15 Best Magical Realism Books
Doesn’t everyone need a bit of magic in their lives? Check out our 15 Best Magical Realism Books
15 Best Magical Realism Books
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1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the bestselling magical novel from Neil Gaiman, one of the most brilliant storytellers of our generation.
It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond this world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed – within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it.
His only defence is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.
2. Beloved by Toni Morrison
This brutally powerful, mesmerizing story is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
3. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides which thunder up staircases, the clouds which move in slow procession through the upper halls.
On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims?
Lost texts must be found; secrets must be uncovered. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous. The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
4. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Imagine a reality where migration didn’t involve a journey, and instead, anyone could simply walk through a door and be in another country. That’s what author Mohsin Hamid does in Exit West, his 2017 novel that tells the story of two characters — Saeed and Nadia — who meet and fall in love as their country breaks out in a civil war. After discovering that magic doors are popping up throughout their city that could transport them to a different country, the couple decide to leave their home and forge a new life together in an unknown place.
5. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
One spring afternoon, the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow. Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastical, funny, and devastating satire of Soviet life combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem, each brimming with historical, imaginary, frightful, and wonderful characters. Written during the darkest days of Stalin’s reign, and finally published in 1966 and 1967, The Master and Margarita became a literary phenomenon, signaling artistic and spiritual freedom for Russians everywhere.
6. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.
7. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
In this relentlessly inventive novel, Japan most popular fiction writer hurtles into the consciousness of the West. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World draws readers into a narrative particle accelerator in which a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is simultaneously cooler than zero and unaffectedly affecting, a hilariously funny and deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
8. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Based on a Russian fairy tale, The Snow Child is a tale of the shoring up of defences, psychological and literal, against the cold and dark. Set in the 1920s, the novel follows the move of middle-aged Jack and Mabel from ‘back east’ America to a remote homestead in Alpine, Alaska. Heavy with the loss of their firstborn and only child many years earlier, they seek to change the pattern of their lives in a context of icy ravines and wild silence.
9. The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage–and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child–but he is also gifted with a mysterious power.
This is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by the author’s bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, The Water Dancer is the story of America’s oldest struggle–the struggle to tell the truth–from one of our most beautiful writers.
10. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Equally tragic, joyful and comical, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a seamless blend of fantasy and reality. Marquez’s great masterpiece is the story of seven generations of the Buendia family and of Macondo, the town they have built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles.
A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book and only Aureliano Buendia can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy with comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.
11. The House of the Spirits By Isabel Allende
The astonishing debut of a gifted storyteller, The House of the Spirits is both a symbolic family saga and the story of an unnamed Latin American country’s turbulent history.
Isabel Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants including Esteban, the patriarch, a volatile and proud man whose lust for land is legendary and who is haunted by tyrannical passion for the wife he can never completely posses; Clara, the matriarch, elusive and mysterious, who foretells family tragedy and shapes the fortunes of the house and the Truebas; Blanca, their daughter, soft-spoken yet rebellious, whose shocking love for the son of her father’s foreman fuels Esteban’s everlasting contempt, even as it produces the grandchild he adores; and Alba, the fruit of Blanca’s forbidden love, a luminous beauty and a fiery and willful woman.
12. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
One morning in 1945, a boy is driven by his father to a mysterious place hidden away in the heart of the old city: The Cemetery of Lost Books. There, Daniel Sempere finds a cursed book which will change the course of his life and plunge him into a labyrinth of intrigue and secrets concealed in the dark soul of the city.
The Shadow of the Wind is a literary thriller set in Barcelona in the first half of the 20th century, from the fading splendor of Modernism to the shadowy post-war world. The Shadow of the Wind has elements of mystery, historical, and comedy genres but it is most of all a tragic love story which echoes through time.
I will never forget the morning when my father took me to visit The Cemetery of Lost Books for the first time…
13. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India’s independence, the infant Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But this coincidence of birth has consequences Saleem is not prepared for: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other “midnight’s children”–all born in the initial hour of India’s independence–and an uncanny sense of smell that allows him to sniff out dangers others cannot perceive. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem’s biography is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.
Ebullient, operatic, comic, and serious, this novel is a wild, astonishing evocation of the maturity of a vast and complicated land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy, Indian-style.
14. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas is a novel comprised of six interconnected tales, each written in a unique style and told from a differing perspective: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death row; and a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation. Each of David Mitchell’s characters has a comet-shaped birthmark and names, dates and references reoccur, hinting at a greater connection between the six protagonists.
15. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
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