets off into the wilderness to try to bring her mother back home.

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm.

Strangers Jo, Adelaide and Kye are the least likely people to find themselves across the threshold of a bookshop. But as their midnight book club shows them that a single book can change everything, all three realise that their own stories can be rewritten.

Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked aeroplane blows apart high above the English Channel and two figures tumble, clutched in an embrace, towards the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India’s legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices. Washed up, alive, on an English beach, their survival is a miracle. But there is a price to pay. Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But chosen by whom? And which is which? And what will be the outcome of their final confrontation?

The Prisoner of Heaven returns to the world of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the Sempere & Sons bookshop. It begins just before Christmas in Barcelona in 1957, one year after Daniel and Bea from The Shadow of the Wind have married. They now have a son, Julian, and are living with Daniel's father at Sempere & Sons.

Fermin still works with them and is busy preparing for his wedding to Bernarda in the New Year. However something appears to be bothering him.

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.

Henry dreams of silence. A world without the clattering of carriages through cobbled streets, the distant cries of drunken brawls, the relentless ticking of the clock. Then he meets a fascinating, mysterious gentleman who sells just that. Precious silk that can drown out the clamour of the world – and everything Henry is so desperate to escape. Summoned to Sir Edward’s secluded factory to try to cure his young daughter’s deafness, Henry is soon drawn deeper and deeper into the origins of this otherworldly gift: a gift that has travelled from ancient Mediterranean glades to English libraries.

Bernie Moon's ambitions and dreams have been forgotten by everyone else - including Bernie herself. At 19 she was full of promise, but now facing 50 and going through the menopause, she's a fading light. Until the murder of a woman in a local park unlocks a series of childhood memories, and with them, a talent that she has hidden all her adult life. What happens when the frustrations and power of an older woman are finally given their chance to be revealed?

In Mr Hirasaka's cosy photography studio in the mountains between this world and the next, someone is waking up as if from a dream. There is a stack of photos on their lap, one for every day of their life, and now they must choose the pictures that capture their most treasured memories, which will be placed in a beautiful lantern. Once completed, it will be set spinning, and their cherished moments will flash before their eyes, guiding them to another world.

A blind man spends his days roaming the beaches of Kenya collecting shells, classifying them by feeling their whorls, spines and folds in his fingers. A young woman discovers that she can explore the inner world of an animal's mind by touching its freshly dead body. A refugee from Liberia, who cannot escape the horrors that he has witnessed, finds salvation in the clandestine act of burying the hearts of beached whales.

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.

When the Night Foxes boldly break into the Fourth Precinct’s Evidence Building, it causes quite the stir. As a Magical Examiner, Henri Davenforth is immediately called in. To his astonishment, Captain Gregson has him work the case like a detective. More astounding, he assigns Henri a partner - The Shinigami Detective. The woman is famous for killing the most destructive rogue witch of the century, and no one is quite certain where she’s from. Every officer in the precinct is either in awe of her, or a little frightened by her. Henri is just baffled.

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.

Satsuki has spent 30 years hating one man: did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm.