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7 August 2026
Still on racing and literature this week. I’ve been reviewing books for just over a decade on RNZ, and this week I had a thematic twist with my book selection: it was horseracing, which I find hilarious for a number of reasons. One: I’m in awe of horses, i.e a little terrified of their majesty (so, not a pony-club child, even if I did have a short fixation of wanting a pony and thinking there was plenty of room on the front lawn). Two: I have little interest in horse races and even less time for gamblers. This view was formed as a bored child waiting in the car outside the TAB, not quashed by the minute or so excitement of going to Trentham once — after the first race, there seemed to be a long hot day of waiting in the ‘family picnic area’ — a parched field of cars, mothers with headaches, and restless children. But I digress, as Gerald Murnane would say in his excellent memoir Something for the Pain. His love of horseracing started as a child, with the pictures of the horses in the newspaper and the racecallers’ voices through the radio. The names of the horses, the colours of the stable, the overheard stories of the adults around him: all a source of fascination. Strangely, he was not put off by his father’s wins and losses at the track; the debts often life-changing for the family. Murnane writes with such verve that I couldn’t help but be pulled in. In each chapter he tells a tale, one that reveals as much about the history of the racetrack in Australia from the 1940s through to the 70s and the people in his orbit, as it does with his idiosyncratic obsession (more on that later), and his life as a writer. (If you haven’t read any Murnane: think Beckett or Proust living in smalltown Australia.) His is the kind of writing where you stop mid-paragraph to wonder at the ease with which the language develops on the page. The sentences are near-perfect, the elliptical nature of the prose delightful rather than frustrating. And back to his idiosyncrasy. He has a real and imagined world of horses, names and colours. The colours of the stable being a central component of his love of the racetrack. When he describes two favourites in a race being (brown and white) (brown and cream) — always bracketed after the horse’s or jockey’s name — I imagine the field of horses racing around the track and the punters with their binoculars attempting to tell them apart. His imaginary world (not in this book; you’ll have to seek out a documentary about Murnane to find out more about this) consists of coloured marbles, names, and many files. It’s his schema. Which he does talk about in the memoir. A lifelong ambition to find the perfect betting style. Murnane’s gambling is one of patterns and restraint, of rules and analysis. It’s keeping your eyes open and ears to the ground, a studied form-book and people-watching. In Something for the Pain there is the comedic and the tragic; you could read it for the horseracing; for the insights into people’s behaviour, both good and bad; for the enjoyment of Murnane’s language; or to understand this excellent writer’s approach to literature.
Listen to Thomas read the ‘Prologue’ to Mark Bowles’s new novel How Do People Stay the Same (published by Galley Beggar Press).
“A journey backwards into and out of the darkness with a companion who is erudite, biting, witty, annoying, garrulous, overbearing, charming, angry, awkward and tender.” —C.D. Rose
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
ALL HER LIVES by Ingrid Horrocks $35
”Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations and constraints of womanhood. … Emotionally intelligent and historically alert, this book is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf of New Zealand fiction.” —Ockham New Zealand Book Awards judges’ citation on awarding All Her Lives the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction
WHISTLER by Ann Paychett $39
When Daphne notices an older gentleman following her around the Met museum in New York, she doesn't expect it to be Eddie — her former stepfather. While their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both. Reflecting on the short time they spent with each other, they begin to piece together the moments that have shaped who they have become.
THE FINEST HOTEL IN KABUL: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet $40
The Winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction ”plays to all Lyse Doucet's strengths: clarity, empathy, depth of knowledge and innate grasp of fine detail. Her subject is not just a hotel, but a hotel that tells the story of four decades of Afghanistan's proud and sometimes unbelievably painful history. This is a most readable account of joy, despair and resilience in one of the world's most fascinating countries.” —Michael Palin
TALKING CLASSICS: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard $40
What's exciting about a piece of bread 4,000 years old? Or some pots of paint abandoned in the eruption Pompeii? Why should we be bothered with the distant past anyway? What's the point? The life, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome have something to offer everyone. They are not the property of wealthy white men only.
SAID THE DEAD by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
Blending detailed research with the sensitvities of a novelist and poet, Said the Dead breaches the boundaries that contain the past to resuscitate the voices of women who were inmates in a now-derelict Victorian mental hospital in the city of Cork. As the narrator follows their traces through the archives and through the corridors, she finds in the murmurings of these women much that resonate with her own life and experiences.
Nell Stevens’s enjoyable novel queers our usual understandings of authenticity and fakery, with all the dramatic vicissitudes and complexities of plot of the type of Victorian novel that it both imitates and remakes. Grace shows a prodigious talent at copying and forging paintings, presented here as a virtue because “the value of the copy is in the copyist’s powers of empathy”. But are our social interactions enabled by just the same species of empathy? Isn’t it by copying others that we gain fulfillment and love, and become ourselves? As the machinations tighten, Grace wonders if it is the ability to ‘pass’ that will give her the opportunity to be authentic.
“Art is always an overreaction,” writes Yoko Tawada in her lithe and compact novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel ); this statement being in itself an overstatement, as all statements are overstatements. Did we not learn at school, he pondered, that every overreaction provokes an equal and opposite overreaction, that the impact of each overstatement causes another overstatement to leap out at the end of the line, and so forth back and forth until the Newton’s cradle of the mind is finally still if it ever can be still. Does any movement towards certainty destroy the very certainty towards which it moves? Is that for which we reach inevitably destroyed by the reaching? This is no way to start a review, he thought; in his search for clarity he has produced a wash of vague sensations barely distinguishable from life itself, so to call it, a fractality of precisions more complicated than disorder; what is literature for, after all, if not to make life more wieldable, or our thinking about it more wieldable at least? No such luck. If the words for things can be used as substitutes for things, they are subject to linguistic forces and relations to which the things themselves are not subject. There’s an illness in all of this, a linguistic illness, or an illness of consciousness, that blurs, ultimately, or penultimately, or by something preceding the penultimate by one or several or many steps, the distinctions between words and their objects and between words and other words, a blurring that allows for or entails the febrile reconfiguration of language into new forms, he was going to write new and less useful forms, but the utility of language is no measure of its other functions (its other pathologies, he almost wrote). The narrator of Tawada’s novel refers to himself as ‘the patient’ and refers to himself in the third person (“third person is a form of salvation” (as we know)) and gives an account of the stayings-in and goings-out that are constrained by the vagaries of his illness and the vagaries of the illness of the world at large, if these are not one and the same: “The patient leaves the house as seldom as possible, and every time he is forced to go out, he first checks to see if the coast is clear. The coast is seldom clear, hardly ever.” If he ever does go out. He meets and befriends one Leo-Eric Fu, who shares with Patrik (Patrik is the name attached by others to the one who calls himself the patient; the patient's name as he approaches the collective world (plausibly a kind of healing (“A person who can continue to distance himself from home, one step farther each day, is no longer a patient.”))) a love and knowledge of the work of Paul Celan, a poet who made from German, a language broken by the trauma of hosting the Holocaust, a new language of beauty and possibility made entirely of the marked, traumatised and broken pieces of that language, and with whose work this novel is a form of conversation (please note that it is not necessary to the appreciation of the novel to be familiar with the other pole of that conversation, though the novel may lead a reader towards that pole). For the patient it is, we assume from the deliberately inconclusive evidence, the trauma of the Covid 19 pandemic that has broken language, either because of the collective circumstances in which he finds himself or also because he himself is actually in addition to metaphorically ill. I am not unfamiliar, he thought, as he attempted to continue with what was intended as a review but was suffering from an illness which made it both not really a review and very hard to sustain, with the linguistic deliria induced by fever, with the disintegrative and recombinatory compulsions that reveal something about language and are in fact structurally inherent in language but usually suppressed for reasons of utility or ‘health’. Any illness will remake language, given the chance to spread. In the delirium of the novel, the patient’s illness (“an autoimmune disorder of the mind”) attacks the distinctions between the binaries it posits: isolation/connection, illness/health, internal/external, uncertainty/comprehension, experience/identity; and attacks all borders generally: those between persons individually and those set between groups and nations. There are no contradictions. “People say I'm sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home.” The forms of thought that gave rise to the illness, whatever it is, are broken and remade: “I prefer a not-yet-knowing or a no-longer-knowing to actual knowledge. These are the fields in which I'll find my role.” It is possible, even probable, he thought, that the entire book takes place within the patient’s head, if such a place exists (“What if Leo-Eric isn't really sitting here and this is all just taking place in my imagination?”), although, towards the end, the Patrik-impulse begins to gain a little ground from the patient-impulse, and the possibility that the idea of Patrik and also the ideas of Patrik could exist in the minds of others begins at last to emerge. Language, ravaged by trauma and isolation, begins to adopt new forms. Is this healing? Illness, we begin to see, is entangled in time: “The present is a constant deferment.”
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.
How Do People Stay The Same by Mark Bowles $45
Told as a series of journal entries that move backwards in time, How Do People Stay The Same follows the life of Patrick Boyd — from the present-day contentment of family life and back to a darker, lonelier childhood. How Do People Stay The Same lays all of Patrick's experience before us, with the challenges of work, housing and all the other pinpricks of existence jostling with his complex inner world. It reveals a fragile man ground down by the world around him — but who might just be able to change and might just have the hope of a brighter future. Featuring the exquisite prose and lacerating wit that readers loved so much in All My Precious Madness, How Do People Stay The Same is also a deeply tender project — an exploration of family, childhood, love, and the personal bonds that tie us together. [Paperback]
“Wondrous. A celebration of life — a remarkable balance of woe and cynicism and wonder and joy.” —Sara Baume
“Brilliant, stunning, unlike anything else around.” —Lars Iyer
“A journey backwards into and out of the darkness with a companion who is erudite, biting, witty, annoying, garrulous, overbearing, charming, angry, awkward and tender.” —C.D. Rose
“A savage and tender work of contemporary disquiet from one of the most distinctive voices in British fiction.” —Stu Hennigan
>>Read an extract!
>>They do and they don’t.
>>All My Precious Madness.
Is Beauty Good by Rosalind Belben $48
“We feel pain, says Fritz, because we need to feel pain, it saves us from being burnt, or hurt, or from walking blindly into danger, breaking a bone; but what does a sense of beauty save us from; what purpose is there in our being coruscated by passing uglinesses; there is little that is moral about beauty; or does it reinforce somehow our notion of moral good: is beauty good?” Is Beauty Good is a novel populated with voices, each musing, in its own way, on the titular question. In thirty short, self-contained chapters set in places as varied as Berlin trams, English gardens, and the tops of mountains, people talk to silent listeners, engage in soliloquy, or else write down their meditations for a stone-deaf man. Elegiac and ironic, the novel speaks most hauntingly of the loss of the natural world, which is of course related to the loss of all those senses and faculties of appreciation that make us feel alive. The sheer sensuous force of Rosalind Belben’s prose is on full display in this work of uncommon inventiveness and philosophical potency, which recalls the fictions of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard. Back in print at last, with an introduction by Esther Kinsky. [Paperback with French flaps]
'So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognising a writer who can conjure an inner life and spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer's mind.' —Isabel Quigly, Financial Times
'Belben's eye for the movement and texture of the natural world is extraordinarily acute and she has a poet's ear for language. A confession of fulfilment, of endless curiosity for, and love of life.' —Selina Hastings, Daily Telegraph
'Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature. An achievement to celebrate.' —Maggie Gee, The Observer
'From the publisher that brought Ann Quin back into print comes another lost classic from an English visionary. Rosalind Belben's work is both terrific and disconcerting, an essential read for lovers of extraordinary fiction.' —Camilla Grudova
'Extremely beautiful, utterly convincing, and rivals anything by Virginia Woolf.' —Melissa Harrison, The Guardian
'Belben takes a brief but unforgettable foray into the mind of an isolated middle-aged woman who describes herself as "an unfortunate ghost." Readers will be glad to discover this striking narrative.' —Publishers Weekly
'A seductively strange novel. In Belben's writing, time periods dissolve: the phenomenon of the medieval pageant is invoked; Robin Hood becomes a character; dreams are recorded; and desires rise up, then settle down.' —Rhian Sasseen, Electric Literature
'A complex, emotionally intense narrative with experimental shifts in style and tone, and vivid lyrical passages. Belben writes about nature with a poetic intensity that is quite wonderful, revealing a deep connection to the natural world, that her protagonist clearly shares.' —Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts
>>The author reads from the first chapter.
>>Falling awake.
>>Writing ugly.
>>The foreplay of wordplay.
Cataract by John Berger, illustrated by Selçuk Demirel $30
What happens when an art critic loses some of his sight to cataracts? What wonders are glimpsed once vision is restored? In this impressionistic essay written in the spirit of Montaigne, John Berger, whose treatises on seeing have shaped cultural and media studies for decades, records the effects of cataract removal operations on each of his eyes. The result is an illuminated take on perception. Berger ponders how we can become accustomed to a loss of sense until a dulled world becomes the norm, and describes the sudden richness of reawakened sight with acute attention to sensory detail. This little book invites us to pay close attention to our own senses and wonder at their significance as we follow Berger's journey into a more vivid, differentiated way of seeing. Demirel's witty illustrations complement the text, creating a mini-world where eyes take on whimsical lives of their own. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
A Quiet Place by Seichō Matsumoto (translated from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai) $48
While on an important business trip, Tsuneo Asai receives word that his wife, Eiko, has died of a heart attack. She has suffered from heart problems in the past, so her death isn't a complete shock, but she was tragically young to suffer such an end. Asai is rattled and sad but devotes himself fervently to his work as a government official to distract himself from the grief. It's not like his marriage was particularly passionate. But something about the circumstances of Eiko's demise is bothering him. Her heart attack struck while she was walking, alone, along a residential Tokyo street where she had no particular connections or reasons to be. During a curious visit to the small shop on that street, where Eiko took her last breath, Asai notices a hotel at the top of the hill, one obviously meant as a clandestine meeting place for lovers. He begins to wonder if his soft-spoken, haiku-obsessed wife might have been leading a double life. As Asai's discoveries cause his mental state to rapidly unravel, and normalcy becomes more and more untenable for him, the fraught relationship between career and domesticity in Japan is laid bare. [Paperback]
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens $33
In the town of Dominion, Mississippi, Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr. is more than a preacher. From his pulpit at the Seven Seals Baptist Church to the airwaves of his local radio station, he exerts influence over every aspect of society. By his side is his wife Priscilla, who types up his sermons and raises their five sons, favouring the youngest, Wonderboy. Handsome and adored, Wonderboy is destined to carry on his father’s legacy. But, after a violent altercation with a stranger, Wonderboy’s actions send shockwaves through the community. Told through the perspectives of the women who love these two men, this Morrisonian, God-troubled novel illuminates the pervasive sins of the patriarchy, and the bargains women strike to survive them. [Paperback]
Shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
"Mississippi is a mystifying language. In Dominion, Addie E. Citchens speaks it with a dazzling tongue. The book is at once ancestral and newborn, drunk with sugary grits beauty and sobering with a Black woman's truth. Citchens shows us that, in a world roamed by two-legged beasts whose robes are stitched with the blood and ruin of willful women, getting happy and getting free are vast contradictions." —Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
My Prizes: An accounting by Thomas Bernhard (translated from German by Carol Brown Janeway) $30
A brilliantly mordant memoir of the background and circumstances of nine literary prizes awarded to the Austrian novelist and enfant terrible between 1963 and 1980, followed by some of the speeches he delivered on those occasions. The result is a self-portrait of the artist as prizewinner and prize farceur: sardonic, biting the hand, relishing both the world and himself with bitter amusement. Preface by Frances Wilson. [Hardback]
"Thank goodness for Thomas Bernhard, the most truthful, the funniest, and the most musical of writers since Marcel Proust." —Gabriel Josipovici
>>The Grillparzer Prize.
>>Frances Wilson introduces the book.
>>Always a catastrophe.
>>Infected with admiration.
>>Kinetic loathing.
>>Other books by Thomas Bernhard.
Music as Medicine: How we can harness its therapeutic power by Daniel Levitin $30
We are only just beginning to appreciate the healing power of music on our minds and bodies. Here, a neuroscientist and celebrated musician introduces a bold new paradigm for medical treatment. From explaining how 'rhythmic auditory stimulation' can fight multiple sclerosis, to examining why Tracy Chapman's songs might just help cure PTSD, Professor Daniel Levitin explores how we can use music to repair our bodies and heal our deepest psychological wounds. The result is both a surprising tour through the science of music, and a joyful celebration of humanity's oldest obsession. [Paperback]
”For many years I have wondered why a bunch of frequencies organised into a piece of music has the ability, even without words, to make the listener cry and become emotional. Although I know this happens to me and many people, I have often wondered how this can be. Dr Levitin, in this latest book, Music as Medicine, has some fascinating insights into this great phenomenon.” —Paul McCartney
”In this fascinating book, the neuroscientist makes a strong case for the therapeutic force of music. The book merges research, theory and intriguing anecdotes about Levitin's interactions with musicians as well as patients to provide evidence of his contention that music not only functions as a temporary uplift or soothing balm in times of trouble, but possesses a much deeper restorative quality.” Observer
”A fun and thoughtful read. A crash course in the aspects of neuroscience that relate to aspects of our daily lives: joy, pain, learning, memory. Levitin draws on a career's worth of experiments and scientific discovery to demonstrate the many ways music can and is being used to treat a number of ailments, whether Tourette syndrome or Alzheimer's.” —Financial Times
Liberal Fascisms by Slavoj Žižek $22
With a an apparently contradictory and characteristically makeshift term, 'Liberal Fascisms', Slavoj Zizek captures the paradoxical nature of political populism. To see this phenomenon as purely liberal and dictatorially fascistic is to expose liberalism and fascism as two sides of the same coin. The concept offers a glimpse into the murky landscape of half-lies and double-truths that Zizek enters in this latest collection of urgent essays. From the economy and politics to ideology, these short texts work through the different faces of liberal fascism, structured around a trio of the universal, the particular, and the single: our global predicament; Europe and the Middle East; Trump's America. Peeling back the inadequate labels we hasten to pin on the phenomena that terrify us — like 'post-truth' — to peer at the seeping wounds beneath them, these writings reveal the uneasy mixture of lies and truths that have always been stacked, matryoshka like, inside of one another. With no cure in hand, but a refusal to dispense with thought that is muddled and murky, the essays are timely and resolute. From the so-called "death of truth" opens up the possibility for a new authentic truth... or for an even worse big Lie. And we must ask: What forms of justice are made possible by this disorder? [Paperback]
I Am a Cat: The manga edition by Sōseke Natsume, retold and illustrated by Chiroru Kobato (translated from Japanese by Zack Davisson) $30
Sōseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirises the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society in early 20th century Tokyo. Written with biting wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a rather cynical stray kitten. He finds his way into the home of an English teacher, where his running commentary on the follies and foibles of the people around him has been making readers laugh for more than a century. Illustrated by Japanese artist Chiroru Kobato, this edition provides a visual, entertaining look at a pivotal period in Japan's history — filled with cultural and societal changes, rapid modernisation and a feeling of limitless possibility — through the eyes of an unlikely narrator. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After A.I.: How to think about artificial intelligence before it’s too late by Cory Doctorow $39
Whether you want to criticise, kill, or use A.I., you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story. Start with labour: in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine pace — a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code. As Doctorow says: it s not enough to ask what the technology does; we have to understand who it s doing it for and who it s doing it to. The intended audience for A.I. hype isn't the people who are forced to use A.I. The A.I. show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. Investment bankers claim A.I. will to be worth more than $16 trillion — a number that only makes sense if A.I. replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of ‘value’, every story about A.I. must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of A.I. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the A.I. bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? In The Reverse Centaur s Guide to Life After A.I. — as he did in Enshittification — Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life ‘after’ A.I. in which the tools work for us, not the other way around. [Paperback]
>>You can’t make billions without hurting people.
Roadscapes: An automotive retrospective of Aotearoa New Zealand by Derek Smith (photographer) $40
For four decades, photographer Derek Smith has explored the way New Zealanders travel, work, and express themselves through the vehicles they drive. Roadscapes is his compelling photographic journey through the heartland of New Zealand, capturing our unique car cultures and the social landscapes they inhabit across Aotearoa. Smith’s long career as an electricity meter reader has taken him to many unusual locations and attuned his eye for the perfect details. This is a book that will be appreciated for the quality of its photographs and observation of period detail even by people with no interest in cars. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
A selection of books from our shelves that spring from the lockdown period. Click through to find out more:
Immortal Thoughts: Late style in a time of plague
Read our 492nd newsletter
31 July 2026
I thought for a while that horse racing was a sort of sport, and I wondered if there were other sports in which the people participating in them were relatively unknown, horse racing being done in the name of the horses, after all, not in the name of the jockeys, whereas cycle racing is done in the names of the cyclists not in the name of their bicycles, and then I realised that horseracing is not a sport at all, but a kind of competition more akin to marbles, a competition of ownership, in which the jockeys are just what make the horses go, the jockeys are the augmentation of the prowess of the horses with the will of their owners, nothing more, implants, marginal figures along with the other unknown persons whose collective efforts both enable and are obscured by the horses that they serve. But this marginalisation, together with the peripatetic nature of these professions, makes the contained human society of the racecourse backstretch such a fascinating and, for want of a better word, such a human one. In small worlds what would otherwise be small is writ large, and what would otherwise be unnoticed is made clear. Kathryn Scanlan’s wholly remarkable novel Kick the Latch is ostensibly the edited-down text of the Sonia half of a series of interviews between Scanlan and a longtime horse trainer (and subsequently prison guard and later bric-a-brac dealer) named Sonia, conducted between 2018 and 2021. Certainly there is a pellucid quality to these first-person accounts, the voice and language of Sonia are strongly delineated and very appealing to read, and the insights gleaned from them into the life of their narrator, from her hard-scrabble girlhood to her hard-scrabble but colourful life around the racetrack and beyond, are entirely compelling. In these twelve sets of titled anecdotes, Scanlan has succeeded in making herself entirely invisible (the text’s invisible but vital jockey), which shows invisibility to be a cardinal virtue for an author or an editor — and it is uncertain which of these labels applies itself most suitably to Scanlan’s achievement in making this book. Perhaps all good writing is primarily editing, primarily on the part of the writer themselves (and secondarily by any subsequent editor). Anyone can generate any amount of text; it is only the ruthless and careful editing of this text (before and after it is actually written down), the trimming and tightening of text, the removal of all but the essential details and the tuning of the grammatical mechanisms of the text, that produces something worth reading. The virtues of literature are primarily negative. I first came across Scanlan with her first book, the poignant and beautiful Aug 9—Fog, which was made by ‘editing down’ a stranger’s diary found at an estate sale into a small book of universal resonance. Kick the Latch could be said to be an extension of the same project: an applied rigour and unsparing humility by Scanlan that makes something that would otherwise be ordinary and unnoticed — found experiences from unimportant lives, as are all of our lives unimportant — into something so sharp and clear that it touches the reader deeply. What more could we want from literature than this?
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.
That Was Not My Intention by Frances Pavletich $30
"They had not spoken in close to a decade. And now here they were, resuscitating each other back into a story she thought they'd left behind." The story of Lola and Ben as they circle around one another trying hard to grow up. A scathing and satisfying look into the relationships we build and what sometimes happens to them. Inspired by: being a great friend, being a terrible friend, being too self-important to tell the difference, failing to get a person to desire you, using dishonest means to get a person to desire you, making a fool of yourself, the people we loved at first, the people we despised later, and the people we can never look in the eye again. [Paperback]
"When I read Frances' first draft, back in 2024, I absolutely knew her perfectly cool and caustic tone was a book for the times. It is a novel that cuts through vanities, desires and delusions. It is not a novel of redemption but is simply and ridiculously true, populated by a cast of furious brats." —Murdoch Stephens.
"It's a novel that will divide reviewers into the simps and the aghast... there is no in-between with That Was Not My Intention." —Brannavan Gnanalingam
>>Other books from Lawrence & Gibson.
Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire by Tony Ballantyne $60
James Cook is one of the most contested figures in Aotearoa New Zealand’s past. Today, his name evokes not only exploration and scientific endeavour but also the violence of first encounters and the enduring legacies of colonisation. In this major new history, Tony Ballantyne examines how stories about Cook have changed over time — and what these shifting narratives reveal about the making of national identity. From Cook’s death through to Tuia 250, Ballantyne traces three major phases in collective understandings of Cook. The first, imperial memory, is centred on British authority and benevolence. This gives way, by the late 1950s, to a distinct national history, marked by J. C. Beaglehole’s influential scholarship and a growing emphasis on New Zealand’s own place in the imperial world. Postcolonial memory follows, bringing Māori perspectives to the fore and reframing Cook as a deeply contested figure in public debate, scholarship and artistic expression. Across time, Ballantyne examines how ‘competing Cooks’ are invoked in commemorations, political argument and cultural production — from British memorials to contemporary Māori protests, and from academic history to Tuia 250. The book shows how Cook’s afterlives continue to shape New Zealand’s historical consciousness and political culture, offering a deeply perceptive account of how imperialism persists in national memory. Beautifully designed nd presented. [Hardback]
‘This is a fine book by a leading New Zealand historian at the height of his powers.’ —James Belich
>>Watch the trailer.
Counterfutures: Left thought and practice Aotearoa, 18 & 19 edited by Jack Foster and Neil Vallelly $30
Counterfutures is a multididciplinary journal of Left research, thought, and strategy. It brings together work from across Aotearoa, aiming to intervene in, and inaugurate, debates about how to understand and influence our society, politics, culture, and environment. In this issue: ‘Things can still be less worse’: A Collaborative Reading of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism with liz breslin, April-Rose Geers, Arundhati Sethy, Lynley Edmeades, Sabrina Moro, and Rosemary Overall; ‘Barricading the Doors: Locking Out Disavowal’ by Matt Russell and Warwick Tie; ‘Modelling Mauri: Indigenous Ideas and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Covid-19 Response’ by Sophie Moullin; ‘Tiriti-based Anticapitalism? Contradictions Within the Settler Left’ by Dan Pickering; ‘Our Technocratic Times’ by Jack Foster; ‘Why We Should Write about Work’ by Alex Smith; ‘In Solidarity with Those in Labour’ by Irina Herb. [Paperback]
>>Read previous issues in digital format.
Counternarratives by John Keene $28
Ranging from the seventeenth century to our current moment, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives' stories and novellas draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. 'An Outtake' chronicles an escaped slave's take on liberty and the American Revolution; 'The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows' presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; 'The Aeronauts' soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theatre of the US Civil War; 'Rivers' presents a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in 'Acrobatique', the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back. [New paperback edition]
‘We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene’s remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own.’ —Kate Webb, TLS
‘Counternarratives is that rare book of short fiction with an epic intuition of time, accomplishing in a handful of inspired, intimate portraits what many sagas only manage in reams.’ —Julian Lucas, New York Times
‘Keene’s collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mould-breaking, and deeply political. He’s a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in US fiction should start here.’ —Christian Lorentzen, Vulture
‘Exquisite, and unlike anything I’ve ever read.’ —Eula Biss
>>The universal family plot.
Perennial Counterpart by Yongyu Chen $35
A poetic study in magical modes of connection over distance — how both friendship and reading are similar ways of being together while being alone. Written over several years of solitude, study, and transformation, the poems in Perennial Counterpart trace an evolving, self-questioning practice of thinking-in-poetry where long, reflective lines — evoking both prose and photography — brush against elliptical, fractured modes of film and literary criticism. Anchored by the author's obsessive reading life, this is a book where lyric inquiry becomes its own form of company. Here, the poem is written to remake its writer through glittering connections to a personal lineage of thought. [Paperback]
'Are these poems, or exploding postcards dispatched from the land of dreams? Yongyu Chen's exquisite Perennial Counterpart balances conceptual density with a yearning lyricism: always strange, "unintelligible to the end," but intelligible to those who speak the language of rain and flowers.' —Jackie Wang
'To be with Perennial Counterpart is to "river around" the intimate folds of its letters, lovers, loved ones, literary souls. Like the strange "fur that grows on a crystal," Yongyu Chen's probing language turns mixture into a beguiling poetics of friendship, a reverie for a more elemental and rejuvenated address to our unsettled world.' —Jay Gao
>>Reading, like friendship, is a way of life.
>>Life within language.
>>’Mouse Song.’
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm $38
Mind-bending science fiction about antimemes — ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself. An antimeme is an entity with self-censoring properties. Some are benign; but others, less so... These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you — and you'll never even know anything changed. And they aren't just feeding on us. They're invading. But how do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day. [Paperback]
"Astonishing. Pitch-perfect cosmic horror — and the pitch will break all the glass in your brain." —M.R. Carey
"The coolest, smartest, mind-blowingest novel to be published this year, and probably for many years to come. It is utterly unique, constantly surprising, genuinely unsettling, and a towering work of speculative fiction that may very well take its place among the best sci-fi novels of the century so far." —Blake Crouch
>>We need to talk about fifty-five.
The Common Good Economy: A new compass by Mariana Mazzucato $40
Our economic system is broken. The climate crisis is accelerating. Inequality is deepening. Public trust is crumbling. Wealth concentrates in fewer hands while governments scramble to fix what markets can't do, rather than to shape them from the outset. For too long, economics has treated 'the good' — whether public goods or the commons — as merely correcting market or government failures. This economic framing traps us in an endless cycle of being reactive, patching problems rather than proactively building the economy we need. In The Common Good Economy, Mariana Mazzucato builds on her ideas of the entrepreneurial state and mission-oriented policies to establish a new theory of the common good, one which allows governments and businesses to develop purposeful economic relationships, creating value and building spaces where human flourishing can happen. She argues that how we achieve collective goals — through collective action, participation and reciprocity — matters as much as what those goals are. The book provides a practical 'common good compass' to help navigate our economies in a radically different direction. Full of compelling real-world examples, from governing water as a global common to transforming procurement and finance, this is a rigorous reimagining of economics and a manifesto for a future economy that serves people and the planet. [Paperback]
>>Making people dream.
>>The biggest lie about Capitalism.
Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly
When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague — the poet — his fascination soon begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn't; she has everything he wants. While he writes about steel and sex, she dreams about the movements of swallows. While he tends to his budding career, she writes from her big, white house in the woods. Meanwhile, his homophobic and spiteful mother — who cast a shadow over his childhood — is continuing to make his life difficult. As he is pulled back and forth between these two different worlds, his fixation on the poet, his ‘Kingfisher’, grows into something more powerful. She becomes his sole focus. He is hypnotised. But when simultaneous illnesses threaten to destroy the precarious reality he clings to, he's forced to question what he can and cannot take from someone. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
>>Beauty in the messiness of being human.
>>Every box.
Knives and Spoons: A chef’s story of kitchens, addictions, and mayhem by Alasdair Gill $39
From working in some of London’s most prestigious restaurants to scrubbing fat from kitchen floors, Alasdair Gill’s life as a chef has been a series of exhilarating highs and harrowing lows. But so too has his private life. Taking readers behind the swinging kitchen doors of London’s dining scene, he shows us the major contradictions in his life, from crossing paths with Anthony Bourdain and preparing dishes for the ultra wealthy to hiding in drug-fuelled kitchen dens and a wake-up call that nearly ended his life. Knives and Spoons is a raw and honest look at the chaotic and often toxic world of professional kitchens, filled with fierce and unforgiving moments, but also a testament to the power of finding one’s craft and the long road to recovery. Alasdair Gill has inherited the writing gene from his father, A.A Gill. [Paperback]
”Incredibly moving, heartbreaking, savage, vivid, shocking, immediate and of course very funny.” —Camilla Long
>>Addicted to not being sober.
Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens $38
For weeks, she has been saying it will be their special day. One last, perfect day with her children before she returns to work after maternity leave. What's the worst that can happen? Unfolding across 24 hours, Natural Disaster is a propulsive, darkly funny and sharply observed novel about the absurd, frustrating, hilarious, precarious, bittersweet, sometimes astonishing challenge — literal, existential — of being a woman, a mother, a wife, a person for one single, entire day. [Paperback]
”I absolutely loved it. A forensic, agonisingly relatable account of the highs and lows and in-betweens of one whole ordinary day in a life with two small children. Funny, dark, absurd, pin-sharp, insightful, propulsive, unputdownable.” —Nina Stibbe
”Lisa Owens lays bare the pains, perils and joys of motherhood, all captured over the course of a single day. Hilarious, brilliant, utterly exhilarating.” —Monica Ali
>>Home is where the art is.
Red Snake, Blue Snake by Olivier Tallec $33
Red Snake and Blue Snake have been friends since they were small but that doesn't mean they see things the same way. When Red Snake says the sky is grey, Blue Snake insists it's blue. The cactus looks just like a ghost—or a mitten. With so much to debate, can the snakes stay friends? The two stubborn reptiles start their morning with a little yoga, watch the clouds, bicker about this and that, narrowly escape being captured by a snake charmer, and end the day very nearly agreeing on something. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Look through the book.
I never intended to be so topical. The news of racetrack closures across Aotearoa has been popping up across the channels this week. Reading about horses and the lives of those that work the track wouldn’t have regstered on my radar a few years ago, but after reading the compelling Kick the Latch by American author Kathryn Scanlan and watching Australian author Gerald Murnane talk about his obsession with horse racing, both real and imagined, and how it shaped his writing, had me reaching for the ARC (Advance Reading Copy) that had landed on my desk. Marty Smith’s work of memoir and portraiture It Gets In Your Blood: Lives of a Racecourse is centred on her local, Hawke’s Bay Racecourse, and follows the lives of the trainers, jockeys and trackworkers across a decade. Like Scanlan’s novel, she gets inside, behind the scenes. While Scanlan did this by developing a relationship with Sonia, a retired trainer, Marty is more like one of the crew. She’s trusted: she’s been a rider, owner/breeder; her family working with horses for generations. What started as a year-or-so project for this full-time teacher and poet morphed into a decade immersed in this world of thoroughbred racing, and the people who inhabit it. It’s a portrait of a community, one with its own rules, attitudes and language. A world where the horses are descibed as good and naughty, of 5am starts, of watching form and testing track conditions, of daring and risks — accidents happen. It has its stars, and its hacks, wins and losses.
In 2014 Marty Smith won The NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Prize for Horse with Hat, poems about her family, about horses and their human counterparts. Nina Mingya Powles described the collection as ‘gutsy’, the poems giving ‘ the impression of standing on the side of the road when a car swooshes past and you feel it shake the air in front of your face, tipping you a step backwards’. And Emma Neale wrote, 'This is alternately comic, wry, downbeat, vernacular, lyrical: yet is is also at times dark, plangent and moving in its use of narratives distilled from extended family relationships.' Smith brings these same sensibilities to her latest work. She gets alongside, witnesses and records faithfully, bringing to light the often unseen world of the trainer and the trackworkers. It Gets in your Blood has grit, drama alongside the daily grind, humour and pathos. There’s the vernacular of the workers, wry and sometimes oblique, often colourful; and the language of the track. For horse lovers some of this won’t be a foreign world, although it is a more particular subset of the riding world. For those who head to race days the terms of the Plough, Tie-Ups, Birdcage, Bullring, and so on, will be familiar. For the rest of us, we are outsiders, but through Marty Smith’s book we can come inside for a moment, she gives us a window to this world, blinkers off. In this it reminds me of Sven Lindqvist’s Bench Press (a dive into the world of bodybuilding). Like Scanlan’s book of episodic moments, Smith employs a shortpiece motif in the form of diary entries, ideal for this many-yeared project and for an industry that has a season, which kicks off in Spring. (Note: the Hawke’s Bay Racecourse is reopening very soon after unsafe track conditions closed it in September 2024 and, if you are in Hawke’s Bay, the book will be launched at the racecourse on Saturday 8 August). Like Kick the Latch, these pieces sometimes have witty titles, focus on a particular activity or happening, or a revealing conversation. There’s a handy map of the racecourse, as well as a table to explain the track form for the uninitiated, and a much needed list to the large cast, all those she spoke with and wrote about, and their roles on the horses and off. Occassionally, there’s also Marty herself, describing her own relationship with horses, her father and the love and respect she has for the industry. In her acknowldgements she reveals the working title for her project: Because I Love Them, claiming this was the answer, in one form ot another, to her question: Why do you do it? I think this is also the reason for Marty Smith’s immersion, and the result is Aotearoa’s own piece of racing literature, exploring a microcosm all its own.
“The writing in Giada Scodellaro’s debut novel Ruins, Child is difficult to define and grasp onto. Like the comma in its title, the novel is constantly spliced, refracted: a group of people are crowding around to watch the same film they always watch, a film of themselves and their elders; now the beauty of crumbling buildings is being assessed by a floating, undefined voice; now we’re hearing about Stevie Wonder’s The Secret Life of Plants. With a book as free-flowing and unpredictable as a river, the experience of reading Ruins, Child is that of sitting on the banks and watching the water flow. Ruins, Child won Scodellaro the 2024 Novel Prize, though it hardly fits the category of ‘novel’; Scodellaro evades all the trappings of novel-writing by writing something that borrows as much from music and improvisation as it does from experimental film or even literary greats like The Waves by Virginia Woolf. In Ruins, Child, no word is frivolous; everything is exact and exactly as Scodellaro wants it to be, even if on first read it’s baffling or oblique. That’s not to say that the reading experience is difficult; rather, it’s refreshing to read something that refuses to unfurl itself upon first touch.” —Jemima Skala
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.
Enough About Angels: The Nobel Lecture by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $20
There could be no more suitable Nobel laureate for the end of the world than László Krasznahorkai, whose astounding, frequently book-length sentences trace human thought’s struggle against the forces that would ultimately erase it. Although poised always on some sort of cultural event-horizon, Krasznahorkai’s books verbally resist the pull towards annihilation posed by the infinite gravity of social, political, historical, environmental and purely existential impossibilities, and provide glimmers of human authenticity in an increasingly depersonalising world. Pulling a dark literary thread backwards through Bernhard to Kafka, Krasznahorkai’s books have a profoundly hypnotic effect, shot with moments of beauty, exhilaration and clarity. Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Lecture, now available as a small book, typically undermines our understanding of a world we actually fail to understand: in these strange times what we took to be angels are wingless and mute; what we took to be towers are only so because of the slope of the ground; what we took to be failure, incapacity and misfortune are in fact the springboard for existential rebellion. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Enough about angels!
>>Literature exists in itself.
>>Books by Krasznahorkai.
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli $35
A mother and a daughter take off on a road trip after the collapse of a marriage. Their journey begins in Sicily during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, if you got the beginning wrong? The trip soon becomes a quest for origins - not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past. With her daughter coming into her own and her mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself confronting the primary questions of life: How do stories shape our children's imaginations? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family's memories made and what happens when they disappear? A road novel, a mother-daughter story, a mystery, Beginning Middle End is a shapeshifting novel that offers an exhilarating testament to the power and instability of the stories we hold most dear. [Paperback]
'Mind-expanding and heart-expanding; a summer book for life.' —Ali Smith
'What sets Valeria Luiselli's new novel apart is its clarity, its immediacy, its vividness. Not just the characters, but the very rooms, the views from windows and the streets, are created with precision and lucidity.' —Colm Toibin
'A beautiful, maybe perfect novel.' —Tommy Orange
'An instant classic, Luiselli is at her bravest and most sincere.' —Samanta Schweblin
'A new literary form altogether, where storytelling itself becomes an act of survival and reinvention.' —Monocle
>>Skipping and skimming.
>>Beginnings that are ends and middles that are beginnings.
>>Sound, memory, and new beginnings.
>>Other books by Valeria Luiselli.
An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail by Hélène Giannecchini (translated from French by Anna Moschovakis) $38
A friendship is a filiation we choose. It holds love and laughter; it can extend our sense of the possible. Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed 'marginal' into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments. Roving from Casa Susanna, a space of freedom from persecution in McCarthyite North America, to the diary of a man living with HIV in France, and to the life and work of pioneering lesbian photographer Donna Gottschalk, each narrative counters oblivion through loving acts of witness. A slantwise gathering of queer life and activism in the twentieth century, interspersed with images encountered by chance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail establishes friendship as a vital political force and offers a moving testament to its liberatory power. [Paperback with French flaps]
'An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail is a florilegium of countersexual kinmaking, survival strategy, lesbian comradeship, dinner parties full of queer ancestors, fugitive photography, transfeminist acting-up, insurrectionary eroticism and pieces of anonymous queer archival ephemera from many lands, brought alive with the help of critical fabulation. The domination of the couple-form over human life can and must be brought to an end, and Giannecchini deftly points to all the places where it is already dead (or perhaps always was). At the heart of this beautiful book lies a deceptively incendiary critique of capitalist society. It asks a direly urgent question: can humanity rise to the challenge of the term "friend"? If not, how do we propose to live together?' —Sophie Lewis
'We could be friends, we could be lovers, we could be comrades. Queer people are specialists in the art of chosen families because we have to be. Giannecchini's book is not just about such bonds, it's made by making them. In a world intent on crushing us all into isolated particles, this is an essential guide for everyone in how to glue together a fuller and deeper life.' —McKenzie Wark
'As someone who has long struggled with conventional ideas of family and marriage, I felt relieved and hopeful reading this searching text. Helene Giannecchini swings open the doors to a great hall of kinship, camaraderie, companionship and neighbourliness. She writes with love and optimism and a desire that we may all become part of communities in which we endeavour, as friends, to hold one another up. This came at a difficult moment in my own life, a period shaped by the death of my father, and I am grateful to have been able to read it.' —Lara Pawson
'At once a memoir and a sociology of friendship, kin, and chosen family, An Army of Lovers is lucid, impassioned and reasoned to a fault. Alternating between intimate, personal narratives and research-based models of kinship, Helene Giannecchini reflects on their myriad permutations and outcomes, and provides us with an urgent, amorous manual for living.' —Moyra Davey
