14 Magical Realism Books Where Nobody Acts Surprised

The Buendias found a town called Macondo in the middle of nowhere, and the novel follows their descendants until the family runs out of them. A ghost moves back into the house and complains about being lonely. A plague of insomnia strips the town of its memory, so people begin labelling every object with its own name. A man is followed everywhere by yellow butterflies and this is accepted as a fact about him, like a limp. Names repeat across generations on purpose, so keep the family tree at the front open and stop trying to hold the plot. The book is a river, not a staircase.

The narrator comes back to his town decades later to reconstruct the morning Santiago Nasar was killed, and the murder is announced in the opening line, so there is no suspense to protect. What follows is closer to a reconstruction than a story: contradictory witnesses, a bishop who will not get off the boat, twin brothers who announce their intentions to everybody they meet because what they want is to be stopped. The dreams, the omens and the smell that will not leave the house are all treated as evidence by the people involved, which is exactly the trick.

Clara del Valle is clairvoyant, silent for nine years by choice, and keeps notebooks that record everything that happens to her family. Her relatives treat her abilities roughly the way you would treat a cousin who is good with numbers. Around this domestic magic, Allende builds the history of an unnamed South American country through one landowning family and the man at its centre, Esteban Trueba, who is both the patriarch you dislike and the narrator you end up half understanding. The final third turns hard and political, and the magic quietly withdraws as the violence arrives.

Tita is bound by a family rule that the last daughter stays unmarried and looks after her mother, so she watches the man she loves marry her sister and takes it out on the kitchen. Her tears in the batter make an entire wedding party sick with longing. A dish made with rose petals sets her other sister alight, more or less literally. The novel is arranged as twelve monthly instalments, each opening with a recipe you could genuinely cook, and the whole thing runs on one idea: feeling is a physical ingredient and it travels.

Sethe lives outside Cincinnati in 1873 in a house the whole neighbourhood avoids, because the house is furious. The spite in it is treated as a household fact, like damp in a monsoon wall. Then a young woman arrives with no history and the name from the gravestone, and Sethe's life rearranges itself around her. Morrison writes the haunting with no explanation and no rules, because in this book the past is not a metaphor that visits, it is a person who moves in and eats your food. This is the hardest book here and the one I would defend the longest.

Saleem Sinai is born at midnight on 15 August 1947 and spends the novel insisting that his life and the country's are the same event, which he very nearly proves. The thousand and one children born in that first hour each have a gift, and Saleem's enormous dripping nose lets him convene them telepathically after dark. The book runs from Kashmir to Bombay to Karachi to the Sundarbans across three generations, and the history is real even when the telling is not. His narration is boastful, unreliable, and constantly interrupted by the woman he is telling it to.

A literary bureaucrat and a young poet meet a foreign professor on a park bench who calmly predicts how one of them will die that afternoon, and the prediction is correct. The professor is Satan, his entourage includes a fanged cat the size of a hog who rides trams and argues with conductors, and over a few days they take apart the Moscow literary establishment mostly by giving people exactly what they ask for. Threaded through it is a second novel about Pontius Pilate on the day of the crucifixion, written in a completely different register: quiet, hot and grave.

Azaro is an abiku, a child who is born, dies and is born again to the same mother, and he has broken the agreement by deciding to stay alive this time. His days are ordinary and poor: a father who unloads cargo and fights at night, a mother who hawks goods, a landlord, a bar run by Madame Koto, an election coming with thugs attached to it. His nights are crowded with spirits who follow him home from the market. The family treats the spirit traffic as weather and Nigerian politics as the real emergency, which is the entire point.

Fevvers is a music hall aerialiste who claims she was hatched from an egg and has the wings to prove it, and the novel opens with an American journalist in her dressing room trying to catch her out. He fails, joins the circus to keep investigating, and the three of them, Fevvers, her guardian Lizzie and the reporter, travel from London to St Petersburg to Siberia through a series of increasingly strange encounters. Carter writes sentences stuffed to the brim, with more comedy and more filth than most people expect from a literary classic.

Oskar Matzerath narrates from a mental institution, beginning with his grandmother's four skirts in a potato field and moving through Danzig before, during and after the war. He claims he chose to stop growing at three and threw himself down the cellar stairs to give the adults an explanation they could live with. He keeps a tin drum he will not surrender and a scream that shatters glass at will. The family response to a son who does not grow is embarrassment and management, never wonder, which is precisely the register this list is about.

A student home from America shoots a monkey with an air rifle. The monkey survives, discovers he is the reincarnation of a nineteenth century poet named Sanjay, and strikes a deal with Yama, the god of death: he lives as long as he keeps his audience entertained. So he types, the household gathers to listen, and the tale runs back into the wars and intrigues of nineteenth century India while a road trip through America runs alongside it. It is a first novel written with the confidence of a fifth.

Kafka Tamura runs away from his father's house at fifteen and hides in a private library in Shikoku. In a second line of the story, Nakata, an old man who lost his memory and his literacy after a childhood incident, can talk to cats and follows instructions he does not understand. Fish rain out of the sky. A figure calling himself Johnnie Walker turns up doing something unforgivable. Murakami explains none of it, and his characters mostly accept the rules of whatever they have walked into, although they do occasionally stop to say that this is not normal.

Saeed and Nadia meet at an evening class in an unnamed city, and their courtship happens as the war closes in around them, with checkpoints, curfews and a militant faction taking the neighbourhood street by street. Then rumours start about doors that open somewhere else, and the couple pays an agent for access to one. Hamid makes the doors completely banal: a black rectangle in a closet, a fee, a queue, a man guarding it. The novel is really about what migration does to a relationship, and the device exists to remove the journey and leave only the arriving.

A seven-year-old boy, bookish and friendless, meets Lettie Hempstock down the lane, who is eleven and has been eleven for a very long time. Her family, three generations of women on an old farm, deal with something that comes through into this world after a lodger dies in the family car. The boy accepts everything he is shown, because he is seven and children accept. It is short, it is far more frightening than the cover suggests, and the sadness in it is the adult kind rather than the childhood kind.