Fantasy Realism

Winter lasts most of the year at the edge of the Russian wilderness, and in the long nights, Vasilisa and her siblings love to gather by the fire to listen to their nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, Vasya loves the story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon. Wise Russians fear him, for he claims unwary souls, and they honor the spirits that protect their homes from evil. Then Vasya’s widowed father brings home a new wife from Moscow. Fiercely devout, Vasya’s stepmother forbids her family from honoring their household spirits, but Vasya fears what this may bring.

“It’s hard to believe that the agreement between myself and her father was forged so long ago. Tonight I am bringing my bride home, regardless of what anyone has to say about it.” There was a pause in the conversation. “You know, boss, there will be other people who will want to talk to and dance with Lexi tonight. It is her 21st birthday ball. Is that going to be an issue?” Xander stifled a growl. He knew it was her birthday but he didn’t want anyone near her. “I'll just have to stay by her side all evening. Conversation is fine, but no one else will dance with her. No one ...

A year ago, Sunny Nwazue, an American-born Nigerian girl, was inducted into the secret Leopard Society. As she began to develop her magical powers, Sunny learned she had been chosen to lead a dangerous mission to avert an apocalypse, brought about by the terrifying masquerade Ekwensu. Now, stronger, feistier, and a bit older, Sunny is studying with her mentor, Sugar Cream, and struggling to unlock the secrets in her strange Nsibidi book.

I've spent most of my very long life an outcast. Driven out of my home and dread by my mother, I wandered the seas of Serai until the Dragon God, the source of the Sea Dragons' magic, was trapped by the Dragon Goddess. Without a connection to Karadas, my kind were forced into hibernation. All but me. Because I'm different. I have more Fire in me than other Sea Dragons, enough to make me something else. I avoided hibernation, but without my Water magic, I couldn't survive in the sea. I left the water and didn't return for centuries, not until the Dragon God was freed and the Sea Dragons woke...

In a world where vampires and witches live in secrecy, 16-year-old Larissa Norton's life is turned upside down when her vampire parents are murdered and a dark presence begins pursuing her. Forced to flee into hiding, Larissa discovers she is not who she thought she was. She learns her real name is Larissa Dubois, a powerful witch born in 1920s New Orleans.

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.

Mark Sandoval - resolutely arrogant, covered head to foot in precise geometric scarring, and still marginally famous after Hollywood made an Oscar-winner based off his memoir years before - has been strongly advised by his lawyer to leave the country following a drunken and potentially fatal hit and run. When a woman sends Sandoval grainy footage of what appears to be a unicorn, he quickly hires an assistant and the two head off to the woman's farm in Hvildarland, a tiny, remote island off the coast of Iceland.

The mystical Britain sites list the Welsh village of Llangynog as a “thin place,” a place where the lines between worlds can be crossed, at least by those whose minds are open to such things. Bronwyn Bagley is one of those people, although she wants desperately not to be. Aware that she is different from others, she longs for a normal life, a life with a career and – someday – a relationship with someone who won’t see her as an oddity. Thus, she waits and hopes, while guarding her secrets closely. Detective Chief Inspector Will Cooper has suffered an unwilling transfer to the ...

Miss Posterity's Academy for Practical Magic is the best kindling school in New York City - and wealthy 12-year-old Emma Harris is accustomed to the best. But when her father dies, leaving her penniless, Emma is reduced to working off her debts to Miss Posterity alongside Izzy, a daring servant girl who refuses to let her magic be snuffed out, even if society dictates she must. Emma and Izzy reluctantly form a pact: If Izzy teaches Emma how to survive as a servant, Emma will reveal to Izzy what she knows about magic.

Maria... "On the white satin comforter was a vision of caramel perfection. Rose-scented candles grouped about the bed painted her skin in an amber-golden glow. She was wearing one of his crisp white dress shirts and nothing else. The fine Egyptian cotton covered her slight figure to mid-thigh where the abrupt transition from white to warm mocha-colored skin drew his eyes down along long smooth tapered legs to perfectly formed feet with nails painted a deep rose color.In the third Nexus book, things start with an almost routine rescue mission that quickly escalates into the most hazardous ...

Make a wish. The words have haunted Rashmi since she first heard them whispered the night before her mother died, when she was just 10 years old. Rashmi’s mother used to tell her stories of a magical garden lit only by the moon, whose blossoms grant wishes. For years, Rashmi believed the whisper somehow came from the mysterious moon garden of her mother’s stories and that her own failure to respond—to wish—may have cost her mother her life.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

Jon successfully killed Belphegor...but he forgot that everything comes with a cost. The cost may need to be paid with money...or life. With his archenemy alive in the game, Jon's days are going to be troublesome. But killing Kurush in-game is not simple as killing Kurush was in real life. Here, Kurush holds power. The power of a whole second-tier guild. With his puny prowess, can Jon go against a second-tier guild and complete his mission that put him in prison in real life? Find out where Jon's life will take him next.

A street preacher decked out in denim robes and running shoes, Julius is a source of inspiration for a community that knows nothing of his scandalous origins. But when a nearby mental hospital releases its patients to run amok in his neighborhood, his trusted if bedraggled flock turns expectantly to Julius to find out what's going on.

The Dragons of Serai Series continues in another gripping, sexy tale that crosses worlds. Get transported to Serai, a world populated by exciting fantasy races and ruled by Dragons searching for their eternal mates. My life wasn't going anywhere, but it was still my own. Until the day a light appeared on a Hawaiian beach and swallowed me whole. It spat me out into a deadly underwater world full of monsters and magic. But I was saved from the monsters by the greatest monster of all—a Sea Dragon. A monster who is also a man. A king, no less. And having saved my life, he claimed it as his. ...

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

Dara is a normal woman living a normal life, as she approaches her 25th birthday. Though her vivid dreams and wild imagination often take her on adventures of her mind, she never expected that one day, she would be roped into a plot of madness and magic by four gorgeous, amazing, pain-in-the-arse guys who come stomping into her life and change everything....

Eury comes to the Bronx as a girl haunted. Haunted by losing everything in Hurricane Maria - and by an evil spirit, Ato. She fully expects the tragedy that befell her and her family in Puerto Rico to catch up with her in New York. Yet, for a time, she can almost set this fear aside, because there's this boy.... Pheus is a golden-voiced, bachata-singing charmer, ready to spend the summer on the beach with his friends, serenading his on-again, off-again flame. That changes when he meets Eury. But some dangers are too powerful for even the strongest love.

A broken heart sent me running right into his arms. I live in a world of magic, but I'm a man of science. Nothing thrills me more than learning, be it a new language, culture, or the way something works. That is, until I fell for the Dragon Prince of Zaru. After he mated another man, I found myself listless, searching for something to ease the heartache. So when the offer of an archaeological job in Ha'tezan came to me, I accepted it instantly. I didn't ask what it paid or who was hiring me; I didn't care. I just needed to get out of Zaru. My employer is a king—King Xa'din of Ha'tezan. At...

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North.