Magical Realism

Naniki, Oonya Kempadoo

“Time-bending, world-bending, heart-bending, Naniki is truly luminous … a lyrical spiritual Afro-Indigenous epic set in a climate ravaged Caribbean… two elemental beings, Amana and Skelele, must find their way across the present and the past if the world is to have a future.  Kempadoo has outdone herself: this is what […]

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The Morningside, Téa Obreht

After fleeing their home, Silvia and her mother have relocated to a crumbling luxury tower—the Morningside—in a not-so-distant future where their city is half underwater. This touching and inventive novel follows a young woman searching for meaning and belonging, both through her loving aunt’s stories and the enigmatic resident of […]

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Pure Colour, Sheila Heti

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has […]

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A Snake Falls to Earth, Darcie Little Badger

Darcie Little Badger introduced herself to the world with Elatsoe. In A Snake Falls to Earth, she draws on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure to weave another unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. It is not to be missed. I get how there’s a lot of uncertainty about the […]

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The China Garden, Liz Berry

When Clare moves with her mother from London to Ravensmere, an historic English estate, she can’t shake the feeling that the residents already know her, especially Mark, a maddeningly attractive biker. Clare also feels compelled to take midnight walks in Ravensmere’s abandoned China Garden. Then her mother reveals that their […]

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Strange Beasts of China, Yan GE

The novel’s environmental ethos is also very much of the now, with numerous, vivid descriptions of urban decay competing with the natural world. As an example, there’s a wistful moment where the novelist sees a bird rise into the air with… “an elongated body and exquisite movements, feathers as pale […]

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The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak

In The Island of Missing Trees, prizewinning author Elif Shafak brings us a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, memory and amnesia, human-induced destruction of nature, and, finally, renewal. –Penguin Elif Shafak hardly needs any introduction. Her beautifully designed books can be found everywhere, from airports […]

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Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Commencing in “our times” and set in the “Free Republic of Aburĩria,” the novel dramatizes with corrosive humor and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburĩrian people. Among the contenders: His High Mighty Excellency; the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the […]

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The House of Rust, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other […]

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Popisho, Leone Ross

A sensual novel, Popisho conjures a world where magic is everywhere, food is fate, politics are broken, and love awaits. Everyone in Popisho was born with a little something… The local name for it was cors. Magic, but more than magic. A gift, nah? Yes. From the gods: a thing […]

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Crow Winter, Karen McBride

Since coming home to Spirit Bear Point First Nation, Hazel Ellis has been dreaming of an old crow. He tells her he’s here to help her, save her. From what, exactly? Sure, her dad’s been dead for almost two years and she hasn’t quite reconciled that grief, but is that […]

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Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson

The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere […]

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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan

In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna’s aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight. When Anna’s finger vanishes and a few months later her […]

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Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger

Little Badger’s debut novel, “Elatsoe”… is a young adult fantasy about a 17-year-old Lipan Apache girl who can awaken the ghosts of dead animals and sets out to solve her cousin’s murder. –New York Times Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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Potiki, Patricia Grace

‘Destroy the land and sea, we destroy ourselves.’ On the remote coast of New Zealand, at the curve that binds land and sea, a small Maori community live, work, fish, play and tell stories of their ancestors. This novel was republished in February 2020 by Penguin Classics and was featured […]

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