A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $42
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The Faber edition of this volume is also available, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.
My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden) $45
A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods. With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. [Paperback]
"Djabbarova debuts with a potent portrait of illness and gender oppression in contemporary Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia . . . This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch." —Publishers Weekly
"Essential feminist, anticolonial reading. My Dreadful Body is about power. The power of one nation to colonise another, which is in turn echoed by the power of men to control women. It is about having the power to be in control of one's own body. But it is also about having the power to fight back." —Full Stop
"A woman maps cultural expectations and desires onto her ailing body in Egana Djabbarova's singular novel. An incisive novel, My Dreadful Body celebrates women's agency, mourns physical losses, and rebels against inherited boundaries." —Foreword Reviews
>>Tongue.
>>Silence speaks.
>>Illness as a sometimes-liminal space.
Discipline by Larissa Pham $40
When two people fall apart, who gets to tell their story? Christine is a young writer touring her debut novel — a thinly disguised tale of the affair she had with her professor ten years earlier. He was magnetic, domineering, both the sponsor of her early promise and its destroyer. But he surely forgot her long ago, and the temptation to exorcise her past was overwhelming. Then, between hotel rooms and bookstores, formal dinners and road-trip hook-ups, she receives a series of sly, unsettling emails and finally an invitation to visit the professor's isolated house on an island off the coast of Maine. Against her better judgement, Christine is drawn back into his orbit, risking forever losing control of the narrative she's worked so hard to create. [Hardback]
”Discipline coolly questions the ethics and processes of fiction and art, examining the toll they take both on the practitioner and anyone unlucky enough to be in their orbit” —Financial Times
”A deceptively quiet and beautifully written story, Discipline plays masterfully with issues of consent, memory and artistic licence. It asks its readers to judge which is more real: what actually happened in the past, or how we feel about it in the present.: —Buzz Magazine
”A story of ideas, but it combines deep philosophical inquiry with thriller vibes.” —Crack
>>Protect that pain.
>>Writing toward the void.
>>”I want to lie.”
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec (translated from Fench by David Bellos) $30
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface — What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity — and possibly his sanity — as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed — but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s novella presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968. [Paperback]
”Perec's novels are games, each different. They are played for real stakes and in some cases breathtakingly large ones. As games should be, and as literary games often are not, they are fun.” —Los Angeles Times
>>A one-sentence review.
>>Questioning the quotidian.
False Calm: A journey through the ghost towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff (translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver) $28
With time I have reached the conclusion that, as it is in my personal history, isolation is present in everything I have ever read about Patagonia . . . I returned to write an account of this eminently Patagonian characteristic. I wanted to see the shapes it takes today; I wanted to locate it at its furthest extremes. Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next. Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia's complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld. [Paperback with French flaps]
”An artful, atmospheric, thought-provoking depiction of life between silence and open space.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
”It has a magical quality, an intimate journey, so humane, one that opens the imagination and reminds us of who we have been and what we have, and have lost.” —Philippe Sands
Women Without Men: A novel of modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (a new translation from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh) $40
An internationally acclaimed novel that traces the interwoven destinies of five women — including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher — as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, the novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men. Originally published in Persian in 1989 and banned in Iran ever since, Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Foreword by Shirin Neshat. [Paperback]
”Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
"Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer." —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepoplis
"Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Parsipur continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming, powerful novella." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.
>>An interview with the author and the translator.
>>The book was made into an astounding film by Shirin Neshat.
Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal el-Mohtar $45
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. [Hardback]
"An essential collection of work from one of today's most poignant speculative writers. El-Mohtar creates immersive worlds with beautiful language." —Library Journal
"A collection of 14 stories and four poems that shine both individually and as a whole, while still showcasing El-Mohtar's characteristic lyricism and striking imagery. There's not a false note here." —Publisher's Weekly
>>Womanhood, identity, and fairy tales.
>>There is no art that is separate from politics.
Cello: A journey through silence to sound by Kate Kennedy $30
Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic and ultimately fatal concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world's greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his 'Mara' Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked off Buenos Aires. Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author's reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy's own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello and, crucially, the absence of the cello had meant to some other cellists, past and present. [Paperback]
”This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life.” —Hermione Lee
”Kate Kennedy's quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power.” —Jenny Uglow
>>A different life.
>>Kammersonate.
>>The ’Mara’ Stradivari.
Nocturnal Apparitions by Bruno Schulz (translated from Polish by Stanley Bill) $28
A fantastical collection of short stories by one of the twentieth century's most iconic cult authors. The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical. Contents: August / Visitation / Birds / Cinnamon Shops / The Street of Crocodiles / Cockroaches / The Gale / The Night of the Great Season / The Book / The Age of Genius / My Father Joins the Fire Brigade / The Sanatorium under the Hourglass / Father's Last Escape / Undula. [New paperbback edition]
“One of the the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” —John Updike
”One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
”Schulz redrafts the lines between fantasy and reality.” —Chris Power
”I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life.” —David Grossman
”Bruno Schulz has this weird sense of humour, this tenderness, and at the same time his writing is very complex. Reading him for the first time was something totally unique. That is still what I feel when I read him.“ —Alejandro Zambra
Black Bag by Luke Kennard $38
A penniless out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation. A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane. [Paperback]
”Gleefully absurd, a triumph of deadpan comedy. From his gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life. Kennard is superb at capturing a chaotic interior life. The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters, and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
”Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair — through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other.” —Joe Dunthorne
>>Theories of attraction.
>>Waiting for it to happen.
MEDesque: Everyday recipes with Mediterranean roots by Georgina Hayden $60
”Warmth, boldness, approachability and a general sense that all is good in the world. All this applies to the food in MEDesque. It's joyful, generous and drenched in olive oil.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
”With this wonderful new book Georgie takes us on a dream tour around the Mediterranean and picks up all the best bits so that our meals can be sunnier, happier, easier and infinitely more delicious — what a treat!” —Itamar Srulovich, Honey & Co.
”Irresistible recipes that spark cravings on every page.” —Yasmin Khan
Includes: Lamb, apricot and feta sausage rolls; Gnocchi puttanesca; Spiced lemony roast chicken with crushed baby potatoes; One-pan 'nduja, pepper and three cheese lasagne; Double chocolate pannacotta with cherries; Salted honey butter madeleines. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>All of Hayden’s cookbooks should be on your cookbook shelf.
Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we’ve been reading and recommending. Choose from our new releases bulletin. Read our interview with Lynley Edmeades.
17 April 2026
A Skinful of Shadows is an immensely compelling novel for children and adults alike. Frances Hardinge creates wonderful characters, intriguing plots, and ideas that will stay with you long after you shut the covers. A Skinful of Shadows is set in England in the 1640s, the English Civil War is brewing, Puritans and Catholics are at loggerheads, and so are the King and parliament. In a small village called Popular, Makepeace lives with her mother. Making a piecemeal living from lace-making and odd jobs, they live in a small barren room in the home of her aunt and uncle, barely accepted by them or the village. When her mother dies, Makepeace is sent to the home of the aristocratic Fellmotte family, where she becomes a kitchen skivvy. Makepeace, an illegitimate child, has the Fellmotte gene, one that enables them to possess ghosts. The Fellmottes have dangerous and dark plans for her — ones that will consume her in their obsession to preserve the family line, the Fellmotte power and property. Not everyone is an enemy, though, and she makes plans with her half-brother James to escape Grizehayes. After many failed attempts, the chaos of the Civil War gives them the perfect opportunity to escape. When James lets her down, Makepeace finds herself in an even more precarious situation, but with the help of a bear and her overwhelming desire to survive she begins a journey across England to find a document worth more than gold, a document that will grant her freedom from the Fellmotte family and ensure their fall from grace. Like all good mysteries, there are plenty of turns and forks on the road, and those that help and those that hinder. Yet the more intriguing elements are those that involve the ghosts or the souls that are possessed, some of which are malevolent, others helpful. Makepeace is an excellent heroine and her relationship with Bear is endearing. A story about power, possession and purpose.
Sand absorbs water poured upon it just as it absorbs blood spilt upon it and the actions committed upon it. Where does this water, this blood, and where do these actions go? Can they be recovered? How do they return? Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel is comprised of two parts. The first, told in the third person, describes with elegant impassivity and equivalence the actions and movements of an officer in the Israeli army in the Naqab/Negev desert during the 1948/49 Nakba. Although we gain no access to his thoughts (how could we gain access to his thoughts, after all?), we are witness to his obsessive washing routines, his watchfulness for spiders and insects within his hut and his destruction of them, his tending of a festering spider bite on his thigh, his journeys into the surrounding desert either in vehicles with his soldiers, using maps, searching for Arab ‘insurgents’, or alone, on foot around the camp, following the topography. The other soldiers have no reachable dimension other than being soldiers because any such dimensions would be irrelevant. The officer is the only one who speaks, and that hardly at all except for a long lecture expressing the view that the desert is a wasteland that can be made fertile when cleansed of its current inhabitants. As the rituals of army life are repeated and repeated, the tension builds beneath the narrative. The soldiers come across a group of unarmed Bedouin at an oasis and kill them and their camels, taking a dog and a young woman back to the camp. Their mistreatment of her, culminating in gang rape and later her murder and burial near the camp, can be felt in the narrative long before they occur. The howling dog witness shifts the first section of the book to the second, where a howling dog keeps the first-person narrator awake at night in her house in contemporary Ramallah. She has become obsessed with the fate of the young woman, which she has read about in a newspaper article, and by “the conviction that I can uncover details about the rape and murder as the girl experienced it, not relying on what the soldiers who committed it disclosed.” What happens to those who have no agency in their own story? The narrator cannot accept that the young woman is “a nobody who will forever remain a nobody whose voice nobody will hear,” and, with a borrowed ID, which will help her to enter different areas, and a rented car, one weekend she sets out to see if she can find out more. She takes a pile of maps: the official Israeli maps that show the roads, checkpoints, settlements and army zones in the Negev but do not mark even still-existing Palestinian settlements, and maps of the Naqab before 1948, which give information possibly relevant to her search. Maps are a way in which power imprints itself on territory, and Shibli spends a great deal of careful attention in both parts of the novel to the movements of her main characters over the land, contrasting the movement associated with maps with that concerned with and guided by the terrain. These different ways of moving have, for each of them, quite different results. The movements of the officer in the first section imprints power upon a territory, a pattern traced by the woman in the second section over land that holds the trace of violence in itself. The past is never left behind though it can never be recovered, either. In the first part, the officer has complete ease of movement, heading wherever he wishes, inside or out; in the second part the narrator has her movement checked and restricted wherever she goes (until she reaches the Naqab). “The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences,” she notes, waiting at the checkpoints in the wall that divides the territory. “There are some who consider focusing on minor details as the only way to arrive at the truth, and therefore proof of its existence, to reconstruct an incident one has never witnessed simply by noticing little details that everyone else finds to be insignificant,” she says, as a reason for her search. This may be true, but if such minor details exist their significance may also be unrecognised by the searcher. In the military museum that she visits, the only ‘evidence’ is the soap, the jerricans, the uniforms, the vehicles and the weapons mentioned in the first part. Intention leaves no residue. Also these objects constitute the majority of the soldiers’ experience of that day, given how little the woman meant to them. Part of the narrator’s and Shibli’s project is to uncover the particular from the general, the experience from the history. Although both she and the author bewail injustice, the narrator shows no enmity towards any of the people she meets, all are treated with sympathy; harm arises only from structures of power. Power withdraws the evidence of its actions, hides its victims, disappears into the understructure of everyday life. There is no residue unless the land holds a residue. The second half of the book is lightly told, in keeping with the personality of its narrator, and often funny (she describes a film rewinding in a museum and the settlers dismantling their houses). She visits the settlement with the name of the place where the crime occurred and learns that the actual place is no there but near by, she visits the place and finds nothing of interest, she walks through the surrounding plantations where the desert has been made fertile, but is frightened back by a dog. “I am here in vain,” she says. “I haven’t found anything I’ve been looking for, and this journey hasn’t added anything to what I knew about the incident when I started out.” Reluctant to return to Ramallah, she drives back and forth in the desert, gives a ride to an old woman, and then decides to follow her through a military zone, where she comes across an oasis. The land has drawn her to the core of her quest, but she has no way of recognising it as such, and she does not expect that her quest will be, still unknowingly, fulfilled in the last sentence of the book.
This superbly well written novel is comprised of two reflecting parts: the first narrating the fate of a young woman abducted by soldiers during the 1948/49 Nakba; the second telling of a contemporary woman's obsession with finding out more about this 'minor detail' of history. Shibli is interested in how the past remains in and shapes the present, and in how mechanisms of power harm both the wielders and the victims of that power.
A selection of books from our shelves. Cick through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $33
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The New Directions edition of this volume is due later this week, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.
The Way to Colonos: Sophocles retold by Kay Cicellis $38
First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone — a stylish woman in her thirties —wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II. As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work-written in English, her second language, offers particularly "shocking insight into the secret lives of young women" and is only now "free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes. … The book is written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master." [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Myths of meaning.
The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis $38
A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality. Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina's son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it's not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered. [Hardback]
”Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.” —Neel Mukherjee
”Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that casts out a multitude of unforgettable scenes, while shining a steady granular light on the hidden depths of the human psyche.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”In the world The Shadow of the Object brings to light — now sharply focused, now only uncertainly defined — Chloe Aridjis patiently layers signs and symbols into a resonant network. A beautiful, eerie, grief-haunted novel.” —Chris Power
”With The Shadow of the Object Aridjis cements her status as the laureate of the peripatetic — of all that's serendipitous, strange, improbable and, for these very reasons, true.” —Tom McCarthy
”The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka's.” —Zadie Smith
”A subtle and courageous writer.” —Ali Smith
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle $30
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a collection of prose poems that invites the reader to consider the relationships between internalised beliefs and the development of illness, drawing on psychology texts and the language of self-help, and the exploration of character traits and dramatic tropes. What are the appropriate emotions. Even with a map, it was difficult to determine. An ache which means let go. If she didn't have the thought, she wouldn't have the feeling. Wheels fall off to create drama. Through shifting frames of reference, wordplay, aphorism, and inversions, the poems reform, unfold and rebound to create a collage of melancholy and comic transformations. One thing leads to a mother. Butcher-McGunnigle's poems explore the relationship between unexamined subconscious thinking and physical and mental health, resisting singular, fixed meanings and inviting the reader to reflect on their own experiences. [Paperback]
"These poems are compressed and layered like paper folded to its tightest square. Here is an exquisite restraint that feels almost brutal, that always manages to surprise. This book has a rare force." — Sholto Buck
"Butcher-McGunnigle transforms malady into force; a leaf in a whirlwind, splitting memory from frame…this collection forms a prelude to her stunning body of work." —Autumn Royal
"Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a prequel to Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s catalogue, one that enriches all you’ve read from her before. Bleakness and a light touch. It all comes back. I read it in one sitting and it felt like being spelled." —Hollen Singleton
”Butcher-McGunnigle’s work is fulll of moments that, to me, are perfect — consummately whole, exactly right, every element in glowering harmony, as densely fixed as a neutron star." —Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Sydney Review of Books
"Butcher-McGunnigle is compulsively readable, hilarious, wonderful — a master of the whiplash turn, the dark plunge." —Ashleigh Young
>>Read an excerpt.
>>About the writing of this book.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.
