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.

Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne $36
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.

No Money Nice Cock by Victor Brooks $35
Victor fucks up. His friends rescue him. He keeps running... running zigzag. He knows he has to keep moving, to keep ahead of the verbs he has been avoiding: excise; suture; reconstruct; harvest; implant; mobilise. At 47, Victor's GP informs him, "You're allowed to try and be happy." This statement, part-revelation, part manifesto, alive with possibility, was the permission slip and catalyst for change. Set over half a century across Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne, India, London and Haiti and written in two parts, NMNC is anarchic, high risk, dopamine-seeking with little reflection and few apologies. Humour finding absurdity in the extremes and serving as a disarming tool of vulnerability. [Laser-cut paperback]
"A very gritty, gutsy, moving memoir of one man's coming of age in the wrong body, and his decision to undergo full transition. It's frank, unflinching, with bold streaks of humour: come to it with your open and lion hearts." —Emma Neale
"Brooks' memoir is a vital, groundbreaking work about all manner of transitions, delivered with equal parts gallows humour and radical vulnerability. It's a wild, gonzo, shocking, explicit and extremely funny exploration of identity and community — and that's just the bits about teaching high school. His story is raw and often confronting but will leave you awash in kindness and compassion. No shame, nice book." —Dr Erin Harrington
"I'm not much of a reader but the moment I started I binged NMNC in two days. The engaging and immediate plot and style drew me in; humour and pathos in beautiful balance." —Nicholas Macaulay, man about town
"Seldom do we come across an author who is brave enough to write with such true grit and honesty. NMNC uniquely reflects the NZ experience of this life-changing journey. It is a must read for everyone interested in, or pursuing, a medical or surgical transition." —Rowena Palmer, Clinical Psychologist

To Lose a War: The fall and rise of the Taliban by Jon Lee Anderson $38
Jon Lee Anderson first reported from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, covering the US-backed mujahideen's insurrection against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, he was again on the ground as an early eyewitness to the new war launched by the US against the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies. At the time, the American military had prevailed on the battlefield, and the newfound peace seemed to offer a precious space for Afghan society to restore itself and to forge a democratic future. But all was not well: Osama bin Laden was still in hiding, the Taliban were stealthily reorganizing for a comeback, and the United States was about to turn its attention to Iraq. To Lose a War collects Anderson's writing from Afghanistan over a near-quarter-century span, offering a chronological account of a monumental tragedy as it unfolds. The colossal waste, missed signals, and wishful thinking that characterized the twenty-year arc of the US-led war in Afghanistan have consecrated it as one of the greatest foreign policy failures of the modern era, and a bellwether of a larger American imperial decline. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Anderson's eye for drama and ear for telling quotations sustain the lively pace of a book peopled with murderous warlords, religious fanatics, victimized civilians and western militarists devoid of sympathy for or curiosity about the people they are killing.... To Lose a War documents in detail, without the polishing of hindsight, what happened as it happened during America's twenty-year sojourn in the "graveyard of empires".' —Charles Glass, Times Literary Supplement
'More than any American journalist of the war in Afghanistan, Jon Lee Anderson knew where to find the story: in the lives of Afghans navigating between an American occupier and a repressive Taliban. With his characteristic courage, curiosity, humanity and unflinching eye for official hypocrisy and the revealing detail, Anderson paints a riveting picture of what went wrong over the two decades after 9/11. To Lose a War is an epochal and essential record of what happened in Afghanistan, a timeless warning about imperial overreach, and a poignant tribute to the resilience of Afghans who lived through it all.' —Ben Rhodes
'Jon Lee Anderson is the real deal. He's the foreign correspondent's foreign correspondent. To Lose a War is a brilliant, compelling and uncomfortable dissection of everything that went wrong — did anything go right? - in the US-led war in Afghanistan.' —Justin Marozzi
'Anderson's pieces are a triumph of high-wire journalism - often taking him into hair-raising action — that also offer a capacious, resonant panorama of Afghan society. The result is a captivating account of a military march of folly that ably dissects its many tragic delusions.' —Publishers Weekly

How to Make a Woman by Marie Darrieussecq (translated from French by Penny Hueston) $40
Rose, a psychotherapist, and Solange, an actress, are very different, one diligent and loyal, the other rebellious and self-centred, but they have been best friends forever, despite their contrasting social backgrounds. In How to Make a Woman, we follow the young women's experiences of adolescence, love, sex, work and motherhood, as they negotiate their place in the world. This lively portrait of female friendship, of two identities under construction, of 'what gets done to women', is also a snapshot of French provincial life in the eighties and nineties. [Paperback]
‘Marie Darrieussecq courses through dark places with such buoyant energy that you emerge exhilarated.’ —Helen Garner
'A lucid, clear-eyed and strangely comforting novel about the paths two friends take away from each other.’ —Amina Cain
‘It’s impossible to stop turning these pages. Profoundly original.’ —Libération
‘Darrieussecq is one of the most prolific and distinguished living writers in France with a truly impressive body of work.’ —Samantha Harvey, Guardian
'It made me think about time and how we spend it, about being a girl, and about the different ways two people experience the same moment.' —Daisy Hildyard
‘Intelligent, insightful, mischievous and tender.’ —Albertine
>>Sleepless.