House of Liars by Jenny Williams $38
When single mother and failed novelist Anna Olin is invited to an exclusive residency on a remote island, it feels like an opportunity for artistic redemption. Alongside five other writers, including an old flame whose spark still smolders, she must finish her novel to compete for a million-dollar publishing contract. The catch? One of the writers isn't human; it's an AI. Isolated and under pressure, Anna’s grasp on reality loosens as alliances form fast, seduction beckons, and secrets press closer to the surface—including Anna's own. When she starts receiving cryptic notes and the AI develops frightening new behaviors, Anna must decide what—and who—she's willing to risk if she is to fulfill the darkest fantasies she can't speak aloud, even to herself. A slow-burn psychological thriller about AI, motherhood, and desire—written by a former big tech AI ethics insider—House of Liars delves into the marrow of the coming wave of AI intimacy, where chatbots and agents influence the most personal parts of our lives, with consequences we can’t yet fathom. [Paperback]
"I devoured this novel--its exquisitely imperfect characters, its propulsive mystery, its urgent questions about human desire in the age of artificial everything. House of Liars captures both the perilous moment our world is facing with AI and the dark tensions of modern motherhood: the fantasies, the hunger, and the way women are torn between the lives we choose and the lives we crave. Riveting, tender, and terrifyingly real, this book will keep you up all night reading and then haunt you long after the last page." —Mia Fontaine
"This novel is a rare find-compulsively readable, gorgeously written, and completely original." —Julie Christine Johnson
Cass and the Beast by Claire Mabey and Jill Calder $30
When a fearful beast arrives in the township, Cass finds her courage and is rewarded with a wild and magical journey. The creature takes her on a thundering ride through a forested landscape, leaving the town and people far behind. In the wilderness that is home to the beast, Cass finds adventure, ferocity, and gentleness. And the beast finds its name. Atmospheric illustrations complement an original narrative voice in this collaboration between an author and illustrator from opposite sides of the world. [Hardback]
”Cass and the Beast is a picture book that affirms the introverted, misunderstood or compassionate child who relishes an imaginative adventure or is brave enough to take risks in real life. Mabey has created a surreal tale of creatures from dreams and nightmares, and what it looks like when children choose not to be afraid. Jill Calder's illustrations have an expressionistic style. Her artwork is detailed yet loose, alternating between wordless and text-filled spreads. The free-flowing lines and layered textures increase the sense of wild motion throughout Cass's journey with the beast. Calder predominantly uses blue, accented with orange, purple and pink, creating a pulsating palette that suggests thrills and excitement and boosts the readers courage to explore the illustrations.” —Joy Lawn, Books + Publishing
>>Look inside!
Communion by Jon Doyle $38
When Mack O'Brien left his home in Port Talbot in Wales for the seminary as a teenager, he didn't imagine he'd be back a decade later, unordained and still at a loss as to what makes for a moral life. He takes a job as a security guard at the local steelworks and begins an uneasy transition into the world he once rejected. When the men of the steelworks organise an unprecedented strike in protest against job cuts, he sees no reason not to go along with it. The last person Mack expects to see in the local club is Siwan Roderick - the woman who appeared out of the blue at the seminary one day to make a confession and swear him to secrecy. Mack kept his word. But as the day of the strike nears, and as he begins to fully understand what
Siwan is planning, Mack is forced to reckon with his loyalty to her and the question of whether an act of violence can ever be justified. [Paperback]
”Gritty and luminous, intelligent and sincere, a radical and transgressive novel in which the profane, the political and the personal are entirely rooted in the sacred. Communion is both tender and confrontational, an immaculate debut with dirt under its fingernails.” —Colin Walsh
”A precise, delicate novel about the complexities of belonging, which gradually and powerfully builds in spiritual intensity. In prose both quotidian and mystical, Communion expands the possibilities of its title in every dimension and marks the arrival of an explosive new talent.” —The Observer
”A highly original book that strips back the traditional architecture of the novel until each paragraph arrives like a short, beautiful breath, and in the silences between, the true voices of Port Talbot are able to sing through. A thrilling evocation of a community.” —Andrew McMillan
”A rare novel. Communion bears witness to quiet accumulating impacts, a tolling, calling out the fundamental question, what happens when the things at the centre of what we try to believe in gutter out, one by one? This is poignant, resounding writing.” —Cynan Jones
>>The sounds of Port Talbot.
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The lives and loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell $33
Augustus was the larger of the two — vivid, volatile, and promiscuous. He was a hero among romantics and bohemians, celebrated as one of the great British talents of his generation. As a woman, Gwen's place in the art world was much smaller, and her private way of working and reserved nature meant it was only long after her death that her tremendous gifts were fully acknowledged. But her temperament was as turbulent as her brother's. She formed passionate attachments to men and women, including a long affair with the sculptor Rodin. And there were other ways in which the two Johns were remarkably alike, as Mackrell vividly reveals. The result is a powerful portrait of two prodigiously talented artists and visionaries, whose experiments with form and colour created some of the most memorable work of the early twentieth century. [Paperback]
”A thoroughly researched and effortlessly written account of the extraordinary lives of Augustus and Gwen John, encompassing painting, of course, but also obsessive love, infidelity, betrayal, family, sibling rivalry and relationships, and how they both subverted society's expectations. A fantastic read - the pages virtually turned themselves.” —Fanny Blake
>>The last laugh.
Miss Cat: The Case of the Curious Canary by Joëlle Jolivet and Jean-Luc Fromental $22
Meet Miss Cat, a private eye with ears on her hat and a nose for mystery! Miss Cat is always keen to get her claws into a new case. When Mr Maximus comes to her detective agency, searching for a kidnapped canary, the scene is set for a tale of crafty crooks, strange secrets, and a huge helping of animal magic. The first in a new graphic novel series for children. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
>>And there are two more adventures!
Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse by Luke Kemp $30
A radical retelling of human history through collapse — from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twentieth-first century and beyond — based on the latest research and a database of more than 440 societal lifespans over the last 5,000 years. Why do civilisations collapse? Is human progress possible? Are we approaching our endgame? For the first 200,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilisations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change. Slowly, reluctantly we congregated in the first farms and cities, and people began to rely on lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. When more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organisation. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires — with vast bureaucracies and militaries — carved up and dominated the globe. What brought them down? From Rome and the Aztec empire and the early cities of Cahokia and Teotihuacan, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power which hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population. Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth-obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech, and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now faces a choice — we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last. [New paperback edition]
>>Self-termination is most likely.
Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell $38
Berlin, 1928. Hannah is new to the pleasures and freedoms of the city. An artist, a runaway, she is building a new life, loving without boundaries and sketching with a cutting edge. But the party is ending. Hannah begins a recklessly consuming affair with a powerful man’s wife and it soon threatens to do more than ruin both of their reputations. People are disappearing. The shadows of something unspeakable are growing darker. Her art could be the thing that secures her survival – or will deny her any chance of escape. [Paperback]
”This vivid novel of 1930s Berlin asks what it means to make art in an emergency. A skilful and loving restoration of Jewish art and women's lives.” —Eleanor Catton
”A rare and precious combination of emotional warmth and cleverness.” —Sarah Moss
”This book offers us a radiant vision of art against evil, of the endurance of love, ambition and vitality amidst the worst of atrocities and betrayal. A bold, moving novel.” —Megan Hunter
”Venus, Vanishing floored me. It is utterly captivating, from first to last.” —Lauren Elkin
”Extraordinary. Venus, Vanishing moved me deeply; I didn't want it to end. The rare sort of book that brings the past back to trembling life.” —Doireann Ni Ghriofa
>>Art, desire, and the rise of the Third Reich.