Autobiography of a Marguerite by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle $33
We are made up of stories, but which ones belong to us? What are the boundaries between our bodies and the outside world? Autobiography of a Marguerite is a profound, book-length poetic work about chronic illness, family dysfunction, and identity, and how they can shape one another. The narrator struggles with the effects of her autoimmune illness, and struggles to separate herself from her troubled mother. A doctor tells the narrator that there is 'no cause and no cure' to her ailment, but the book attempts to explore how familial environments might contribute to the development of ill health. Butcher-McGunnigle's experimentation with form overlapping voices, footnotes, fragments, found text and photographs illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self, the repressed grief of chronic illness and its disruptive effect on the sufferer's sense of time's passage. The poems make visible the often-hidden experience of disability, and the reader becomes both a witness and an actor, piecing together a narrative that challenges what an autobiography can be. New edition. [Paperback]
"Recursive, clear-eyed and flatly funny, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle captures here all the strangeness, fragility and wry sufferings of a young life." —Jessica Au
"Like nothing else you’ll encounter. A meditation on pain and illness made strange by close proximity, a child and parent leaking into each other. Butcher-McGunnigle has developed a brand new way of creating story to make this stunning work possible." —Pip Adam
”One of the most innovative New Zealand books published in recent years.” —Siobhan Harvey, Booknotes
”Astonishing. This poetry is unlike anything I have seen.” —Paula Green
”A grand achievement. The writing goes to the aching heart of disconnection and of longing for repair. Butcher-McGunnigle has created a crooked beauty out of shards.” —Sue Wootton, Takahe
>>Read an excerpt.
>>A note from the author about the book.
A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the radical history of mothering by Elinor Cleghorn $40
Mothers make history. Yet for centuries, patriarchal control of motherhood has relegated acts of growing, birthing, nurturing and loving children to the sidelines, deeming the work of mothering to be unworthy of historical enquiry. In A Woman's Work, Elinor Cleghorn retells the story of motherhood, showcasing the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, and community leaders who have shaped the course of history. These inspiring figures include Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval nun and mystic with pioneering views about the maternal body; Mary Wollstonecraft, who laid the intellectual groundwork to release motherhood from male control; and Sojourner Truth, who drew attention to the abhorrent treatment of mothers under chattel slavery. Beginning in the ancient world, we learn how each era constructed its own idealised notion of motherhood — from the misogynistic dogma of the early church and the stigmatisation of single mothers in 17th century England, all the way through to the post-war myth of the perfectly contented housewife. But we also learn how mothers of all classes and circumstances fought back, and lobbied to be valued, respected and supported — not as reproductive vessels, but as people. From the author of Unwell Women, A Woman's Work is a bold and radical new history of mothering, and a timely reminder that the fight for reproductive justice is far from over. [Paperback]
>>The horrors persist.
>>Women aren’t the solution to an aging population.
Sororicidal by Edwina Preston $38
A punk-gothic historical novel in which sisterhood is the defining experience of two women's lives — and also the potential death of them. Well-born Mary and Margot are raised on a vineyard estate above Adelaide in the early years of the last century. Mary, brilliant and beautiful, dazzles all as her quiet, serious sister trails in her shadow. But Mary's high-handed malice finds a match in Margot's growing resentment at mistreatment; her revenge will be served at absolute zero. Set against a backdrop of privilege and propriety — and unfolding in an era of global conflict and radical new ideas about art and female agency — Sororicidal is an account of Edwardian-era sisterly love that mutates into a very modern tale of rivalry and betrayal. The polite cruelty of their childhood games becomes adult battles where the endgame is to split the nuclear family, releasing utter devastation. Sororicidal is the story of womanhood across a convulsive century — and the ordinary lives of two sisters who remain inextricably linked across a lifetime: as mirrors, rivals, and executioners of one another's dreams. It is a novel about the necessary and unendurable entanglements of family; the thin, volatile line between care and spite; and how love is a flame that both feeds and consumes. [Paperback]
Small Comfort by Ia Genberg (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $28
Intricately built and wickedly humorous, this is a novel in five parts, all about one thing: money. From an interview with a child star turned thief to the mysterious death of an employee at a drug manufacturer — or the couple feigning married bliss to keep their inheritance, Small Comfort carefully unravels the value we place on both money and people. What does it really mean to be in debt to someone? How does our financial worth permeate the ways we think and feel? And what do we lose when we supposedly win? Small Comfort skewers its characters, slyly implicating the reader along the way. [Paperback]
”Money makes the world go round and Ia Genberg has a deep, clear-eyed vision of how. The dramatic distinctness of the five stories that make up Small Comfort speaks to the might of Genberg's imaginative powers, while the intricate threads tying them together are testament to her subtleness as a thinker. It couldn't work without Kira Josefsson's staggeringly flexible translation, which also stands out for the naturalness of its dialogue and wonderfully rhythmic prose. This duo's writing zings and smarts in all the right places as we see ourselves reflected in the characters, warts and all. Breathtakingly original, profound but with a delicious dose of irreverence.” —2026 International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>Read an extract.
>>Not the way it was planned.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio) $38
Hana has nothing but she's hopeful. She's fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears. Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana's dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that caters to hostesses and their marks, small-time crooks, men with low morals and deep pockets, and anyone down on their luck. Suddenly Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible. But in the seedy streets of Setagaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana's hope, her optimism, and her drive, will be tested to the limit. Twenty years later, Kimiko is on trial. Now Hana must wrestle with her own actions, and face their devastating consequences. [Paperback]
”I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami.” —Haruki Murakami
”Mieko Kawakami is a genius.” —Naoise Dolan
>>Sisterhood, survival, and finding hope in the darkness.”
The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín $32
In the stories collected in The News from Dublin Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home. A woman in Galway hears of the death of her son in the First World War. An Irishman seeks anonymity in Barcelona, haunted by crimes he has committed. A man goes to Dublin from Enniscorthy to implore the Minister for Health for a special favour. A young woman is pregnant during the Spanish Civil War. An undocumented worker finds himself living an illegal life and must leave San Francisco, and his child, after thirty years in America. Three sisters who have been living in Argentina decide to return to Catalonia. [Paperback]
”Tóibín is the consummate cartographer of the private self, summoning with restrained acuity (and a delicious streak of sly humour) the thoughts his characters struggle to find words for.” —Clare Clark, Guardian
>>A complex business.
>>How evil is tolerated.
The Last Witch on the Knock by Aimée MacDonald $38
”Wouldn't you rather be a witch than a victim? I didn't realise those were my only options.” In need of a fresh start, Thomasin leaves her toxic boyfriend, absent father and empty friendships to spend the summer in the Scottish Highlands with her eccentric Aunt Agnes and stern little cousin, Nina. But amidst the sprawling fields and ragged hills thrums a secret that has cursed the land for generations. 300 years earlier, Kate McNiven labours in The Big House by the Knock hill, wishing for a brighter future far away from the lecherous clutches of her master, the Laird. When she is exiled as a witch for refusing to succumb to his advances, Kate finds the escape she so desperately seeks in Thomasin, whose vulnerable body becomes her unwilling host. In the thin place between centuries, through a pulsing wound that bleeds out history, the truth of the past is finally ready to be revealed. [Paperback]
”Tense, harsh and haunting, The Last Witch on the Knock explores toxic relationships in myriad ways. Through a blend of body horror and poetic insight, Aimee creates a compelling tale.” —Lynsey May
”A lyrical exploration of identity and shared trauma, reminding readers of the power of folk. MacDonald's writing is unflinchingly visceral.” —Amy Twigg
”Mesmeric from the first page. A twisting, haunting tale where the present thrums with the bloody heartbeat of the past. MacDonald's prose is poetic and sharp.” —Lucy Steeds
”The Last Witch on the Knock does witches differently; here, a feral, intimate honesty lights the pyres.” —Charlotte Tierney
Read our 476th newsletter.
