Showing results for "The Rural" in Magical Realism

Cutthroat NYC lawyer Mary Whelton just buried her problematic old mentor. But as she leaves the mourners and protesters behind, the press stays hot on her heels. Desperate to escape, she unwittingly barrels deep into a remote forest in upstate New York. Until a collision—with a buzzing, oozing throng of cicadas—stops her dead in her tracks. She awakens in a crude cabin, held captive by Girl, a simple, hulking woman who mistakes Mary for her derelict mother and obsesses over a mysterious Brood.

A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists. A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there, or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself.

Med school dropout Harlan Winter returns to his impoverished West Virginia hometown, where the law is scarce, arsonists are turning everything to ash, and his family’s turbulent history lingers. All he wants is to keep the peace in a community cowering from the Lighthouse, a local cult preying on people’s fears. Harlan’s own fears, too, when he’s hired to play detective and find a young couple gone missing.

After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano.

In a small southern pecan town, the annual harvest is a time of both celebration and heartbreak. Even as families are forced to sell their orchards and move away, Lil Clearwater, keeper of a secret covenant with her land, swears she never will. When her twin Sasha returns to the dwindling town in hopes of reconnecting with the girl her heart never forgot, the sisters struggle to bridge their differences and share the immense burden of protecting their home from hungry forces intent on uprooting everything they love.

Vega Jones escapes an abusive relationship with nothing but her two-month-old baby and the van she grew up in. Her destination is a small Ohio town her late vagabond mother left years ago. It’s one full of nobodies, her mother warned. That makes it the ideal refuge for Vega to lie low, feel safe, and maybe learn more about a past her mother never spoke of.

Before Dan opened his door to find a wounded woman who had escaped from the tormentors in the mountain, his life had become rather quiet. He and the eight other people in the mostly abandoned town had become friends. They spent peaceful evenings around the campfire and even made vague plans to journey east one day and leave the ominous mountain behind. But the woman's arrival changes everything.

Almost immediately upon Julie Bird’s return to the small port town where she was raised, everyday life is turned upside down. Julie’s Gulf War vet father, Marty, has been on the losing side of a battle with PTSD for too long. A day of boating takes a dramatic turn when a majestic blue whale beaches itself and dies. A blond stranger sets up camp oceanside: she’s an agitator, musician-impersonator, and armchair philosopher named Jennie Lee Lewis - and Julie discovers she’s connected to her father. As the blue whale decays on the beach, more wildlife turns up dead - apparently by suicide - echoing Marty’s deepest desire.

Ren Ishida is nearly finished with graduate school when he receives news of his sister Keiko's sudden death. She was viciously stabbed one rainy night on her way home, and there are no leads. Ren heads to Akakawa to conclude his sister's affairs, still failing to understand why she chose to abandon the family and Tokyo for this desolate town years ago. Haunted in his dreams by a young girl who is desperately trying to tell him something, Ren struggles to find solace in the void his sister has left behind.

2015. Eighteen-year-old Boyd Montgomery returns from her grandfather’s wedding to find her friend Isaac missing. Drought-ravaged central Texas has been newly inundated with rain, and flash floods across the state have begun to sweep away people, cars, and entire houses as every river breaks its banks.

Primer hi ha la tempesta i el llamp i la mort d’en Domènec, el pagès poeta. Després, la Dolceta, que no pot parar de riure mentre explica les històries de les quatre dones penjades per bruixes. La Sió, que ha de pujar tota sola la Mia i l’Hilari allà dalt a Matavaques. I les trompetes de la mort que, amb el seu barret negre i apetitós, anuncien la immutabilitat del cicle de la vida.

Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.

An ailing farmer in rural Iran unearths an extraordinary find: two parsnips, grown together and looking for all the world like entwined lovers. For now, the sublime treasure is his secret. Wrapping it in a silk handkerchief, he nestles it away in a dresser drawer. Day after day, he gazes at their unmistakable rapture, reminded of the long-gone youthful passions he once shared with his wife. So, too, he mourns the inevitable - the eventual decay of the parsnips in love. When he decides to share his discovery with the world, his life and the lives of those around him connect and change.