30 Best Magical Realism Books

Book Summary

Twenty-seven year old Ava is struggling one month after the death of her ex-boyfriend. Although she lives in Ohio, she receives a mysterious letter with an ad to become a caretaker for a cantankerous older man and his cat in the small town of Driftwood on the Alabama coast. Despite her normally fearful approach to life and her suspicion that her ex is now haunting her, Ava takes a risk and heads to the quaint beachside town.

In Driftwood, thirty-eight year old Maggie runs Magpie’s, a coffee and curiosity shop where magic is found when the old and new are paired. While she’s cheerful on the outside, she’s still mourning the loss of her mom and worried about her aging father. Newcomer Ava might be just what Maggie needs to learn to let go of the past.

Magical realism is sprinkled throughout the novel with unexplained predictions and events, and through the use of butterflies.

Book Summary

Lucy is a 26-year-old teacher’s aide hoping to adopt her student, seven-year-old Christopher. He tragically lost his parents, but she needs to be in a better financial situation for both the actual adoption process to be approved and to take care of Christopher long-term.

She’s always found comfort in books, especially the Clock Island series by Jack Masterson. The author stopped writing and became reclusive years ago, but she still regularly re-reads his work. Just when Lucy is about to give up on adopting Christopher, Jack Masterson re-emerges and announces a new book. However, it’s not a standard release. Four contestants will get to come to the real Clock Island and compete for a chance to win the single copy in existence, which is worth at least six figures.

Book Summary

If you could find out exactly how many years you have left to live, would you want to know?

On the same day, all around the world, every person over the age of 22 receives an identical box. Inside each is a string. At first, no one knows what the strings mean, but it soon becomes apparent that a long string means long life and a short string foretells a life cut short.

As society responds to the revelation of the boxes, each person must make a choice – do you want to know how long you will live? If so, what will you do with that knowledge? And what if your choice is different from those you care about most?

These are the dilemmas facing the eight protagonists in The Measure, whose fates become interwoven as their individual stories unfold.

Book Summary

Nora has decided she is done. Done with the way her life is going. In a moment of darkness, she attempts suicide, but she finds herself in the Midnight Library between life and death. The shelves go on and on, and inside each book is a life that she could have lived, had she made just one different choice somewhere along the way – from following dreams to pursuing different careers to undoing old breakups.

Each time she opens a book, she finds herself living that alternate life, and she is faced with the decision of whether she wants to permanently exchange her life for a new one. As she visits these alternate realities, she’ll have to decide not only which life she wants, but also what makes life worth living in the first place.

Book Summary

On Mallow Island, off the coast of South Carolina, sits an old cobblestone building in the shape of a horseshoe. It’s called the Dellawisp, named after the tiny turquoise birds who reside there alongside its human tenants. The building has an air of magical secrecy.

When 19-year-old Zoe inherits her late mother’s apartment at the Dellawisp, she meets the quirky and secretive neighbors, including a henna artist, a lonely chef, middle-aged sisters (one of whom is a hoarder), and three ghosts. The property is overseen by Frasier, who has a special affinity for the birds.

When one of the residents turns up dead, the other neighbors search for answers, but each is also hiding secrets of their own. The investigation leads to the island’s famous but reclusive author and to a long-lost relative of the sisters.

Book Summary

Clementine has been protecting her heart ever since the worst day of her life. She wants to find love, but she’s scared to get hurt. But then she meets a man with kind eyes, a Southern drawl, and a taste for lemon pies. He’s precisely the kind of man she’d fall for… if only he didn’t exist seven years in the past.

Her late aunt always told her that her apartment was a pinch in time – a place where moments blend together like watercolors. And it seems she was right. When she finds this man standing in the kitchen and realizes she’s living seven years in his future, she knows she shouldn’t let her heart get involved. But she just might anyway.

Book Summary

While jogging near her home on Nantucket, novelist Vivi is killed in a hit-and-run accident. After her death, Vivi is granted the opportunity to watch what happens to her family for one final summer. In addition to watching, she gets three “nudges” to change the outcome of events on Earth.

Between troubles for her children, the investigation into her death, and a childhood secret wrapped into the final novel she was writing, Vivi must be cautious with her nudges while learning to let her family make decisions without her.

Book Summary

Neighbors Celeste and Wendy are both moms. As far as they can tell, that’s the only thing they have in common – other than their mutual disdain for each other!

Celeste is a stay-at-home mom who spends her days volunteering and creating a Pinterest-worthy life that makes other moms despise her. Wendy is a career-driven working mom who lives by her minute-to-minute schedule as she balances her business and keeps things afloat at home.

After a bit too much sangria at a softball potluck, Celeste and Wendy wake up in each other’s bodies – Freaky Friday style. Soon everything they thought they knew about the other is turned upside down. Their messy lives are about to get a whole lot more complicated, but along the way, they’ll discover they might not be so different after all.

Book Summary

Lillian and Madison were boarding school roommates and friends from very different backgrounds. However, they’ve barely spoken since a scandal forced Lillian to leave school.

A decade later, Lillian’s life is not on the track she’d imagined for herself, so when she receives a call from Madison asking her to help care for Madison’s twin step-children who are moving in, Lillian figures she has nothing to lose.

But there is a catch: both kids spontaneously burst into flames when they are agitated. Madison needs to keep this fact somehow a secret while her husband runs for public office. Despite knowing nothing about raising kids, Lillian agrees to take on the role, and throughout one summer, she and the kids learn together how to keep their cool – literally. It may even prove to be the start of a whole new life for Lillian.

Book Summary

Ashlyn Greer is a rare-book dealer who loves the smell of old paper, ink, and leather. Old volumes appeal to all of her senses, including a sense the rest of us don’t have. She is gifted with the unique ability to feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners.

When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound, unpublished volumes with no evidence of how they came to be, she gets wrapped up in a decades-old literary mystery. Each volume bears a curious inscription, as well as the emotional fingerprints of the authors, Hemi and Belle. The books tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the closer she comes to bringing closure to their love story, and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

Book Summary

Kerala, on India’s southern coast, is a slender, coastal state with almost 373 miles of Arabian Sea coast and beaches. Being surrounded by water makes this a popular tourist destination. But for the family at the heart of this novel, being surrounded by water has plagued three generations. In every generation, at least one person dies by drowning.

This new literary fiction epic is a tale of love, faith, and medicine in which the family is seeking answers to this strange secret. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life.

Book Summary

In the present-day timeline, Caroline arrives in London on what was supposed to be a 10th Anniversary trip with her husband. Just days before the trip, she discovers that her husband had been cheating on her, so she’s making the trip solo in hopes of sorting out what her future will hold.

Her passion for history – the career path she gave up when she married her husband – is unexpectedly reignited when she stumbles upon a small vial with an unusual etching. As she seeks to learn more about where the vial may have come from, she begins to unravel the story behind a string of “apothecary murders” dating back to the 1790s.

This dual-timeline novel transports us back to 18th-century London where we meet Nella, a female apothecary with a dark secret. As Nella’s story slowly unfolds in the 1791 timeline, Caroline gets closer to discovering Nella’s secret in the present. However, when their two stories collide, it’s Caroline who may face some unexpected consequences.

Book Summary

Even as a child in 1910, Sara recognized that she was a gifted Jewish matchmaker and a seeker of soulmates. But on New York’s Lower East Side, this profession is dominated by devout older men who see a talented woman as a threat to their traditions and livelihood.

Two generations later, Abby is a successful Manhattan divorce attorney with some of the city’s wealthiest clients. When her beloved Grandma Sara dies, Abby inherits her collection of handwritten journals in which Sara recorded details of her matches. The pages seem to provide Abby with more questions than answers – including why the work she once found so compelling suddenly feels inconsequential and flawed.

Book Summary

After Isla’s father passes away, she’s sent from her home in New Jersey to stay with her grandmother and great-aunt in Puerto Rico. When she is eighteen, her grandmother dies. It is only then that Isla discovers that she has a family gift that has been passed down through her family’s cuentistas (storytellers).

The tales of the dead family storytellers are brought back to life, replaying themselves over and over right before her eyes. At first, Isla is enchanted by this connection to the family cuentistas, but when she has a vision of an old murder mystery, she realizes that she must try to solve it in order to close the loop before these stories cost her her life.

Book Summary

This book comes with a unique narrator – Music. Music tells the story of an extraordinarily gifted musician, Frankie Pesto. Starting at Frankie’s funeral, you’ll look back at his Forrest Gump-like life as he navigates the music world. From 1950s jazz to the Grand Ole Opry, Elvis, and even Woodstock, Frankie both finds and loses fame. And all along the way, he’s searching for his childhood love.

When Frankie loses his ability to play the guitar, he disappears for decades, returning just in time for a mysterious final farewell.

Book Summary

Joanna Teale has thrown herself into dawn-to-dusk work studying nesting birds in rural Illinois for her graduate program. It’s a great distraction from the loss of her mother and her own breast cancer battle.

Out of nowhere, a bruised girl named Ursa shows up. The girl claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles, but provides no other background information. Concerned about the bruises, Joanna lets the girl stay while enlisting the help of her reclusive neighbor to solve the mystery of where the girl came from.

Over the summer, miracles occur, but as the end of summer and the 5th miracle approach, Ursa’s dangerous past also gets closer.

Book Summary

In this charming debut novel, Widower Tova works at the Sowell Bay Aquarium to occupy her mind and time. She takes pride in cleaning perfectly every night, even though she doesn’t need the money. She loves all the aquarium life but forms a special bond with the intelligent (and curmudgeonly) octopus named Marcellus.

He’s just as surprised to feel friendly toward this human who visits him nightly. Soon, he connects the sadness he sees in her with something he saw in the ocean long ago. Can he help her solve the mystery of her son’s disappearance 30 years ago?

Book Summary

In The Snow Child, you’ll be transported to remote 1920s Alaska. Jack and Mabel are nearing 50 when they decide to move to Alaska. As newcomers to the harsh environment, it is a struggle for them. Between the intense physical labor required and the even more extreme loneliness, they’re not sure they’ve made the right decision with the move.

Then, during the first snowfall of the year, they decide to have some fun and build a child out of snow. In the morning, the snow child is gone, but they see a young girl running through the trees with the items they had used to dress the snow child. Is she real, or are they hallucinating and dreaming of the child they’ve always wanted?

Book Summary

This debut novel written by Ruth Emmie Lang is magical, both in story and language. Weylyn Grey was raised by wolves after being orphaned. After surviving on his own in nature, he has developed some supernatural abilities. He first realizes his powers when he single-handedly stops a tornado.

His powers, amazing as they may be, tend to manifest at inopportune times and places. In Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance, Weylyn’s story is told by those who have encountered him throughout many years.

Book Summary

Ted is a writer, struggling at work and in relationships. His closest companion is his elderly dachshund, Lily. They do everything together. But now Lily has a new condition that Ted is having a hard time accepting.

This quirky novel turns into an adventure, which then spins into magical realism and beautifully written truths of loss and longing. It reminds us how it feels to love fiercely, how difficult it can be to let go, and how the fight for those we love is the greatest fight of all.

Book Summary

Harry has always loved trees, but he spends his days behind a computer as an analyst in a treeless US Forest Service office. After his wife dies suddenly and tragically, Harry can’t seem to move forward. One day he decides to follow his wife’s advice – he quits his job and escapes to the remote woods of northeastern Pennsylvania to be with the trees.

There he meets Oriana, a young girl who has suffered a significant loss of her own. She spends most of her time in the forest with her book in the treehouse her father bought for her. They bond over their love of the forest and the trees.

The octogenarian librarian in town gives Oriana a strange, handwritten book called The Grum’s Ledger. With this book as their guide, Oriana helps Harry believe in the magic, if only he’s willing to open his eyes and see it.

Book Summary

This is a moving coming-of-age novel about how fragrances connect us to our memories and help us share our lives. Emmeline grows up on a remote island with her father, who teaches her about the world through her sense of smell. Throughout her enchanted childhood, the one thing her father won’t explain, however, are the mysterious scents stored in the drawers that line the walls of their cabin, or the origin of the machine that creates them.

As Emmeline gets older, her curiosity gets the better of her and she finds herself vaulted out into the real world, with all its ups and downs – love, betrayal, ambition, and revenge.

Book Summary

The House of the Spirits is a sweeping epic that follows three generations of Chilean women through good times and bad. Spanning WWI through the 1970s, through the Trueba family, Allende illuminates the history, political unrest, and cultural richness of 20th-century Chile. 

Book Summary

This modern classic crosses genres from historical fiction and romance to magical realism. Set in 1910-1917 Mexico, Like Water for Chocolate is the story of the all-female De La Garza family. The youngest daughter, Tita, is expected to follow the Mexican tradition of caring for her mother instead of having her own husband and family.

However, she’s fallen in love with Pedro, who has been seduced by Tita’s magical food. So, knowing the tradition, Pedro takes the extreme action of marrying Tita’s sister Rosaura so he can stay close to Tita. And that is just the beginning of Tita’s problems, which include everything from a kidnapped sister to war.

The story is told in monthly installments, with recipes and home remedies mixed into the romance.

Book Summary

In this 2017 National Book Award winner, you’ll be transported through Mississippi’s past and present. Magical realism is in full effect in this literary fiction novel. The story is told from multiple perspectives, including that of a ghost.

Jojo lives with his grandparents and toddler sister, with their drug-addicted mother making occasional appearances in their lives. Their grandmother, Mam, is dying of cancer, leaving their grandfather, Pop, to run the household. When Jojo’s white father is released from prison, Leonie picks up the children and heads out on a dangerous road trip to Parchman Farm (a notorious, real Mississippi prison).

Book Summary

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky. And her new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless. The baby whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Throughout the novel, the ghost of Beloved embodies the collective memories of enslaved people, allowing them to tell their stories.

Book Summary

Cora is enslaved on a cotton plantation in Georgia, where she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans. With womanhood on the horizon, she knows that she’ll soon face even greater problems and pain unless she is able to escape to freedom. When she learns about the Underground Railroad, she decides to take the terrifying risk to escape. In this novel, however, the railroad is not merely a network of secret routes and safe houses. Instead, Colson Whitehead employs an element of magical realism. His Underground Railroad has engineers and conductors operating a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath Southern soil

Along the way, Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. She is now being hunted as she continues to make her harrowing journey northward, state by state. She encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey, each created by the author to illustrate the unique terrors and dangers for African Americans in the pre-Civil War era.

Book Summary

In Exit West, two young people meet and fall in love in a country that is teetering on the brink of civil war. Nadia is fiercely independent, while Saeed is gentle and restrained. As the violence in the streets escalates and their city becomes overwhelmed with checkpoints and bomb blasts, they began to hear whispers about doors. Doors that can whisk people far away. When they feel they no longer have a choice, Nadia and Saeed find a door and step through. Leaving their old lives behind, they struggle to hold onto each other, their past, and the very sense of who they are.

Book Summary

This classic book is considered one of the most influential books in the magical realism genre. It tells the story of the mythical town of Macondo, Colombia, through the multi-generational history of the Buendía family. Throughout a century, it chronicles the conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love.