10 April 2026
From the rusting hulks of the industrial era, from China to America, from the bodily functions of blood to the philosophical musings on the allegories of nature and man, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Rust in the 'Object Lessons' series is a fascinating exploration of this chemical process. Fittingly introducing us to his subject through the most obvious - and what comes to mind immediately (for me at least) when we consider rust - Rabaté describes industrial wastelands and the slow decay of iron as it oxidises creating layers of rust. In a country where corrugated iron and steel infrastructure is synonymous with growth and decline, construction and patched sheds, placing ourselves in the world of the American Dust Bowl or the industrial decline of China or the agricultural wastelands of Australia is more a matter of scale than of foreign territory. In these discussions of rust, Rabaté draws on cultural references in literature and film: Paul Hertneky’s memoir Rust Belt Boy, Wang Bing’s documentary Rust, and an Australian novel by Paddy O'Reilly, The Fine Colour of Rust. Where the reader starts with the idea of decay and decline, Rabaté's analysis moves us to see rust also as a saviour, a surprising and not always negative keeper of time. Using the same method, the conversation moves towards the metaphoric, and here again texts illustrate the author’s thinking. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K is explored as a metaphor for renewal and the land giving, through its richness in iron, a plentiful supply of vegetables — the one the main character is most enamoured of being the red-orange (rust-coloured) pumpkin. As we are drawn into this examination of the notion of rust, oxidation, iron — the ideas of nature in flux — the text moves into deeper discussions of the works of several philosophers: Hegel and Ruskin each have chapters devoted to them, lovingly entitled 'Hegel and the Restlessness of Rust' and 'Ruskin: Nothing Blushes like Rust'. These are thoughtful, lively and witty explorations worth re-reading. Alongside these more academic musings are anecdotal tales from the author’s childhood - his pet turtle features with her rust coloured shell, as does his anaemia and the prescribed medicine of fresh horse’s blood. Another writer explored in response to the ideas of rust and decay is Kafka, and his story ‘Jackals and Arabs’, which features rusty scissors and is also an allegory for his views on the politics and machinations of Zionism and its effect upon the Arab communities of Palestine. In the final parts of the book Rabaté extends the conversation of rust to imperfection, to the flaw that makes an object exquisite — the mark of time, nature and artist — in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, in the sculptural works of monuments purposely made to alter over time through oxidisation, and in architecture that allows the metal to record time on its facades. The concluding chapter introduces the hopefulness of rust - the discovery of ‘green rust’, an ecological tool that can clean iron-heavy waters and that may lead to technology that will break down waste. Rust is ‘infinitely restless’ in all its guises — physically, emotionally and intellectually — and Rabaté’s musings are infinitely provocative with their eclectic amalgams. Another excellent addition to the 'Object Lessons' series.
“Fact is to me a hindrance to memory,” writes the narrator in this remarkable collage of passages evoking the ways in which past experiences have impressed themselves indelibly upon her. The sleepless nights of the title are not so much those of the narrator’s youth, though these are either well documented or implied and so the title is not not about them, but those of her present life, supposedly as “a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home”, waking in the night “to address myself to B. and D. and C.— those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to through the night.” As if the narrator is a projection of the author herself, cast forward upon some distorting screen, the ten parts of the book make no distinction between verifiable biographical facts and the efflorescence of stories that arise in the author’s mind as supplementary to those facts, or in substitution for them. Elizabeth the narrator seems almost aware of the precarity of her role, and of her identity as distinct from but overlapping that of the author: “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.” Hardwick writes mind-woundingly beautiful sentences, many-commaed, building ecstatically, at once patient and careening, towards a point at which pain and beauty, memory and invention, self and other are indistinguishable. Spanning over fifty years, the book, the exquisite narrowness of focus of which is kept immediate by the exclusion of summary, frame or context, records the marks remaining upon the narrator of those persons, events or situations from her past that have not yet been replaced, or not yet been able to be replaced, by the ersatz experiences of stories about those persons, events and situations. “My father…is out, because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded.” Hardwick and her narrator are aware that one of the functions of stories is to replace and vitiate experience (“It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction”), and she/she writes effectively in opposition to this function. Observation brings the narrator too close to what she observes, she becomes those things, is marked by them, passes these marks on to us in sentences full of surprising particularity, resisting the pull towards generalisation, the gravitational pull of cliches, the lazy engines of bad fiction. Many of Hardwick’s passages are unforgettable for an uncomfortable vividness of description—in other words, of awareness—accompanied by a slight consequent irritation, for how else can she—or we—react to such uninvited intensity of experience? Is she, by writing it, defending herself from, for example, her overwhelming awareness of the awful men who share her carriage in the Canadian train journey related in the first part, is she mercilessly inflicting this experience upon us, knowing it will mark us just as surely as if we had had the experience ourselves, or is there a way in which razor-sharp, well-wielded words enable both writer and reader to at once both recognise and somehow overcome the awfulness of others (Rachel Cusk here springs to mind in comparison)? In relating the lives of people encountered in the course of her life, the narrator often withdraws to a position of uncertain agency within the narration, an observatory distance, but surprises us by popping up from time to time when forgotten, sometimes as part of a ‘we’ of uncertain composition, uncertain, that is, as to whether it includes a historic ‘you’ that has been addressed by the whole composition without our realising, or whether the other part of we is a third person, indicating, perhaps, that the narrator has been addressing us remotely all along, after all. All this is secondary, however, to the sentences that enter us like needles: “The present summer now. One too many with the gulls, the cry of small boats on the strain, the soiled sea, the sick calm.”
Written in beautiful, surprising, vegetal prose as if written by the rainforest in which it is set rather than by a human hand, this novel incants to life Antonio de Erauso, a real figure from the Spanish conquest of South America, a trans man disgusted with religion and authority, hiding in the jungle with two Guarani girls he has rescued from slavery. Only in the jungle, where the categories imposed by human understanding are in flux, can transformation and liberation be effected.
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Night, Ma by Elizabeth Knox $40
For three and a half years, calamities hit Elizabeth Knox and family in rapid succession. Her sister suffered a psychotic break and was hospitalised against her will, her husband’s brother died by violence, and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. In time, she was able to write about it. Night, Ma is a book about the net of family which people are held by, but also slip through. About the actual daily work of love; the physical and cognitive work love requires. Knox is a gifted storyteller who has given us other worlds; now she invites us into her own. With characteristic generosity and transcendence, she guides us through time, illness, loss, and the loneliness of unutterable experiences. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Absolutely brilliant. This radiant, radically honest memoir pulls the pin on a sequence of domestic grenades, from the perils of semi-feral childhood to a cruelly compacted series of family crises that, like shock waves, sweep all before. Armed with inimitable wit, the consolation of cats and a forensic gaze that spares no one, least of all herself, Knox interrogates the act of caring; the ties that burn and bind, that we somehow survive.” —Diana Wichtel
”An unforgettable record of love and pain, as wide and deep as the ocean and as mighty. There is such life in this, such wit and goodness. Telling the truth of how we are, all of us, trembling on the edge of a great and terrible mystery.” —Noelle McCarthy
>>Never letting up.
>>Workshopping.
>>The film that laid an egg.
>>The closely noticed husband.
The Clean: In the dreamlife you need a rubber soul by Richard Langston $50
In 1978 in Dunedin the Kilgour brothers, Hamish and David, and their schoolfriend Peter Gutteridge, got together to form a band called The Clean. When Robert Scott joined in 1980 the band found a combination that endured for nearly forty years. The Clean profoundly changed alternative music: hitting the New Zealand charts for months with a single made for $50, 'Tally Ho!'; helping establish Flying Nun and a music scene independent of the big labels; pioneering a low-fi, do-it-yourself approach to rock music; and touring internationally to influence bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. Raw and immediate, this is the story as told by members of The Clean and their inner circle - fellow musicians such as Chris Knox, Martin Phillipps, Graeme Downes and Ira Kaplan, friends and family, pub promoters and sound engineers, and their good friend, Richard Langston. From teenagers in a Dunedin practice room to New York City on 9/11 - this is the band's history as it unfolds. A remarkable piece of multivocal oral history, bursting with images both familiar and surprising. [Flexibound]
”Much needed and long overdue. … A book that tells the story of the band at the heart of New Zealand underground music and that became synonymous with things like Flying Nun Records and the "Dunedin Sound" that travelled around the world. It is written by the ideal author who was not only there when it all happened, but who also recognised why it really mattered more than most.” —Matthew Goody, author of Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988
”In 1980 The Clean blew my mind open at Coronation Hall on a Sunday afternoon. I stood adrift on a sea of wooden floorboards, drinking classic clanging brilliant amp sound, guitar notes shimmering all around me like scattered metal hail . . . All I knew was that this was where all music came from.” —Alastair Galbraith
>>Look inside.
>>Anything could happen.
>>Getting older.
>>Obscurity blues.
Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne $42
Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly... Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her. [Paperback]
”Ghost Driver devises a new genre of administrative horror: by turns addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar. Malory's inner and outer worlds, like the novel's prose, feel agonisingly poised on a knife edge - gothic in the cruellest, off-kilter sense. I am obsessed.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Nell Osborne is a genius. Ghost Driver is brilliant and hilarious and dark and true. I loved it.” —Sarah Bernstien
>>Every wrong turn.
>>Getting evil freely.
>>A tapestry of humiliation.
Spit by David Brennan $38
Welcome to the village of Spit, where Danny Mulcahy is losing the run of himself, and where, as he and his friends dream of escaping, an unexpected death sets the rumour mill into motion. Suffering an unexplained, perpetual banishment the Spook of Spit is watching everyone and everything - nothing goes unnoticed. Bearing witness to the village's half-truths and suppressed secrets, fragments of its own dark and obscured history are unveiled. As events spiral out of control, the past, present and future are set to collide. Can there be redemption for past deeds? How do you escape when you are fated to remain? What does it take to break free from the confines of Spit? [Paperback]
”There are whispers of Synge and Kevin Barry but Brennan has a full-throated and thrilling voice of his own. Spit gets hold of you and won't let you go.” —Estelle Birdy, The Irish Independent
”Crackling with dark humour and incantatory force, every line pulses with linguistic relish.” —The Irish Times
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen $30
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar. Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise. From the author of Dropbear, winner of the 2022 Stella Prize. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Stella Prize.
”Rageful, desireful, artful, sorrowful, hauntful. A blaze of a book.” —Michelle de Kretser
”Evelyn Araluen's poetry and prose is created with a passionate intensity, razor-sharp intellect, beauty and compassion as she turns her mind to the broad sweep of history and a dynamic engagement with the spirit of our times.” —Alexis Wright"
”Blistering, brilliant, lacerating, wry, elegiac, The Rot is a hymn to girlhood, to resistance, to solidarity. Araluen is a masterful stylist, braiding air-fryer abjectioncore with bathtub meditations on the machinery of colonialism — and the whiplash and fury of witnessing and protesting genocide in the digital age. For all its allusions to mould and decay, The Rot is exhilarating in its defiance and staunchness.” —Jennifer Down
>>Dissecting the rot.
>>Poetry, rage, and the power of not surrendering.
>>”I wrote The Rot.”
Three Stories of Forgetting by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (translated from Portuguese by Alison Entrekin) $35
Three men haunt these pages. Perhaps they are tormented ghosts who cannot find rest. All three have been expelled in some way, sent on solitary journeys into the night. Celestino, an old slave trader, returns to the solitude of his home and garden after a life of horrors. Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan who served on the Portuguese side in the Colonial War and has become a valet in Lisbon, writes endlessly to his daughter, asking for her forgiveness. And Bruma, an enslaved man, initiates a young writer, Eça de Queirós, into the world of literature. In discrete yet overlapping tales, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Three Stories of Forgetting explores the experiences of those who live within the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese Empire. In these unstable chapters, we find incarnations of our despair at the questions that history does not answer, and allegories that may yet reveal new ways of seeing through the dark. [Paperback]
"A brilliant, yet understated, critique of a past that Portugal most likely hopes to forget. Lyrical, enigmatic, and subtle: an accomplished work." —Kirkus Reviews
>>What the garden remembers.
>>600 years of colonialism.
>>Co-creatoirs.
The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson $48
The Wayfinder is an epic, sweeping novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu’i Tonga Empire. At its heart is Korero, a young girl chosen to save her people from the brink of starvation. Her quest takes her from her remote island home on a daring seafaring journey across a vast ocean empire built on power, consumption, and bloodshed. With the grandeur of Wolf Hall, Shogun, and War and Peace, The Wayfinder immerses readers in a world untouched by Western influence, evoking the lost art of oral storytelling. Far from a conventional swashbuckling adventure, it conjures a world of outrigger canoes and celestial navigation, weaving a narrative that is as much about survival and self-discovery as it is about the sweeping history of the Tongan people. In this monumental literary work, Adam Johnson explores themes of indigeneity, ecological balance, and the resilience of humanity in the face of scarcity, marking the novel as a meditation on both individual and cultural legacy. [Paperback]
"Novels are long divorced from the oral tradition; few are designed to last beyond their reading. But some books — Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), for instance, or Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (1985) — continue to be passed down, like legends. Predicting posterity is impossible, but The Wayfinder is this kind of work, modern and mythological. It is good enough, wondrous enough, to endure." —The Wall Street Journal
"An epic that feels less created than unearthed, Johnson's dizzying attention to the mercurial crosscurrents of conquest recalls Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. His bold melding of magic and psychological realism casts a spell as captivating as Marlon James's Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Yet The Wayfinder is sui generis — a tapestry of South Pacific myth, archetypal quest, political allegory, environmental jeremiad and feminist revision that feels both ancient and impossibly relevant." —The Washington Post
>>Celestial navigation.
>>A very real experience.
The Raven’s Eye Rebellion by Calire Mabey $25
When Getwin, Lea and Buckle — with the help of Sharp the raven — unearth the trickster Book of Blacke, they embark on a quest to undo the controls on their world, seeking justice for the Scribes who are forced to work and for those who have never been allowed to read or write. The city of Wyle comes alive with danger and intrigue as our heroes contend with the secrets of the Scholars Library, a magical boat, curious creatures, a secret reading and writing society, sleeping trees and the twists and turns of the ancient city. Can the friends stay safe? Will they be able to free the Scribes? Will Getwin's family ever be reunited? This sequel to award-winning The Raven's Eye Runaways is rich with wonder and a thirst for justice. [Paperback]
”Sparky and spooky, humorous and luminous.” —Elizabeth Knox
Kin by Tayari Jones $38
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother's death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life. A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South. From the author of An American Marriage. [Paperback]
"Tayari Jones's great subject is family loyalty. Kin alternates with metronomic precision between her main characters' first-person narratives. Loyalties and fortitude are repeatedly tested in this immersive drama. Resilience abounds." —The Wall Street Journal
"Jones's dazzling novel traces the complex range of the Black experience — rich and poor, queer and straight, blessed and cursed — in the Jim Crow South." —People
"One of the many pleasures of Kin is how deftly Jones builds the story within the context of the Jim Crow South in mid-twentieth century America. Another novelist might have made these broad social concerns the focus of the story, but Jones foregrounds her characters and lets them navigate these national tensions as naturally and confidently as they move through the streets of Atlanta and Memphis." —Ron Charles
Lost Wonders: 10 tales of extinction from the 21st century by Tom Lathan $28
Lost Wonders is a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth. From giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies, Tom Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime. Drawing on the personal recollections of the people who studied these species, as well as those who tried but ultimately failed to save them, Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world. It is also an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp. Most of the species considered in this interesting book were unique to isolated locations in the Pacific. [Paperback]
”Lathan's superb storytelling makes ecological crisis personal, local and often scarily visible. He doesn't let the tragedy hide, as it usually does, behind graphs and abstractions. Yet there's hope here too, in spades. This is an exhilarating and vital book.” —Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild
”A beautifully crafted elegy for the lost species of our age. In repopulating the world with extinct snails, lizards, bats and rats, Tom Lathan makes us marvel and care almost as much as the conservationists who tried and failed to save them.” —Kate Teltscher
The Only Way Is Up: On foot to Rome by Jennifer Andrewes $38
Setting out from Canterbury and walking some 2400 km to Rome along the Via Francigena, Jennifer Andrewes undertakes a personal journey across England, France, Switzerland and Italy. What begins as a physical journey soon becomes something deeper: an exploration of momentum, mindset, and the quiet power of putting one foot in front of the other when the way ahead is uncertain. Structured as a series of daily stages, the book follows the rhythms of pilgrimage life — early starts, long days on the road, chance encounters, moments of solitude, and the simple rituals that sustain a walker: coffee stops, conversations, rest, reflection. Along the way, Jennifer meets fellow walkers from around the world, navigates doubt and discomfort, and learns to trust the unfolding path rather than trying to control the outcome. While written through the lens of walking to Rome, The Only Way Is Up speaks to anyone standing at a crossroads. The author’s experience living with Parkinson’s is part of the landscape, but it does not dominate the narrative. [Paperback]
”'I have not walked the Via Francigena, but I recognise much in Jennifer's account from my own journeys on foot. Walking has always given me clarity, perspective and a steadier sense of leadership and decision-making. This book captures that rhythm beautifully. With insight and honesty, Jennifer shows how sustained movement builds resilience, momentum, and unexpected connection. A generous, reflective and uplifting account of pilgrimage as a framework for navigating change.” —Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand
>>The power of walking.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
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Find out what we’ve been reading.
2 April 2026
In 2012, lying in a hospital bed, clinging to language, wondering what my brain was doing, I wrote: “my inability to sleep my inability to remain asleep imperfect inability in either case my imperfect inability to fall asleep therefore a slight ability to fall asleep perhaps all it takes not much of a claim my nearly complete inability to fall asleep my nearly complete inability to remain asleep nothing remarkable there in either case all sleepers awake perhaps sooner perhaps later excepting those who will not ever wake but who will no longer be asleep in any case my nearly complete inability to remain asleep for more than a few seconds no my complete inability to remain asleep for more than a few seconds so it seems who knows eyes open in the dark my complete inability to fall asleep…”. I had driven myself to the hospital one-handed (I shouldn’t have done that) after finding that my left arm had become entirely unresponsive and discovering how hard it is to peel an egg for lunch using only one hand (typing had been manageable and I had really wanted to finish what I was working on). They gave me all the tests. My stroke was a small one compared with the one that wiped out poet Richard Siken in 2019, though his was at first misdiagnosed at the hospital as a panic attack. Afterwards he found himself having to completely rebuild his relationship with his body, with his world, and with language itself — the medium that previously had come most naturally to him. To help him with this, or, rather, to grab desperately and uncertainly at both language and memory, he wrote a series of short paragraphs, firstly just to explain himself to himself, that later formed the core of the book I Do Know Some Things. The 77 prose poems are written in the empty place made clean by the stroke, they are careful and simply constructed, the experiences they delineate are immediate, ordinary, and often tragically personal, and yet shafts of sublime poetry and insight strike often when least expected, sublimity and insight that surely would not have been possible without the emptiness cleared in Siken’s world by the stroke. Also, notably, this is a darkly hilarious book, both vitriolic and tender. What began for Siken as a series of exploratory and explanatory survival notes to himself built into a series of playful interrogations of memories, traumas and losses, a pinning of personal phantoms, a renegotiation of the contract between inner and outer worlds, and an unfurling of new and vulnerable possibilities in language and in life — new and vulnerable possibilities that could not have been accessed but from a place of helplessness and hopelessness. “If it can be done, there’s a way to do it poorly,” writes Siken of his failure to properly fill a place in the world, but it is this failure, this struggle and attendance to the most basic problems of living and thinking, that provides access to new ways of writing, where the quotidian and the ecstatic, the simple and the infinite, the personal and the universal, the tragic and the treasured, death and renewal, the gauche and the inspired are barely separate at all. Surely this is what poetry is always aiming for. “A man lies down in leaves, singing, so we’re surrounded by trees in wind. His song is a mountain and all the ladders that every living thing is climbing. He will sing his beast into a larger beast and trample the open field of himself into wonderment. These things happen. It frightens me, this availability to the world, the vulnerability it takes for possible joy.”
Addressing our increasingly antagonistic and frightening times, Ali Smith’s new novel asks if we are attending to the history that made us and to the history that we are making. Smith’s playful writing, her sympathetic characters, and her seemingly inexhaustible reserves of knowedge and care, provide hopeful paths towards better lives, not only for her characters but also for us. Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we can rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness.
I’ve been reading Ali Smith for decades. From her debut novel, Like, through her short story collections, Hotel World springs to mind, her retelling of mythologies, Girl Meets Boy and The Story of Antigone, to the discomfort of There But For The and the unexpected visitor in The Accidential, to the art of How to Be Both, Smith’s books have always been intriguing, centred on human interactions and our ability to live in the world. Yet it was the seasonal quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer; and the books that have followed: Companion Piece, Gliff, and now Glyph; with their immediacy and provocation to act, to be part of the story that pushed her writing and the reading of her work into a realm where only Ali Smith could take us. Her ability to use language, to incorporate art, culture, and politics is invigorating, pointed and surprising.
Here are some of the things I said in my reviews at the close of reading each of the quartet novels and Gliff: “….a book that will both stun you and fill you with hope, moments of kindness, forgiveness, and a window to a better world if we dare to step through.”, “..a meditation on time, ….and the surprising things that the past can reveal to us in the present.”; “…with a hammering of words that are explosive…demands your attention. Ferocious and tender.”, “…draws richness out of desolation…and she does it with intelligence, wit and style.”, “To stay in this playfulness of words, the richness of language and story, to be suspended with curiosity, while also confronted by the urgency of our 21st century landscape must surely be a work of genius.”
In Ali Smith’s novels I have been introduced to artists, and experienced writers and mythology in new ways. I am asked to see, to shift or sharpen my perspective bringing the telescope’s lens to its best advantage, even when that clarity is frightening. Characters are brave, and also cowards. The curtains of the theatre that allow a player to be revealed, and then escape and hide, are constantly in motion. We flex our emotions. The reader is emboldened, then stunned. We remember why we should ask the most important question: Why? Ali Smith feeds our desire for story, for narrative, not at its surface level, but at its core: why narrative is important; whether that is in words, art, myth, nature, politics; and how it is used and how we can claim it. We can read the world, see it for what it is and more importantly what it could be. I think reading books is a subversive act: in reading we acquire knowing. We are in the book, and this action does not allow interference. If a book makes you curious, curious enough to ask questions, you are thinking. If you are thinking, this is a good thing. I have two new Ali Smiths on my reading pile, Glyph and So in the Spruce Forest. Autmnn will be a good reading season.
The International Booker Prize recognises the authors, translators and publishers of excellent fiction translated into English. The judges’ selections provide an opportunity to both broaden and deepen your reading.
Find out below what the judges thought of the books they short-listed this year, and then click through to our website to find out more and to place your orders. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
She Who Remains by Rene Karabash (translated from Bulgarian by Izadora Angel) $42
”In a village governed by archaic laws in the Albanian Alps, a teenage girl swears a vow of chastity to escape an arranged marriage. As a ‘sworn virgin’, with a new name, Matija is free to live as a man. But that freedom comes at a cost that tears Matija’s family apart. Told with understated poetry, this novel perfectly captures the slippery uncertainty of painful memories. Matija is a compelling narrator, whose story swept us up completely. She Who Remains is an unforgettable modern fairy tale.”
>>Read an extract.
>>Read an interview.
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) $48
”On a government-sponsored tour of 1930s colonised Taiwan, a Japanese author with an insatiable appetite develops complex feelings towards her local interpreter. Despite the instant spark between the two women, the power imbalance inherent in their relationship proves difficult to navigate. With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.”
>>Read an extract.
>>Read an interview.
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (translated from German by Ross Benjamin) $38
”In The Director, Daniel Kehlmann performs a literary panning shot over the career of real-life filmmaker G. W. Pabst and charts the ways in which Nazi ideology leaked into the arts during Europe’s occupation. Where is the line between survival and collaboration? And can art survive the moral bankruptcy of its makers? It’s hard to imagine any writer tackling such hefty themes with lightness, yet Kehlmann does just this, writing compassionately, humorously and unsparingly from the perspectives of his complex characters, guiding the reader through the moral maze. Translator Ross Benjamin writes each shifting voice and set-up with the nuance they demand in a juggling act of wit and gravity that shouldn’t look this easy. Deeply intelligent, ambitiously structured and unputdownable.”
>>Read an extract.
>>Read an interview.
The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (translated from German by Ruth Martin) $37
”What actually happens after a revolution? Through cycles of flight and return, exile and assimilation, Shida Bazyar takes readers through four decades in the lives of an Iranian family – two of them young revolutionaries, Behzad and Nahid, who flee to West Germany with their children. One generation yearns for their homeland; the other makes new beginnings; some visit home, some dream of return, some find going back too painful. The pages of The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran pulse with solidarities and betrayal, with heartache and humour. And for all exiles, migrants, once-and-future revolutionaries, Bazyar captures what it means to always live in hope.”
>>Read an extract.
>>Read an interview.
On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan) $40
”Set in a remote penal colony built on land scarred by slavery and colonialism, this vivid and haunting novel unfolds in a landscape where punishment has replaced justice and cruelty has become the norm. As the colony nears its end, the warden introduces a ritualised full-moon hunt, releasing prisoners into the forest for sport. Through spare yet masterful prose, Ana Paula Maia renders a closed world thick with dread, brutality and moral decay. The prisoners and guards alike are trapped within a system that corrodes and suffocates everyone it touches. On Earth As It Is Beneath is a stark, unsettling exploration of power, violence, destruction and institutional corruption that will linger with readers long after the final page.”
>>Read an extract.
>>Read an interview.
The Witch by Marie NDiaye (translated from French by Jordan Stump) $37
”Lucie, a long-suffering housewife, inducts her daughters into a secret practice passed down by the women in her family: witchcraft. As the two girls begin to explore their new powers, Lucie’s husband disappears, upsetting the balance of their stifling, suburban life. The language in this novel – and in Jordan Stump’s translation – is exquisite: sentences twist and transform in unexpected ways. Each character is observed with icy precision. Through Lucie’s daughters – with their nonchalant acceptance of the immense power they’re beginning to wield – the nuances of motherhood are brought into sharp focus. The Witch is pure magic.”
>>Read an extract.
>>Read an interview.
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Glyph by Ali Smith $45
It sounds like Gliff? Well, it's something else altogether. Glyph follows Ali Smith's 2024 novel Gliff and tells a story hidden in the first novel. Ghosts don't exist. They don't. End of. Story, however. It is haunting. Everything tells it. It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost. Is it imaginary? Is it real? Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom. What to do? She phones her sister. In a chiaroscuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making. A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness. This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world. [Hardback]
”Glyph's primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language; its etymological resonance and inference. Smith's tonal skill as a writer is also used to great effect when dealing with bureaucratic, authoritarian absurdity. It is a bold move to be so morally unflinching, especially in the face of a perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that so often privileges distance and irony, but in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day when so many others have equivocated or turned away. There is also something about Smith's relentless focus on language that makes her particularly well suited to the task. Smith's sensibility is fine-tuned to grapple with the avalanche of passive-voice headlines, asymmetric categorisations, outright linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that have accompanied the increasingly desperate attempts to justify the unjustifiable.” —Keiran Goddard, Guardian
”Smith is an exceptionally gifted storytelle. She can bring any sentence alive with the verve of her wordplay, as her characters spark off one another in speech, echoing, patterning and discovering the energy contained in a single moment. Smith's capacity for hope is infectious, and the hope posited by these books is that storytelling can restore not just our humanity but our political responsibility and agency. Between them, Gliff and Glyph offer a world of endlessly proliferating gliffs: slivers of conscience that Smith imbues with a power that is not illusory simply because it is imagined. Indeed, Smith suggests that made-up stories may, at this point, be the least illusory things we have.” —New Statesman
>>Exhilirating/excoriating.
>>Read Stella’s review of the companion volume, Gliff.
Wilderness of Mirrors by Olufemi Terry $48
When Emil’s father suggests that he set aside his studies to help steady his cousin’s life, the young neurosurgeon-in-training moves in with indifferent relatives in Stadmutter, an unfamiliar, deeply divided city at Africa’s southern tip. There he is drawn to tamsin, a white doctoral student, and Bolling, a wealthy Haitian-German whose reactionary ideas hold a curious allure. Beneath Stadmutter’s languid surface, a gathering Creole movement is straining the country’s fragile racial peace. Through Bolling’s machinations, Emil is pulled into events that threatne his future and pushed towards irrevocable choices. [Paperback with French flaps]
”I loved this novel, at once vivid and mysterious, beautiful and frightening. Olufemi Terry speaks with great clarity and precision to the aimlessness and self-disconnect of youth, the formlessness of relationships developed under liminal conditions, and the frightening sensation of being gradually absorbed into something vast and opaque. Emil is a fascinating protagonist; Wilderness of Mirrors follows his movements closely, yet he remains — to himself, too — often half-absent, though occasionally brought into sharp focus and placed under the lens of his own self-analysis. Wilderness of Mirrors follows Emil's search for meaning and emotion amidst the mysteries of himself and of the parallel South Africa in which the novel is set, to deeply absorbing, often destabilising effect.” —Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
”In Wilderness of Mirrors, Olufemi Terry conjures up a parallel South Africa where, although apartheid is decades gone, its young people move through an existential transience, fitfully straining to reckon with the gaps their country's history has left them. For Emil and Tamsin, there's no coming of age, only a hollow sense that they should be doing more with selves they are still figuring out. It's a world that is all too familiar, yet Terry transfixes the reader such that we are loath to turn away.” —Evan Narcisse, author of Rise of the Black Panther
>>Read an extract.
>>What lies beneath?
On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis (translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls) $43
In a run-down East London housing office, migrants and frustrated local government employees cross paths and try to work out what the latest policy means for them. As a favour to a friend, one man finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. It is not until his life collides with Ghiyath's death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who've fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls, full of insight, humour and profound humanity. [Paperback with French flaps]
”I was riveted and charmed by this funny, humane and poignant novel. It's written in a voice that is as ardent as it is sensitive, one marked by history and yet managing to remain beautifully unruly and independent.” —Hisham Matar
”Shady Lewis makes fun of everything and everyone with great humanity: we become attached to these characters who are more lost than crazy, who do what they can keep going. Lewis, with scathing humour and a healthy lightness of touch, examines everything: from the god Khnum to Margaret Thatcher via Karl Marx, freedom of expression, Facebook, romantic breakups, colonization, identity and religious tensions - nothing escapes his acerbic and lucid gaze. A delicious tragicomic novel about contemporary society.” —Nina Chastel, Orient XXI
”This introspective novel delights with its finesse and depth, and invites us to look at reality from the author's sensitive perspective. In painfully beautiful, funny and tragic prose, Shady Lewis skilfully and accurately expresses the difficulty of being excluded and stigmatized because of their difference.” —Nadia Leila Aissaoui, l'Orient litteraire
>>Madness and philosophy.
>>The translator reads a passage (and there’s a slideshow).
>>Fifty shades of whiteness.
Pulse by Cynan Jones $35
A collection of viscerally powerful short stories in which man is pitted against nature, against circumstance, and against himself. A man heads into the snow to hunt down the bear that has been taking stock from farms in the valley. A father tries to make something go right for the son he no longer lives with. A partner is called to help when a cow's labour goes horribly wrong. A fierce storm threatens to bring down a tree on powerlines over a family's home. Fear, vulnerability, tension and resolve course through these arresting and indelible stories from the Welsh author of The Dig and Cove. [Hardback]
”Breathtakingly tense, vital and precise. Cynan Jones has a rare gift for making us experience, moment by moment, the struggles of his characters to survive.” —Carys Davies
”Pellucid clinical sentences craft a loving symphony of meat and magic, mucous, mud and mire. Cynan Jones's writing is pure electric energy. Every story thrums and squirms with life. The accumulative affect is to deliver a shock to the heart of what a wild, strange and wonderful thing it is to be human.” —Megan Barker
”Each paragraph reads like a beautiful, multi-layered prose poem. The crystalline language conveys, with real emotive power, the squelch and suck of mud and manure, the stink of blood, the skin-feel of drizzle. Spending time with this collection is a sensory, immersive experience.” —Niall Griffiths
”Cynan Jones is a blast of fresh air, a stumble in the dark, and a sudden chill in the guts.” —Tim Winton
”The six tales in Cynan Jones’s new collection vibrate with fear. Jones introduces a mood of fearful expectation on the first page and maintains it, with few moments of respite. Much of the tension arises from our not knowing what is going on. Such withholding of information is a studied technique on the author’s part, a means of creating mystery, sparking our curiosity and prompting us to ask questions. Pared-down though his writing may be: it is shot through with moments of arresting originality and beauty. The painterly effect is exquisite, the first sentence of the first story exemplifying the quiet power of Cynan Jones’s prose.” —Times Literary Supplement
>>Nature and non-linear love.
>>Writing in your head.
Angst by Hélène Cixous (translated from French by Sophie Lewis) $48
A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis. [Paperback]
”Cixous reminds us that women have long spoken from a wound. To be is already to be abandoned, already to have lost, and still to love. To read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, to hear how writing becomes testimony to its own possibility.” —Jamieson Webster
”Language in Cixous’s hands is molten, constantly opening onto fresh possibilities.” —Maggie Nelson
”With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.” —Lidia Yuknavitch
>>On Angst.
>>Very close, very far.
Happiness by Yuri Felsen (translated from Russian by Bryan Karetnyk) $42
Influenced by the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Yuri Felsen’s writing stood at the forefront of aesthetic and philosophical currents in European literature. Set among the exiled Russian community of interwar Paris, Happiness offers both a vivid social snapshot and an unnerving psychological portrait, and its exploration of desire, rivalry, masculinity and self-deception, shaped by shifting sexual and emotional mores, feels strikingly modern. Written as a diary addressed to his beloved Lyolya, Happiness unfolds as an intense stream of consciousness in which Volodya — its anxious, self-scrutinising narrator — revisits the fragile equilibrium of their difficult relationship. When new figures enter Lyolya’s orbit, Volodya’s hard-won certainties begin to collapse. Forced to contend with a series of rivals — a Soviet film star, a dashing ex-soldier, a wealthy businessman — he is driven ever deeper into jealousy and self-analysis, with tragic results. As the relationship fractures, Volodya probes the uneasy bond between emotional suffering and artistic creation, and the elusive nature of happiness itself. Felsen’s writing has only recently been rediscovered. At the height of his career, following the Nazi occupation of France, he was deported and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and his legacy and archive were largely destroyed by the Nazis. [Paperback]
”Felsen has rightly been compared to Proust in his determination to make language capture every atom of the mind’s workings. This translation is a formidable achievement.” —Literary Review
”The miracle of Yuri Felsen is how his apparently Nabokovian rhythms lull you into a false sense of security, before a sudden and chilling exposure to the weather of a walk where the whole elegantly interwoven conceit of the narrator is ripped apart. And the pain of someone like Walser glints through a decadent surface of exiled life in Paris, to hint at darker shadows to come.” —Iain Sinclair
Zero Point by Slavoj Žižek $22
The essays in Zero Point ask how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and how we confront despair without collapsing into it — questions never more pertinent than the current moment in the wake of electoral victories for authoritarian populists and unceasing news of violent atrocities. The 'zero-point' of the title is ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups. Taken from Vladimir Lenin's 1922 piece 'On Ascending a High Mountain, in which Lenin considers the complexities of how one 'retreats' while keeping faith in the cause, the central simile of the climber offers a blueprint for resilience, flexibility, and the persistence of hope. This is the revolutionary as living out the Beckettian motto — 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' In Žižek’s hands, this becomes the formula for confronting the antagonisms of existing world order. With a particular focus on the Middle East — the point at which all our tensions threaten to explode — Žižek argues nothing can be addressed meaningfully without such a confrontation. [Paperback]
Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Gransden $40
In the midst of an apocalyptic event of unknown provenance — a mass of red spreading north from the southern counties — a young girl sets out on a journey. Along the way she encounters a series of eccentric characters, the few left behind in the wake of a widespread evacuation. Some of these individuals are ravaged and on the edge of death, while others are immersed in their own hermetic practices, be they solipsistic, nihilistic, or otherwise. None wish to engage for more than the brief time necessary to offer their meagre assistance. There is talk of 'anti-spores', pools of blood, and of a hum spreading through communication wires. The hum has altered the very appearance of written language, pushing words apart, leaving only single syllables behind. This constraint is present in the third-person narration we read but is removed during periods of dialogue. This results in a rhythmic, chantlike flow to the prose. As with the best of work that employs the tropes of apocalyptic fiction, Rebecca Gransden's unusual novella ends with many of its questions floating in the scarlet haze it generates, leaving them for the reader to ponder in the wake of what is surely a singular literary experience. [Paperback]
"Linguistically inventive, alert in every sense, and propelled with such narrative force that hairs burn on the unsuspecting reader’s neck." —Iain Sinclair
>>The way of salt and sin.
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki (tranlsated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $37
The new novel from the author of Butter. Eriko really wouldn't mind being savaged, if it was her best friend doing the savaging. Eriko's life appears perfect — devoted parents, spotless apartment and a job in the seafood division of one of Japan's largest trading companies. Her latest project, to reintroduce the controversial Nile perch fish into the Japanese market, is characteristically ambitious. But beneath her flawless surface she is wracked by loneliness. Eriko becomes fascinated with a popular blog written by a housewife, Shoko. Shoko's posts about eating convenience store food and her untidy home are the opposite of the typical Japanese housewife's manicured lifestyle. When Eriko tracks Shoko down at her favourite restaurant and befriends her, Shoko is at first charmed by her new companion. But as Eriko's obsession with Shoko deepens, her increasingly possessive behaviour starts to raise suspicion. As Eriko's carefully laid plans begin to unravel, how far will she go to hold on to the best friend that she's ever had? [Paperback]
”Obsession, tension and toxic loneliness: Hooked had me in a headlock. No one writes about the hidden depths and lurking monstrosities of womanhood quite like Asako Yuzuki.” —Alice Slater
Mastering Italian Breads: Recipes and techniques from Italiy’s most celebrated breadmaker by Fulvio Marini $60
From humble homes in the mountain villages of Umbria and the Piedmont to the grand bakeries of Milan and Rome, the Italians know bread-baking. The same breads they make are also made in fancy, expensive bakeries outside of Italy, too, but few people realize how easy, gratifying, and inexpensive it is to make these spectacular loaves at home. Enter Fulvio Marino, one of Italy's most celebrated bread-makers, who has made it his mission to teach everyday home cooks the secrets of Italian artisan breads. He has written a big, colorful book that reveals his secrets and those of his fellow artisans. Illustrated with hundreds of step-by-step color photos that show you how the breads are folded and shaped, Mastering Italian Breads includes well-known classics like Focaccia, Ciabatta, Crostata, and Pan DolceLesser known-but worth discovering! —Italian regional breads like Pane Pugliese and Teglia alla Romana. —More than a dozen Italian spins on rolls, biscuits, and breadsticks. —Six rustic and delicious versions of pizza doughs. —Breads with a sweet side, such as Cannoli and Panettone. Authoritative, easy-to-follow advice about yeasts, wheat varieties, proofing, rising, shaping, and baking. Both useful and inspiring. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
She Who Tastes, Knows: A memori of food, exile, and awakening by Durkhanai Ayubi $38
To truly understand things, we need to know them. We need to taste them. This is a story of how food connects us all — not only at the table but to each other's cultures and histories. Durkhanai Ayubi was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and she and her family became refugees when she was a small child. She's grown to see her ancestral lands be misunderstood as a desolate war zone of helpless people, with no history or culture worthy of mention, when the reality is in fact steeped in rich, complex histories of incredible cultural significance. Living in Australia, Durkhanai's only tangible connection to the histories of her homeland was through food, first through cooking with her family, and then as an owner of her much-loved award-winning Adelaide family restaurant, Parwana. Years on, and following Afghanistan's systemic collapse in 2021, Durkhanai realised that it was time to revisit those histories and tell the previously untold stories that can help shape a more optimistic future. She Who Tastes, Knows is an expansive history of Durkhanai's homeland and a vivid, moving story about what it truly means to understand another's culture. Through stories of food, family, belonging and migration, the book traverses cultural boundaries, weaving a tapestry of dignity, empathy and understanding. Each chapter draws on a particular ingredient important to Durkhanai's cultural identity, and explores their life cycles to uncover unseen histories of Afghan culture, the complexities of migrant and refugee experience, and how we as a society might work towards unifying our disparate cultures and ways of seeing the world. In our modern world, which can feel so disjointed, this book shows us how new possibilities for connection are just under the surface, waiting to bloom. [Paperback]
>>Ayubi is best known as the author of the Afghan cookbok Parwana.