M agical realism, the term, was born in the art world; the German critic Franz Roh coined it in 1925 to describe post-expressionist paintings that involved dream logic or surrealist elements. It was a few decades before it became a recognised term within literature, but it soon grew over the second half of the 20th century into a thriving genre. Magical realism books are particularly popular in South America but are written and read worldwide.
Bluntly put, magical realism books feature fantastical elements, taken at face value—as if existing within our normal reality. In The Life of Pi
We’ve put together a list of some of the magical realism books you need to be aware of. This is a thriving genre and there are far more excellent titles out there—and more being published every month.
“What García Márquez does is tell a story of the history and culture of Latin America from the point of view of the ordinary person. He manages to do that through this deadpan narrator who can mix the savagely real with the wonderful, and narrate a family saga which is also a history of Latin America. This book really put Latin American literature on the international map because it is a novel which, while deeply Latin American, is also accessible to all readers.” Read more...
The Best Latin American Novels
John King ,
Literary Scholar
Isabel Allende—the world's most popular living writer working in Spanish—published her famous magical realist novel The House of the Spirits in 1982, and found immediate global acclaim. It began, she has said, as a long letter to her dying grandfather: "He died and never received the letter, because I kept on writing and writing it. By the end of the year, I had more than 500 pages, and that was my first novel, The House of the Spirits ." The book is a family saga, unfolding over four generations in an unnamed country that appears very like Chile. In it, the youngest daughter of the del Valle family, Clara, has telekinetic and clairvoyant powers—but she cannot, in the end, save her family from violence and heartbreak. It was adapted as a film starring Meryl Streep in 1993; a new television adaptation is currently being developed for Amazon Prime.
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“He’s the best-known Japanese writer right now and this book I would consider to be his opus. It’s a big sprawling book that deals with weighty subjects like the Second World War and Japan’s part in that. There is a horrifying section set when the Japanese had occupied Manchuria and the Chinese are approaching and it’s told from the point of view of a soldier who is told to kill all the animals in the zoo as the Chinese close in. It’s a harrowing tale of this Japanese soldier going round the cages killing these magnificent animals.” Read more...
The best books on The Asian American Experience
Sung J. Woo ,
Novelist
“Beloved was Morrison’s fifth novel. It’s a gripping story, inspired by a famous abolitionist case, the true story of a woman who runs away from slavery with her children, but when the slave catchers catch up with her, she kills one of her own and tries to kill the others, rather than returning them to slavery. The specter of slavery is unrecognized and unnamed; it is embodied in a ghost-like, other-worldly figure. It’s a novel about trauma and psychic scarring, but it’s a novel that points toward a necessary reckoning with what she calls the black and lonely dead, those lost from the Middle Passage, through abolition to the racial violence of the twentieth century.” Read more...
The Best African American Literature
Farah Jasmine Griffin ,
Literary Scholar
🏆 Winner of the 1981 Booker Prize
"This is about a boy born at the midnight hour of India's independence, endowed with magical powers to shape the history and destiny of India. Through Saleem Sinai, Rushdie shows a city reclaimed from the sea. Its maidans , its ancient temples and its 'rutputty' cafes are all imbued with the city's quirky, addictive and almost manic magic. Sinai grows with all that shaped the city, its communities, its tensions, its haphazard growth and its churning for identity. Rushdie created a new vocabulary, a new form to reflect Bombay. Forty years later, I was seeing so much of the same"
—Saumya Roy, author of Castaway Mountain the best books on Mumbai .
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“This is one of my favorite books ever. I’m tempted to give a lot of theory-based background to it – where it fits in the postmodern oeuvre and all that – but honestly it doesn’t even need to fit within a framework…This book is a travelogue of imagined cities that its protagonist, Marco Polo, has visited. If you read it straight through, it just seems like the author has come up with fifty-five really wacky and fantastical ideas for cities. Upon the second or third reading, you get the sense that it’s following a pattern, that the themes and the elements involved in these cities are following some kind of internal logic.” Read more...
The Best Ergodic Fiction
Arianna Reiche ,
Novelist
“I don’t think there will ever be a better writer on uncertainty and science than Borges. I’m a huge fan.“On Exactitude in Science”, a story about a map the size of the Empire, is such a wonderful way to think about scientific modelling. Like the British statistician George Box said, “all models are wrong but some are useful”. Scientific models are simplifications of reality. We can make them look more or less like the real world, but we need to be careful that in our drive to create realistic, complex models, we don’t end up with a map of the world the size of the world itself.” Read more...
The best books on Climate Change and Uncertainty
Kate Marvel ,
Scientist
“This is probably the best-known work of fiction about perfume and the perfume industry. It’s a crime novel by a German author which was also made into a movie. It’s a very lush, richly imagined book. It just bursts with sensuality and the smells of Paris in the 18th century. And not just good smells, but also the smell of raw sewage running in the streets, or of horse manure. It’s about a lowly orphan boy who happens to be gifted with the olfactory equivalent of perfect pitch. He apprentices with perfume makers. He’s a very odd creature, and eventually he decides that he wants to create a perfume that will make people do his bidding. It will be so stupendous that it will overwhelm people and he can rule the world with this perfume.” Read more...
The best books on Perfume
Denise Hamilton ,
Journalist
“I defy anyone to read those opening pages…and not have it slightly get under their skin and haunt them…I believe that there’s been a lot of dispute about whether Mikhail Bulgakov was writing against Soviet atheism or in favour of it, against religion or in favour of it. Like all great art, it’s shot through with ambivalence. But I don’t think he could ever have written this other than through the collision of the creative impulse and the soulless worldview of Soviet communism. I just don’t think it would have been created other than through that rather disfiguring collision between creativity and conformity. And, for that reason alone, I just think it’s an astonishing book.” Read more...
Nick Clegg on his Favourite Books
Nick Clegg ,
Politician
🏆 Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2017 Arthur C Clarke Award
Colson Whitehead transforms 'the Underground Railroad'—the nickname for the network of safe houses used by fugitive slaves escaping the American South—into a very real rail system in this stunning work of speculative fiction. Since publication in 2016, it was an international bestseller, garnered praise from (among others) Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, and won a number of major literary prizes.
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“Ishiguro is one of these novelists who is writing science fiction, but it’s not science fiction as we normally encounter it. It’s not the invention of a completely different world. Instead he takes one or maybe two conceits, and then explores their consequences in a setting that is relevant and immediately relatable to normal life. His writing is always so clear, spare, and vivid—and Klara and the Sun is no exception…literature has always been about understanding what it’s like to be a person, what it’s like to have a stream of thought, to be a human, to be an individual, or to be another individual. And that’s a key part of the story. Klara and the Sun is an absolutely remarkable example of how to develop this understanding. In ways I don’t yet know, it will no doubt make me think about my own work differently.” Read more...
Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness
Anil Seth ,
Scientist
“The hero of this book is already dead. In the afterlife, he’s given a chance to revisit moments and places from his life, which took place during the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which the hero—who was a photographer—was ultimately killed. It’s a fantasy of a dead figure coming back, revisiting and understanding what happened, and also watching what the significance of their own life was. So at one level, it’s an enormous subject, almost a theological issue—what did this person do with their life? what does it add up to?—but it’s done, again, with enormous humour.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor ,
Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Gold Diggers is about three overachieving, South Asian Americans trying their best to get the checklist of success and achieve the American dream. In this book, which blends a little bit with magical realism, a mother of the young girl character realizes if you take specific metal, melt it, and drink it, it helps you succeed, get a higher test score, get into the good schools, and get some money. But there’s a cost. It’s a Faustian bargain. It’s a great story that speaks to the model minority myth. In the quest for success, what is the cost to our identity, our health, our relationships? Does the American dream bring happiness? This novel explores this in the realm of a magical realism.” Read more...
The Best South Asian American Novels
Wajahat Ali ,
“This book does two things really well. The first is shifting to the hallucinatory world to the context of loss and grief. Lots of people experience these sorts of things following the loss of a loved one, and that happens to Benny as well. Secondly, this is a book about books. It’s steeped in books, much of it unfolds in a library, and in a way it’s about how we create different worlds constantly. We can move between them, and they shape how we think. The boundaries between these fictional worlds and the real world is much more porous and malleable than we might appreciate.” Read more...
The best books on Hallucination
Ben Alderson-Day ,
Psychologist
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