Let emotion run unbounded and no plot just vibes be your motto: it’s Pisces season. Dreamy, sensitive, escapist Pisces – sometimes you can’t tell the difference between whether something has actually happened or if you just dreamed it one night. (...Or during the mid-afternoon nap you regularly to take to reset all those feelings. We see you and feel you, sweet fishes.)
With your head in the clouds and your heart on your sleeve, magical realism is absolutely your genre – but only the kinds of stories written with a level of deep, visceral emotion that hits you to your core. Which is where we come in, with all the Pisces-worthy book reccs you could need.
These picks will allow your creative imagination to run wild, blending books that detail everything from dream sequences and ghostly presences to anthropomorphic trees and malevolent spirits. All well within your vast imaginative realm; all of them suitably emotive. So dive into this literary waters – you might just get hooked...
Whimsy meets melancholy in House of Day, House of Night, the latest of Olga Tokarczuk’s brilliant novels to be translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (read our interview with her about translating Drive Your Plow for extra insight). With elements of magical realism and plenty of dreamy symbolism, it’s the perfect Pisces read – playful, intelligent and beautifully written and translated. The novel entwines Polish history and myth to construct a small Polish village through Tokarczuk’s meticulous vignettes of each eccentric character. Some of the short chapters are simply titled ‘A Dream’, reflecting how the subconscious weaves through the narrative to shape this epic, imaginative book. Perfect for a Pisces.
Dip your toes in Freshwater, Pisces: the spiritual otherworldliness of Akwaeke’s reality-splitting novel will be sure to draw you in. Ada is a girl from Nigeria who moves to America to study. She’s also an ogbanje, a spirit not quite of this world, composed of multiple selves. When Ada experiences a traumatic event at university, these selves crystallise into voices that merge with her, pulling her mind and body away from agency and into increasingly dangerous territory. This author is a fiery literary force, and expresses fear, rage and transformation in spiky, sharp prose. The novel’s mythical language and elements of magical realism will appeal to the Piscean proclivity towards the fantastical and haunting.
For the deeply emotional Pisces, Sorrow and Bliss delivers both ends of the spectrum with devastating beauty. Warning: only read if you’re ready to weep – but, Pisces, that’s practically your hobby. The novel follows Martha, an acerbic, funny but self-sabotaging woman. Something happened to her mind when she was seventeen; she experiences periods of crushing low moods, yet seems unable and unwilling to explain it. This phenomenon is never named by the author, meaning the story explores mental illness not as a cut-and-dry diagnosis, but as winding tentacles which impact not just the sufferer but everyone who loves them. You can’t help but root for Martha and the tender, heartbreaking love story at the centre of the book. It’s truly sorrowful and ecstatically blissful – the emotional extremes that make life worth living.
Beloved is the brutal, spectral story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman who is physically free but who remains deeply scarred. Her memories of the ironically-named Sweet Home, the farm where she was subjected to unimaginable trauma, have bled into her present life, where she is haunted by the ghost of her unnamed child who died many years ago. Toni Morrison’s novel is full of heartbreaking poetry, visceral descriptions of grief and longing and the horrific treatment of enslaved bodies. With the experimental chapters from multiple points of view, this spiritual, immersive novel will deeply resonate with Pisces looking to lose themselves in raw emotion.
Can you get any dreamier than a book partly narrated by a fig tree? If you’re a Pisces looking for hints of magical realism in a gorgeous, historical book with a romantic love story at its heart, then where has The Island of Missing Trees been your whole life? Two teenagers, one Greek Cypriot and one Turkish Cypriot, fall deep in forbidden love in a taverna beneath an old fig tree. Then, war begins to tear Cyprus apart. The tree is a witness to the land being destroyed and the lovers being forced apart. Years later, their teen daughter Ada lives in London with her father – the fig tree growing in their garden their only connection to a fraught family history. Weaving spiritual philosophies with history, romance and ecological awareness, the author dedicates the story to the ‘uprooted’ around the world, writing with a masterful solemnity and beauty. Dreamy, mystical Pisces, this one is for you.
