Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: Magical Realism

A woman who dies in a freak kebob accident on a first date is given the chance to revisit key moments of her life to see if different choices lead to the fulfillment she was missing.
(Description from NoveList)

When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives.
(Description from catalog)

In 1918, field nurse Laura Iven returns to Belgium to uncover the truth about her brother Freddie's supposed death in combat, while Freddie, unable to return to the killing fields, take refuge with a mysterious man who has the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.--Description by NoveList

A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mother, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it's been just the three of them-her mother has brought home guests attimes, but none have ever stayed. Yet when her mother brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children's lives.
(Description from catalog)

Graham Patterson's life has hit a dead end. His career as a comedian is failing. The love of his life recently broke up with him and he literally has no idea what to do next. With nothing to lose, he buys a new car and hits the road, planning to drive across country and hopefully figure out his next moves before reaching California. But along the way Patterson does something his old self would never have even considered: he gets tattooed by a brilliant tattoo artist in North Carolina. The decision sets off a series of extraordinary events that changes his life forever in ways he never could have imagined.
(Description from catalog)

In 1908 Manchuria, Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the identity of a dead courtesan, while a secretive woman named Snow, seeking vengeance for her lost child, navigates the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits to find a murderer.--Description by NoveList

When called upon, young Weatherly Wilder can talk the death out of the dying and save their lives—only once, never twice. But this truly unique gift comes at a price, rooting Weatherly to people who only want her around when they need her and resent her backwater ways when they don’t.
(Description from NoveList)

A high-concept speculative novel about heartache, hope, and human resilience, this book explores the path of grief and healing, a journey at once profoundly universal and unique to every person, posing the questions: How do we heal in the wake of great loss? And how far are we willing to go in order to be healed?
(Description from NoveList)

When Cornelia joins Napoleon's army as a traveling naturalist with the power to heal, she meets the sister she never knew existed on the opposite side of the battlefield and together, they must use the magic of flowers to solve the mystery of their mother's death, while fighting for their survival.
(Description from catalog)

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.
(Description from NoveList)

Set in an unnamed valley-surrounded by other valleys, each twenty years apart in time-a masterful, moving literary speculative novel in which the Conseil determines if a bereaved resident can cross the border to the past or the future on a "mourning tour." One sixteen-year-old Conseil candidate spots two visitors from the future, but is shocked when she recognizes them as the parents of the boy she loves. (Description from catalog)

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover, sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.
(Description from Amazon)

The story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.
(Description from Amazon)

Note: Han Kang is the recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize for literature.

Moving into Akbar Manzil, a ruined mansion off the coast of South Africa, Sana stumbles upon the long-forgotten story of Meena, the original owner's second wife who died there tragically 100 years ago, awakening a grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who has haunted the mansion since Meena's mysterious death.
(Description from NoveList)

A hidden and nearly forgotten magic--of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life--holds the power to transform a young woman's relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space.
(Description from NoveList)

Settling at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in Island City, Silvia, struggling with her new reality, becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse and is determined to unravel the truth about this woman's life, and her own haunted past, which may cost her everything.
(Description from NoveList)

In Prague, a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting, on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie, Hero Tojosoa finds the lines between illusion and delusion, fact and interpretation blurring as tensions between the friends' different accounts of the past reach a new level.
(Description from NoveList)

A gorgeous debut, laced through with magic, following four generations of women as they seek to chart their own futures.
(Description from NoveList)

Cursed with immortality at the age of 9, but with a requirement that she stays in perpetual motion, Aubry flees Paris and embarks on a century-spanning, globe-trotting odyssey, seeking a cure and discovering a world beyond the boundaries of time and space. (Description from catalog)

"Enter a Filipino fantasy world where myth, magic, and mystery collide! On the shadowy, noir-tinged streets of Manila, two friends seek a cure for a mysterious malady. To add to their problems, the Magic Prohibition Act has been adopted, and Lambana -- the supernatural realm of the Diwata -- has fallen. Slinky sirenas and wraith-like spirits populate this parallel universe of lurking danger and corruption. Will Lambana spill its secrets and provide the healing balm that's needed? Or will Conrad and Ignacio fail in their quest and perish in the process?" -- page [4] of cover.