Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Magical Realism

Margot Wayward is in manically gleeful self-destruct mode. Following the implosion of a ten-year relationship, she’s wilfully derailing her successful career, joyfully taking down men on dating apps, and living in total chaos. Until one day, when Margot has a vision of herself with a man she’s never met before. She doesn’t believe in fate. But when Margot meets single-dad Henry, the vision comes true: exactly as she’d foreseen it. As her future continues to reveal itself, a glimpse at a time, Margot realises she knows exactly what’s going to happen, and when.

Since her father’s death twelve years previously, our unnamed narrator, a pharmacist, has been living with her older sister Dong Ji in Five Poems Lake on the edge of the desert. The sun over their isolated town has begun to disappear in crescents, like a gibbous moon. These increments are reported on the evening news, while the temperature drops, the lake freezes over, and the trees start to die. One night, as the narrator returns from visiting a friend in hospital, she is accosted by a man who tries to assault her – but who transforms before her eyes into a Beacon.

Grace has always wanted to be a ballerina, ever since she first peered through the windows of the Near North Ballet company. The elegance of the dance seemed transcendent to an immigrant child of the working poor, and so, when she is orphaned, it is to the ballet that she flees. Years later, Grace is on the verge of becoming the company's new prima ballerina - though she is beginning to realise that achieving her long-held dream may not be the triumph she once envisioned.

When he arrives in Cuba at the close of the eighteenth century, Victor Hugues, a merchant sailor from Marseille, brings with him not only the idealism of the French Revolution but also its ambition and bloodlust. Landing at the Havana doorstep of a trio of wealthy, eccentric Creole orphans, he sweeps them across the Caribbean Sea to Guadeloupe, whose enslaved Africans he frees only then to exploit them in his fight against the British for colonial sovereignty. What ensues in Alejo Carpentier’s magical realist masterpiece is an explosive clash between the New World and the Old World.

'Kid' Wolffe is an up-and-coming boxer in 1920s New York. An honest fighter's got little chance at success on the mob-controlled circuit—until ambitious lieutenant 'Hinky' Friedman starts making moves to take over her boss's business, and sees a use for the kid. Teitelstam is a struggling tattoo artist, whose natural talent for ink magic won't amount to much without formal training. So he's got no idea why Hinky would offer him 10 times what he's worth to come work for her.

When Lu and George Barnes drop their only daughter, Pippa, off at college, they return to their Sonoma home to find that their paths have diverged. Confronted with an empty nest, Lu’s increasing dissatisfaction with their materialistic lives becomes impossible to ignore. She is most content outdoors, finding the animals in her backyard far superior company to her pretentious neighbors. In contrast, George is eager to throw himself into his business, a local winery with an elite clientele, as well as his art collection.

It all begins the night a leaflet comes through the door of unsuccessful novelist Herman Orff, promising a magical cure for writer's block. The strange treatment plunges him into a hallucinatory London dream world populated by figures mythical and real: a severed talking head, Vermeer's girl with a pearl earring, his lost love Luise and, beneath it all, the Kraken awaiting. As Herman will discover, creating art is a tough business.

'I have gone to look for a lion.' In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this note. But his decision has unexpected consequences. He will be pursued by his son, Boaz-Jachin, and by something else: a tawny-skinned, amber-eyed beast from another place and time, a bringer of life and death.

Childhood friends in the 1960s, Ivy and Abe were inseparable until a chance event tore them apart. Now in their early 70s, fate once again brings them together - both grey-haired, Ivy hand in hand with her grandson - to fill in the gaps of one another's lives. Each has experienced great passions as well as heartbreaking tragedies, but the time is finally right for them. Their love story seems, in the end, meant to be. But what if, in a parallel universe, chance had intervened and they'd met sooner?

A pause-resisting novel about a traveling salesman who arrives to sell dreams to a town rocked by a child's disappearance, both a thoughtful mediation on grief and a magical exploration of our innermost desires.

In the cafes and bars of Rosario, Argentina, there are sure to be many tall tales told. But none, perhaps, quite as spectacular as those recounted by Trafalgar Medrano. With a coffeepot and a pack of cigarettes to hand, he will nonchalantly tell you all about his otherworldly adventures: from studying dancing troglodytes on a mucky planet, to befriending the only chaotic man in a perfectly arranged society, to a close shave in 15th-century Spain. The things Trafalgar has seen....

Ebey’s End is a small town on an island off the Pacific coast, reachable only by ferry (assuming the gods are with you and it’s not a Tuesday). It’s a comfortable, familiar (but okay, fine, sometimes lonely) life for its resident grocer Anita Odom. That is, until fourteen-year-old July shows up on her doorstep. Taking in the recently orphaned daughter of an estranged cousin had not been on Anita’s to-do list. In fact, it’s a terrible idea. Anita is ill-suited, ill-prepared, and absolutely certain the entire enterprise will end in disaster—for both of them.

Rising star Jules Costa loves re-creating vintage recipes for her popular online cooking show. But when personal and professional disaster strikes, her only chance of saving her career is to complete her new cookbook before the end of the summer. Panicked, Jules returns to her family’s beloved olive farm on the shores of Italy’s stunning Lake Garda. Seeking culinary inspiration, she's hoping to convince her spunky eighty-year-old Nonna Bruna to share her precious collection of family recipes. Jules’ plans quickly go awry as she discovers Nonna’s cookbook has magical and unpredictable powers.