Showing titles in Magical Realism

Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice - but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. He will learn to handcraft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, he can help. If there’s something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible.

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.

A 30-something painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors.

Kenna is a human in a magic-biased world, but a night at the club changes everything. There she meets four sexy strangers who unbind the magic she never knew she had. Now, she needs their help to train her wild and unpredictable magic and to find the truth of who she really is before someone she loves gets hurt. She is tormented by events in her past, and the secret she has guarded for so long threatens to destroy everything.

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.

Evie Berry is a 30-year-old wannabe screenwriter who spends her days managing a London cinema bar and making the podcast Pasta La Vista with her best friend, Ben. She's also obsessed with Hugo Hearst. Have you heard of him? Of course you have. He's only one of the most influential and not to mention swoon-worthy best-selling writers of his generation. When Evie's not hooking up with her on-again, off-again booty call 'Ever-Ready Freddy' (and sometimes even when she is), she fantasises about what might have been if she'd met Hugo years ago, when he was just a struggling writer.

Oriane is the skylark, and the sun only rises if she wills it. Every morning, she transforms from woman to bird, calling the dawn with her song. Seclusion has kept her safe her whole life – but it has also left her lonely, and craving freedom. When Oriane finally succumbs to the lure of the wild unknown, she is discovered in the gardens of the royal palace, where she is taken in by the king and treated like a goddess – and a prisoner.

Five months after Mel told her husband to leave, a ghost moved in upstairs. A young man who reminds her, with eerie intensity, of a past lover, someone who changed Mel's life and then vanished. When the man's travelling girlfriend joins him, Mel's obsession with the couple upstairs builds and the boundaries between the two homes begin to blur, with devastating consequences.

Here is a novel, set in Tokyo, of mysterious and intriguing chance encounters. The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night; Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke, and drink coffee until dawn. Then they realise they've met before through Eri, Mari's beautiful sister.

Combine an offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose, and the result is the remarkable story Dance Dance Dance: high-class call girls billed to MasterCard, a psychic 13-year-old dropout has a passion for talking heads, and meet a hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. Don’t forget the one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem.

Kafka Tamura runs away from home at 15, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The ageing Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people, fish tumble from the sky, a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night, a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II.

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.

He chose a class for ballrooms, not battlefields. Unfortunately, he got goblins instead of galas. When college dropout Justin gets isekai'd to Eyrth, he chooses Socialite—a build designed for charm and persuasion—hoping he'll never have to fight a single monster. At first, his plan works perfectly. A Paladin takes pity and gives him resources, he discovers he can actually flirt, and he lands his first job as a courier for the Royal Mail.

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.

Emma is having a fresh start. After a successful teaching career, an exciting new chapter awaits Emma – helping her fiancé Grayson run one of Beatrix Potter's farms. While imagining days spent supporting Grayson with his dream, working the land and helping with the animals, Emma harvests a dream of her own – to set up an alpaca-walking business around the farm. But working together isn’t as easy as Emma expected. Soon her dreams are in tatters and, broken-hearted, she must start over yet again.

The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?

Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'cemetery of lost books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son, Daniel, one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out La Sombra del Viento by Julian Carax. But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find.

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.

But when a body is discovered in the shadow of Cairndale, Charlie and the Talents realize there is even more at stake than they'd feared. For a new drughr has arisen, ferocious, horned, seemingly able to move in their world at will – and it is not alone. A malevolent figure, known only as the Abbess, desires the dust for her own ends. And deep in the world of the dead, a terrible evil stirs - an evil which the corrupted dust just might hold the secret to reviving, or destroying forever.

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet.