Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

It's 1899 and all of Europe is agape at the arrival of the new century. The world crackles with possibilities and people dance to the irresistible rhythms of money, sex, love and freedom. Swinging above them all is a showbiz sensation: a fierce, vulgar, pant-droppingly sexy trapeze artist called Fevvers.

Goodreads description

Wow! This book doesn't so much begin as launches - "Lor' love you, sir!" Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. What follows is a rollicking good read, full of invention, humour, earthiness and magic realism. This is a circus world in which chimps take over the management of their act, tigers waltz, a pig acts as management consultant to the circus owner spelling out advice in alphabet cards, clocks repeatedly strike midnight and of course a buxom Cockney aerialist hatched from an egg and now flies on dyed purple wings. Or do they? As Fevvers wonders at one point  Am I fact or am I fiction?

The book opens in a theatre dressing room strewn with underwear, discarded costumes and empty bottles where Fevvers assisted by Lizzie, her assistant and adoptive mother, tells a cynical reporter by the name of Walser the story of her youth and life to that point. Throughout the interview Fevvers constantly uses slight of hand and word to bemuse the young reporter, combining her physical presence and some apparently verifiable references to put him off the scent. We, the readers, watch as the game is played out and Walser is reeled in. This section sets up the rest of the book. Like a magician's dupe Walser is encouraged to focus on the wrong things, like the clock constantly striking twelve, while not focusing on the major (whether Fevvers really has wings). The clock episode is mirrored later in the book in which time passes at different speeds for the two protagonists. Indeed we readers sometimes feel like Walser in the dressing room and we certainly do at the end.

So is the magic just artifice - as in Life of Pi? No, this is more than a story told to befuddle. Everything is larger than life, in Fevvers' case quite literally. As I indicated above there are plenty of magic realism elements in the story, which we accept without question, perhaps because we are watching to see if Fevvers can really fly. The questions we are left with rather than diminishing our capacity to imagine increase it. The picture Angela Carter is painting is bigger than the canvas and we are left to think outside the frame. 

An important element in this book is its feminism. In addition to the wonderful Fevvers, an earthy goddess albeit one who flies, there is the ex-whore Lizzie who is politically active and scathing about men and authority and too can perform magic: For the things my foster mother can pull off when she sets her mind to it, you'd not believe! Shrinkings and swellings and clocks running ahead or behind you like frisky dogs. Then there are a series of women in Fevvers' life who have been the sexual and abused objects of mens cruelty and who find strength and love in other women. Men have always seen woman's body as at once real and magical. Fevver's body is a larger than life example of that, but it is one which Fevvers denies the men who crave to control and own it. For women Fevvers' wings are an assertion of a woman's right to soar. My body was the abode of countless freedom. It is often said of magic realism that it is a means of the oppressed to express themselves. If women's experience of reality is a denial of access to power then it becomes necessary to create an alternative reality. It is therefore appropriate if magic realism is used to explore the magical strength of women. This is something that interests me as a writer. I too have chosen to use magic realism to explore the potential of women in my trilogy about the healer Judith. 

by Zoe Brooks

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska, The Snow Child was a bestseller on hardback publication, and went on to establish itself as one of the key literary debuts of 2012.

Alaska, the 1920s.  Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before.  When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in their hearts for her?

Written with the clarity and vividness of the Russian fairy tale from which it takes its inspiration, The Snow Child is an instant classic.

Amazon description

This book seems to be everywhere – the publisher certainly has been pushing it. I bought my hardback copy at a price of a bargain paperback. At the time I was not considering my magic realism challenge, so for a while it sat in my to-read book pile waiting for an appropriate time. That time came with the challenge. So is the book worth the publisher’s efforts? In one word – yes. This is my sort of book – undoubtedly magic realism, beautifully written with well-drawn characters.

In plotting terms the book is not overly complex, it can’t be being so closely based on the fairytale. Fairytales are a wonderful source of ideas for books, but by definition they tend to be short and stripped down. The fairytale is referred to throughout the book including the various endings of the different versions, this sets up part of the plot driver of the book – which ending will the writer opt for or none. Will, as in the Life of Pi, we be told at the end that there is a rationale reason for the magic? Some of the characters, including at times Jack, try to explain away the unearthly nature of Faina. There are times in the book where the story appears to be going in that direction. I will not spoil the ending for you by revealing which the path the books takes in the end. Another plot driver is the nature of Faina – is she a real human child, is she created by the couple from the snow or is she both?

As I seem to be saying a lot in my reviews on this blog, the setting of the book – the Alaskan wilderness – is almost as much a character as the humans who inhabit it. Eowyn Ivey lives in Alaska and describes it superbly – its beauty, richness and starkness. It is a landscape of contrasts. The seasons are extreme, with the winter dark and deep with snow, the summer with endless sun "the colors were too sharp full of yellow sun and blue sky" the spring "a damp, moldy dreariness, something like loneliness." The landscape and its weather impacts on the feelings of the characters. Faina of course is of the snow, which fills the books pages in drifts, she has the delicacy of a snowflake and the toughness of a cranberry bush in winter. The Alaskan wildlife features prominently in the book, Faina has a fox companion and both she and the other characters are very capable of hunting, killing and gutting animals for food, something described in some detail.

At the heart of the book is the relationship between Jack and Mabel. This delighted me, it rang so true. As a 50-something woman I was pleased to see that the writer showed the love between the two, whilst at the same time exploring how when we love someone so dearly we are sometimes afraid to express our feelings. The two still have moments of high spirits and it is in one of those that they create the snow child in the yard. I read on Goodreads a reviewer saying that the couple’s grief at the loss of a baby annoyed her because it suggested that people (women) were not fulfilled without children. I had no such problem - for some people the loss or absence of children can be a constant pain and such people are driven to do desperate things. Perhaps it is Mabel’s longing that it is the magic that initiates the snow girl. Mabel is not a weak little female, as the book progresses and as Jack is forced by circumstance to accept, she becomes an active participant in taming the land. 

Did the ending work for me? I’m not sure. It is one of those endings that niggles, I keep going over it, playing with it and seeing different angles. As Mabel’s sister writes to her: "We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow."

by Zoe Brooks 
 

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger and Pi - a 16-year-old Indian boy. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary fiction of recent years. Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" is a transformative novel, a dazzling work of imagination that will delight and astound readers in equal measure. It is a triumph of storytelling and a tale that will, as one character puts it, make you believe in God.

Amazon description

This review is going to be impossible to write without it containing spoilers, so you are warned.

"So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or without the animals?"

That question is what the book is about. It is a story about how we tell stories about our lives giving them order and meaning and the greatest story, Yann Martel maintains, is that of religion: “God is a shorthand for anything that is beyond the material -- any greater pattern of meaning.” 

The book begins with the boy Pi lapping up the stories of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism and adopting all three religions much to the shock of his religious teachers when they meet together with him. It then moves to the tale of Pi's survival on the lifeboat with a tiger and other animals for company. This story although maybe somewhat far-fetched is nevertheless logical, until Pi arrives on an island, where things just get weird.  

In the last tenth of the book, Pi tells a different story, the alternative story without animals and more horrific, and asks his listeners, two Japanese accident investigators, the question above. They, like most readers I suspect, prefer the story with animals. 

Ok, so what did I make of this book that everyone seems to claim to be magic realism?  Well if I use the definition giving to the right of this post, I don't think it is magic realism. It is about storytelling and therefore not about magic in a realistic setting. It is almost the opposite of magic realism, in that it questions magic, faith or what you will. For that reason I found the ending unsatisfactory. I know many others have loved it, enjoying how in the last thirty pages everything that has gone before is thrown into doubt, leaving you to question your own assumptions and your need for a good story. But I am sufficiently old-fashioned to have an affection for good stories and I felt cheated - as if the book was a bravura display by a conjurer and not a real magician. Maybe if Yann Martell had invested the same effort into the alternative story, not writing in the wonderful prose of the first half but in some other perhaps more factual style, I would have been happier, but he doesn't. The prose at the end just seems very clumsy, I assume Martell's many fans will say that it is how it is meant to be. 

As I feel my way towards a deeper understanding, I am acutely aware that many others have disagreed with me and claimed the book to be a fine example of the genre. Please feel free to explain your position in the comments below.

by Zoe Brooks 
 

The Wood Wife by Terri Windling

Leaving behind her fashionable West Coast life, Maggie Black comes to the Southwestern desert to pursue her passion and her dream. Her mentor, the acclaimed poet Davis Cooper, has mysteriously died in the canyons east of Tucson, bequeathing her his estate and the mystery of his life-- and death.

Maggie is astonished by the power of this harsh but beautiful land and captivated by the uncommon people who call it home-- especially Fox, a man unlike any she has ever known, who understands the desert's special power.

As she reads Cooper's letters and learns the secrets of his life, Maggie comes face-to-face withe the wild, ancient spirits of the desert-- and discovers the hidden power at its heart, a power that will take her on a journey like no other.

Goodreads Book Description

I always have a bit of a problem with books about writers or artists and this book has both. My creative English teacher, who first recognised my skill as a writer and poet, taught me to avoid writing about writers, regarding it as self-indulgent. Unfortunately there are a lot of books and art that are self-referential nowadays, indeed it seems to be highly popular with the people who give awards and other accolades. On the face of it I should have had a problem with this book, but I didn't. 

Why didn't I? Well, despite being on the face of it about art, it is actually about magic as reality. The poet Davis Cooper and his wife Anna are dead by the time the story begins and yet they are major characters in the book. Cooper's poems and letters punctuate a tale seen primarily from Maggie's point of view, Anna's mystical pictures are a dark presence in the book. The poems and art portray creatures which at first we might believe to be fantastic and archetypal, but during the course of the book are revealed to be real. These creatures are clearly drawn from the Native American myths, but as a Brit I was interested to see that they bore similarities to British mythic figures - such as the horned man and the wild hunt. I was reminded of the work of the British writer Alan Garner, who portrays a modern world in which the old gods are just below the service.  

The characters are part of the landscape: 

Windmage/Owl Boy: Sky

Rootmage/Root Mother: Earth

Floodmage/Drowned Girl: South etc.

The landscape, the flora and fauna that live within it, are beautifully portrayed in the book. I do not know the desert of the South West, but I felt I was walking through it. The other characters are also well drawn with complex personalities, which at times merge with the mythic. The only fault I would find in the characterisation is that Maggie and all the others accept the reality of the mythic creatures without any resistance. I would have thought that at least one of them might have struggled with the idea and thus given us a bit more conflict. But then I suppose I can't have it both ways!
 

by Zoe Brooks

 

Winter's Tale by Mark Halprin

New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake— orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.

Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.

Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and besieged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.

Amazon.com description

This book is epic in vision, ambition and size (673 pages of relatively small type in my edition). And a few days ago I very much doubted that I would hit my target of reading a book a week, but I finished it today, having spent all of yesterday reading. I did read the Lord of the Rings in two days (and all through one night), so I suppose finishing Winter's Tale wasn't a complete surprise. Whether I would have finished this book without the challenge is questionable. I might have given up, which would have been a shame as the book is worth the effort, I am grateful to my challenge for keeping me reading.

The book ranges in time from the late 19th century to the eve of the 21st. It is set in a fantasy New York, heaving with the poor dying in their hovels and gangs of thugs, overseen by hugely powerful newspapers and their magnates, full of energy, hope and despair. As someone who has never been to New York and who is unlikely to go, I felt that I missed a lot of the book's richness. There is a rave review from the New York Times review link here which gives you a New Yorker's take on the book.


The description in Goodreads and on Amazon (above) is misleading. Peter Lake may be the main character of the book, but he disappears for the central part of it, and the love story with Beverly although enchanting is actually a minor part of the book. With Peter Lake removed from the story, the focus shifts to a larger cast of characters. Don't expect subtle characterisation in this book. With the exception of Peter Lake and the elderly newspaper owner Harry Penn, Halprin's characters are symbols, vehicles for forces of love, truth etc. The good are good, the evil are evil and there isn't that much of a focus on the latter.

In some ways New York is the central character in the novel, whilst the storyline is the pursuit of the ideal city. "To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through . . . gates far more difficult to find than gates of stone, for they are test mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice.'' One gate is that of ''acceptance of responsibility,'' another is that of ''the desire to explore,'' still another that of ''devotion to beauty,'' and the last is the gate of ''selfless love.'' Does the ideal come at the end of the novel?

 This book has been lauded as a great feat of magic realism, and compared to the wonderful One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have to differ - it is not as great as Marquez's masterpiece and I don't think there was a lot of realism in the book to make it a great magic realism book.

I found the book overly verbose. Like one of his characters the author uses all sorts of unusual words, which I found got in the way of understanding rather than illuminating. Halprin applies layer upon layer of description to the point where it was possible to skip several pages without missing any of the story. At first I really enjoyed his descriptions, but after a while found them tedious and at times not even very good. 

It is nevertheless an impressive book, full of wonderful images, thoughts and imagination. The book reminded me of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and like Pullman's book had me loving it in parts and leaving me nevertheless unsatisfied.

by Zoe Brooks

Books added to the list

The list of books is growing and the range of authors is growing with it.

New titles include: 

• The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos
• Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
• Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link
• The Grass Dancer by Susan Power
• Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
• Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado
• The Silver Cloud Cafe by Alfredi Vea
• The Scholar of Moab by Steven L Peck
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
• The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis
• Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
• Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Holes by Louis Sacher
• Cloud Street by Tim Winton
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino
• Skellig by David Almond
• The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos
• Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
• Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link
• The Grass Dancer by Susan Power
• Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
• Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado
• The Silver Cloud Cafe by Alfredi Vea
• The Scholar of Moab by Steven L Peck
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
• The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis
• Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
• Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Holes by Louis Sacher
• Cloud Street by Tim Winton
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino
• Skellig by David Almond
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
• The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman

A haunting and emotionally satisfying novel from a much-loved and critically acclaimed author, which weaves fairy tale and gritty realism together to dazzlingly effect.

‘The Story Sisters’ charts the lives of three sisters – Elv, Claire and Meg. Each has a fate she must meet alone: one on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination. Inhabiting their world are a charismatic man who cannot tell the truth, a neighbor who is not who he appears to be, a clumsy boy in Paris who falls in love and stays there, a detective who finds his heart’s desire, and a demon who will not let go.

What does a mother do when one of her children goes astray? How does she save one daughter without sacrificing the others? How deep can love go, and how far can it take you?

At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing, ‘The Story Sisters’ sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the girls become women and their choices haunt them, change them and, finally, redeem them.

Amazon Description

Please note this review contains spoilers

They say don't judge a book by its cover, but we all do, I certainly do. The cover would have put me off. As a mature woman I would have looked at the girl with young man behind her and thought "not for me." I probably wouldn't have noticed the moths. So I very much doubt that I would have read this book had it not been for this challenge, but I did and I'm glad I did. When this challenge is over I will read more Alice Hoffman. I'm not sure why, but I didn't fully engage with this book until about halfway through, when suddenly I could not put the book down.

The book is a modern fairytale, not a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale but a Grimm brothers' tale full of darkness, shadows and evil demons. Two of the three Story sisters share a terrible secret. One day the youngest Claire is grabbed by a man and dragged into a car, her oldest sister Elv saves Claire but is taken herself and kept prisoner for hours. When Elv returns she makes Claire promise not to talk about it. The book is about that event and the girls failure to talk about it.

The book is partly about stories. Elv creates a fantasy world to cope with the evil that she has encountered, but the fantasy is more real to her than normality. She draws her sisters into that world, creating a language which the sisters share and exclude their mother and the rest of the adults. Rebelling, cynical and hurting Elv spirals down into drugs and crime.  Lorry, a young heroine addict and crook, enchants Elv with weird stories about his past. Elv is convicted of trying to con an old woman. The second sister escapes into books. The girls' grandmother and her friend Mrs Cohen also believe in the presence of demons.   

The psychology in the book is excellent. I particularly liked the way the character of Elv is drawn. We are sympathetic to her, like Claire we are in on the secret of why she is the way she is, and yet the author does not refrain from showing how nasty Elv can be, vicious towards her sister Meg, even willing even to steal from her own mother. Claire too pays a price for what happened. She blames herself for not being the one taken, for not saving Elv from the reform school, for the car crash that kills her other sister. Meg is the least well-drawn of the three sisters.

The Story Sisters is to my mind a good example of magic realism. There is a school of thought that magic realism is a fiction form created about and/or by the oppressed. It is used in this book to explore the consequences of abuse.

by Zoe Brooks

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess: Qara Köz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, as two worlds are brought together by one woman attempting to command her own destiny...

But is Mogor's story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess?

Amazon description

Review

I have not read very much Rushdie and I was not sure what I would make of this book. Going by the reviews it seems to divide opinion, but I loved it.

The book is like an incredible tapestry, rich in imagery, history (it comes with a long bibliography), descriptions, themes and characters. Although a work of historical fiction, as Rushdie has said: "non-historians think of history as being a collection of facts, whereas actually it's not -- it's a collection of theories about the past. We revise our view of the past all the time, depending on our own present concerns."  
As rationalist westerners we see history through our realism focused eyes. But the worlds that Rushdie draws - the Mughal court and Renaissance Florence - believed in magic, enchantment and religion. It is therefore only right that a book set in such a world should share those belief structures. Accurate historical fiction is magic realism and that is what Rushdie writes brilliantly, for example the Great Mughal, Akbar, has a fantasy wife, who exists not only in the mind of Akbar but also on Rushdie's pages as an independent character.

Of all the characters the best drawn is Akbar, who is a mass of contradictions, a bloody tyrant who meditates on the role of kingship, religion and identity. The yellow-haired Italian stranger is less well drawn with good reason because we are viewing him through Akbar's eyes and Akbar cannot tell whether the stranger's story is true or not and he and we never know. We are shown at the beginning of the book how ruthless the stranger can be in pursuing his own interests. Rushdie has been criticised by some readers as being anti-women in this book, defining women by their sexuality, as whores or sexual enchantresses. Although a feminist and a liker of strong women characters this aspect of the book did not bother me. Rushdie is accurately depicting the world of the Mughals and Renaissance Italy and the place of women in it. The enchantress of the title uses her sexual beauty and force of will to bind men to her. The book closes with her saying to Akbar, "And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours." And Akbar thinking "Until you're not, my Love. Until You're not" for the Enchantress had always moved on from one man to another as their power to protect her fails. The power of men is shown throughout the book to be fragile and short, even Akbar's great palace is brought to dust. Perhaps, one wonders, the only power that survives is that of the illusion of the perfect woman.

by Zoe Brooks

The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser

Twelve fabulous stories from 'the most inventive, wistful, sexy, and wryly comic writer of our time' (Washington Post), his first book since Martin Dressler. Unmistakably Millhauser, these stories range from the imaginative to the phantasmagoric, and all inhabit a strange world, part American, part European, wholly fantastic. From the terrifying opening tale of the knife-thrower, the consummate entertainer pushing his audience to collusion in the ultimate thrill to a fictional meditation on the far from innocent nightlife of teenage girls, these vividly told stories demonstrate once again why Steven Millhauser is one of the most acclaimed, and certainly one of the most distinctive, American writers of the age.   Amazon description

Review

Millhauser's short stories fall in to two types: the dreamlike more poetic stories focused on individuals and often written in the first person and the more formal almost objective accounts of subtle alternative history. The stories often start out in an apparently normal mundane world before moving into the magical alternative realities, drawing the reader with them.

There are certain themes that run through the stories. His characters seem to be trying to escape the world, flying above it on a carpet or balloon, going underground into the tunnels under a town or into a theme parks. In a way this is paralled by our experience as readers. Indeed the theme of art/artifice gradually becoming larger, perhaps better than life but at the same time becoming disturbing appears in several of the stories. Other stories deal with adolescence as magical/dreamlike, alien to the adult world.

My favourite story was The Sisterhood of the Night in which the adults are worried by what they perceive as a secret society of teenage girls, who gather at night but seem to say and do nothing. At first one is fascinated by what the girls are up to, but after a while one suddenly realises that the action in the story is in the increasingly paranoid reactions of the adults. How easily it could slip into a witchhunt. We too have been guilty of speculating.

I am in awe at Steven Millhauser's stylistic mastery. He uses the first person point of view with great ease, even though he has little time in a short story to establish the voice. His descriptions are wonderful: poetic at times, exact at others.  I particularly admire the subtle way he shifts the ground under the reader until suddenly, just like the audience in the title story, you are no longer sure what you are seeing.

by Zoe Brooks

The Book List

Here is the list of magic realism books I will read and review here over the next year. The sharp-eyed among you will realise that there are not 52 books on this list, that is because I am expecting to find more to be added over the year. I welcome suggestions

• The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser
• The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
• The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman
• Winter’s Tale by Mark Halpern
• The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
• Just Relations by Rodney Hall
• Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
• Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda
• Chocolat by Joanne Harris
• Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill
• Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
• Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
• Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
• Fludd - Hilary Mantel
• Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel
• Book Thief - Markus Zusak
• Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
• Nights At the Circus by Erin Morgenstern
• The Cure For Death By Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz
• The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago
• Ruby Holler by Sharron Creech
• House of Spirits by Isabelle Allende
• Famished Road by Ben Okri
• Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
• Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke
• Metamorphasis by Franz Kafka
• Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf
• Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King
• Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
• Garden Spells by Sarak Addison Allen
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• The Magician and Other Stories by Murilo Rubiao
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Alchemist by Paul Coelho
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold