Love in the Time of the Cholera: This is a masterpiece of Magical Realism. The well-drawn characters struggle through the trials of life (including a cholera epidemic), but are sustained by the magical happenings floating through their lives. It is a tale of love and of wonder.
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
– Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
On Hundred Years of Solitude: This is another fine example from the South American school of Magical Realism. Here the rules of the real world are broken and magical events occur in otherwise ordinary situations. As an example, while hanging wash on the line, a woman is levitated into heaven.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
– Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Isabel Allende
Isabel’s books are written in the Magical Realism genre. “Tales of Eva Luna” was the first of these books I read and I was fascinated. These are true tales of escape into the mystical world.
Novelist Isabel Allende rearranges reality with a blend of memories, mysticism and imagination. She invents characters caught between fact and fantasy.
– The Philadelphia Inquirer
Diana Gabaldon
Outlander
Dragonfly in Amber
Voyager
Drums of Autumn
Fiery Cross
Breath of Snow and Ashes
Echo in the Bone
These are time travel books which are set in 18th century Scotland and colonial America. The plots are fast moving and rooted in history – only the time travel element is fantastic and therefore a part of Magical Realism. This genre often displays time as cyclical instead of linear.
GREAT FUN…marvelous and fantastic adventures, romance, sex…perfect escape reading.
—San Francisco Chronicle
Sharon McCrumb
An Appalachian writer, McCrumb has set Ghost Riders in 1861 when the Civil War reaches the mountain south. Here the enemy is your neighbor and the victim is your friend. McCrumb links these forces of political unrest with present day stories of mountain wise folk who calm these wandering Civil War ghosts. The characters don’t question supernatural elements; they are integrated into the perception of these narrators. (A technique of Magical Realism.)
This novel…is enough to convert anyone into a Civil War buff…an absolutely fantastic novel that slips readers a serious historical mickey.
– Tampa Tribue
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver is from Appalachia and is a trained scientist. She uses her knowledge of biology and ecology to bring attention to the environmental movement and global warming. Flight Behavior explores the impact of climate change on animal migrations of all kinds. Her books also highlight the hardships faced by the working poor, single mothers and illegal immigrants.
Kingsolver has written one of the more thoughtful novels about the scientific, financial and psychological intricacies of climate change. And her ability to put these silent, breathtakingly beautiful butterflies at the center of this calamitous and noisy debate is nothing short of brilliant.
– Ron Charles, Washington Post