How to Win a Trade War: A friendly guide to an unfriendly world by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown $39
We used to take trade for granted. Trillions of dollars of goods and services crossed borders each year, made possible by a global, rules-based system. Nobody paid too much attention to supply chains: they just worked. Now, Trump’s latest tariff announcement can crash markets, ruin your pension, and sour decades-long alliances. Brexit can sever Britain from its closest trading partners. China’s export restrictions on rare earths could bring the West’s car production to a crashing halt. Curbs on trade in cutting-edge chips could determine who wins the AI race. The stakes couldn't be higher. In this irreverent guide to our economic world, Keynes and Bown explore the history, players, and rules of trade, asking how we prepare for what the future might hold. Could trade wars lead to hot wars? What can the West learn from China? Timely, funny and informative, How to Win a Trade War argues that the old system is dead. But what will emerge in its place? And ultimately, what is at stake for you, your country, and your company? [Paperback]
”Timely, witty and wise — you could not ask for a better guide to the new economic order.” —Tim Harford
”Full of insight. This is critical reading for anyone trying to make sense of today's trade disputes.” —Chris Miller
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Read our latest newsletter and find out what you’ll be reading next.
24 July 2026
A few years ago, I did a piece of concentrated post-grad study through the art school at Otago Polytechnic. An idea had been pestering me for several years, and I needed a focus to make it over the hump from rattling about in my mind to becoming something actual in the world. I’m usually project-driven when it comes to my art practice, but sometimes an outside structure (deadlines, unexpected conversations, an introduction to whole new bunch of thinkers and artists) is just what you need. Anyway, the study — a great mix of practical experimentation and theory, reading and writing — was perfect for this idea and I finally got it out of my system (mostly). The exciting thing, apart from the study itself (yes, I would do more if time and money weren’t barriers), was what followed: an exhibition and an accompanying book. I never intended to write a book, let alone a book of short stories. That was 2023. The book sold out (admittedly a small printrun) and we reprinted. Now there are just a handful left. So, if you are curious about these stories, interested in jewellery (or objects in general) and our relationship with it (bodily and psychologically), you might like one of the final copies. And it’s also nicely produced, has diagrams and an index, and, although I never intended it, it is surprisingly funny.
(PS: I think there is another book brewing…)
It seemed sometimes that they were even wanting the worst to happen, if only to be relieved of the terrible anticipation that the worst may happen. It seemed sometimes that the worst thing sucks everything else towards it, even our resistance to the worst thing, and the closer we get to the worst thing it seems the less we resist it, just when we would be better to resist it more, until we are drawn over the acquiescence horizon, so to call it, until we are drawn past the point at which the possibility of relief from the effort to resist is stronger than our exhausting effort to resist, the point at which we either try to resist more, which just increases the degree of relief offered by giving up, or we resist less, which draws us closer to giving up. We give up. Of course, we don’t want to be seen to be giving up, not even by ourselves, what we want is a way to be seen to be resisting when in fact we are giving up, what we want is some mechanism that will make it appear that, when the worst happens, it might not have been as bad as it could have been even though it is worse than we could have imagined. How could that they have become a we so easily? A threat presses unrelentingly on the narrator of Krasznahorkai’s text, the threat of the worst thing, the nullification of that narrator, the narrator knows there are assassins on the narrator’s trail, they from whom the narrator flees, they whom the narrator has never seen and may never see, no matter, this just makes the fleeing more urgent, the threat more imminent, the worst that could happen always just on the point of happening if never actually happening. “I know they’ll never relent,” the narrator writes, “it’s as if their orders aren’t to make quick work of me … but rather to keep pursuing me.” The narrator must keep fleeing so as to continue being what a narrator is, the narrator must flee nullification, the narrator must flee into the new. “I have no memories whatever … the past doesn’t exist for me, only what’s current exists … and I rush into this instant, an instant that has no continuation.” The narrator flees in the present tense, the narrator flees by narrating. The text we read is the result of the narrator’s resistance to their own nullification, or, rather, the text is the narrator’s resistance to their own nullification. Obviously. “Life is forever merely the incalculable consequence facing the oncoming process, because there’s nothing that lurks behind the process … for me nothing exists that goes beyond the situation that happens to be at hand,” states the narrator, and if fate, or, rather, the causal mechanisms that we mistakenly label as fate, is nothing but an ineluctable process of destruction, if nullification is a corrolary of being, then we can only exist in our errors, we can only exist to the extent that we make a mistake. “The decisions I make must be the utterly wrong ones.” the narrator states, “that’s how I can confound my pursuers.” Great forces grapple through the text, through the narrator caught within themselves. We all share this pressure upon us that many would mistake for paranoia, no such luck, we all share this problem with time, this snagging in the moment, this agony of being forced on but this terror of no longer going on. “If I were to divine a plan of action of some kind, it would be all over for me,” the narrator states, though, really, is the threat coming from within or from without? But the narrator does divine a plan of action, the narrator is seduced by story, the narrator does start to abrade against their surroundings and against the people in those surroundings by the very fact of their interaction with those surroundings and with those people. The narrator passes the acquiescence horizon without being aware that they are passing the acquiescence horizon. All is lost. Giving up is no less fatal for looking like merely a change of plan.
There could be no more suitable Nobel laureate for the end of the world than László Krasznahorkai, whose astounding, frequently book-length sentences trace human thought’s struggle against the forces that would ultimately erase it. Although poised always on some sort of cultural event-horizon, Krasznahorkai’s books verbally resist the pull towards annihilation posed by the infinite gravity of social, political, historical, environmental and purely existential impossibilities, and provide glimmers of human authenticity in an increasingly depersonalising world. Pulling a dark literary thread backwards through Bernhard to Kafka, Krasznahorkai’s books have a profoundly hypnotic effect, shot with moments of beauty, exhilaration and clarity.
Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Lecture, now available as a small book, typically undermines our understanding of a world we actually fail to understand: in these strange times what we took to be angels are wingless and mute; what we took to be towers are only so because of the slope of the ground; what we took to be failure, incapacity and misfortune are in fact the springboard for existential rebellion.
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
MY YEAR IN PARIS WITH GERTRUDE STEIN: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
As Paris sweeps the narrator of Levy’s latest fiction along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks about what we have to lose to become modern, about navigating anxiety, about living with uncertainty, about angry fathers, about making a new life in another country, about art and language — and how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century.
THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris
NGĀTI KUIA: He pūtake, hei pakiaka ora; A history by Madi Williams $60
Drawing on hundreds of whakapapa, pūrākau, waiata and karakia recorded in nineteenth-century tribal manuscripts and court records, Madi Williams presents Ngāti Kuia history in Ngāti Kuia voices. A vital contribution to the understanding of the history of Te Tauihu-o-Te-Waka-a-Māui (the northern South Island).
TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner $33
Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex.
LAND by Maggie O’Farrell $38
Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. From the author of Hamnet.