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. The term was first used by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe a strand of post-Expressionist painting, but it became indelibly associated with Latin American fiction after Alejo Carpentier's 1949 concept of 'lo real maravilloso' (the marvelous real) and, above all, Gabriel García Márquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' (1967), in which a girl ascends bodily to heaven while folding laundry and a village is struck by a four-year rainstorm, all narrated in the same measured, factual tone used for ordinary events. That flatness of tone is the technique's defining device: magic realism does not announce its magic as extraordinary, and characters within the story do not react with surprise, which is precisely what separates it from fantasy, where the magical is marked as an intrusion into an otherwise mundane world. Critics have linked the mode's rise in Latin America to a specific historical function — narrating colonial trauma, political violence and indigenous cosmology in a form that resists the imported rationalism of European realism. The mode has since spread well beyond its regional origin: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved,' Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children,' and Isabel Allende's 'The House of the Spirits' all work within or near magic realism's conventions, each adapting the technique's central bargain — treat the impossible as ordinary — to a different national and historical context.