Magic realism is a narrative mode in which magical events are presented matter-of-factly within an otherwise realistic world.
Magic realism crystallised in Latin American fiction of the mid-20th century, though its roots run through European modernism and indigenous storytelling. Gabriel García Márquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' (1967) became its emblem: in Macondo, ghosts share rooms with the living, yellow butterflies trail a lover, and rain falls for four years and eleven months — and the prose reports it all with the same sober tone as a weather forecast. The mode shaped Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and Haruki Murakami, each adapting it to their own histories. What distinguishes magic realism from fantasy is its insistence that the impossible is part of ordinary life — not an escape from reality but a fuller version of it, one that includes the reality of belief, memory, and grief.