The End of Romance by Maria Takolander $40
It is the future, and the earth has seemingly refused to cooperate with humanity, producing only thorn-bearing plants and caustic fogs in abundance. Life is hard for those who still inhabit urban communities. For those who have chosen to live 'off-grid' it is subsistence at best, but at least there is some kind of independence. A woman and her son live alone, surviving as scavengers. Even so, the boy must attend military school like all the other boys. In time he will be shipped off with the rest of them to a distant planet — the Promised Land — to fight the colonising war that is touted as humanity's only hope. By chance, the woman meets a young man who has avoided this fate, despite his lack of physical impairment. It appears that he comes from a place of sanctuary. Can he lead her back there — and help her to save her son? [Paperback]
”This is a tense, engrossing and deeply uncomfortable novel that speaks in urgent tones to our complacent moment.” —Guardian
‘There is something deliciously generative about the juxtaposition of Muskian fantasies of space exploration and ecological and social breakdown. Not only does the idea of troops being sent to fight wars of colonial conquest in space evoke the classic texts that so many of our tech bro overlords cite as inspirations—Starship Troopers, anyone?—it also subtly invokes the anti-colonial, anti-militaristic counter-tradition found in works such as Ursula K Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. The End of Romance lets us see our world in new and different ways.’—The Saturday Paper
>>Eking out an existence.

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim $38
When you emigrate, you leave a version of yourself behind. Literally. One instance crosses the border; the other instance stays trapped behind it. Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, synchronize their lives and minds in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Other instances, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at age ten and never speak to their other selves again. With a life of her own in New York, Rose never imagined she’d return to Korea. Then her grandfather dies and Soyoung, her Korean instance, summons her home for the funeral. But Soyoung’s motives aren’t as innocent as Rose imagined, and the consequences of Rose’s return to Seoul will change her forever. [Paperback]
”One of the best debuts of the year. Sublimation speaks to our moment, in ways we could not have expected.” —John Scalzi
”In this dazzling parable of connection and isolation, Isabel J. Kim's vividly crafted characters navigate identity, belonging, and the weight of a divided history. A richly imagined alternate reality that serves as a perfect allegory for our own world, where the borders of our fragmented selves are increasingly shaped and policed by corporate technologies.” —Scott Westerfeld

The North Pole: The history of an obsession by Erling Kagge $35
Throughout recorded human time, few places on Earth have inspired as much fascination as the North Pole. This is an otherworldly place where the sun rises and stays aloft for six whole months before setting, plunging the expanse of ice and water into darkness for half a year. Foot-stepping alongside Erling Kagge, who ventured to the North Pole in the spring of 1990, we hear the story of the North Pole as never told before. From Herodotus who first wondered what the northernmost point of our planet might be like, to the intrepid early cartographers who mapped the world, and the legendary expeditions led by Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary - the first polar explorer global celebrities - who were in the grip of a dangerous obsession to get to the North Pole first. What emerges is a new history of the world, spanning thousands of years, as seen from the 'silver-shining vacantness' of the North Pole. Blending memories from Kagge's own 1990 trip with this epic history, The North Pole is an adventure story, a book about enacting hidden human dreams, about difficult fathers and their difficult sons, and a psychological record of what it means to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of adversity. It is for anyone who's gazed out at the horizon — and wondered what happens if you just keep walking. [Now in paperback]
”Erling Kagge is a deeply thoughtful writer. The North Pole proves to be the perfect subject for him>” —Michael Palin
”The book of a lifetime, from a rare writer-adventurer whose obsession and passion for his subject know no bounds.” —Elif Shafak

Checkmate: Genius, scandal, and the billion-dollar rise of chess by Ben Mezrich $39
In September 2022, the chess world watched in disbelief as Magnus Carlsen, widely considered the greatest player in history, faced an unthinkable defeat against the nineteen-year-old American upstart, Hans Niemann. When Carlsen withdrew from the prestigious Sinquefield Cup and subtly accused Niemann of cheating, shockwaves hit the chess community, igniting the biggest scandal in the sport's history. Checkmate dives deep into this modern-day drama, tracing the parallel rises of Carlsen, the stoic virtuoso, and Niemann, the fiery disruptor. Niemann denied the accusations, even as past online cheating incidents surfaced, while powerful entities like Chess.com, a billion-dollar online arena, became entangled in the escalating controversy. As the scandal went viral, it became clear that more was at stake than a single game. Checkmate is a story of ambition, genius and greed set against the backdrop of a once-niche game exploding into a global, multi-billion-dollar phenomenon. It's a compelling exploration of a world where tradition collides with innovation, and a new generation, forged in the digital age, threatens to upend everything. [Paperback]

Family: Simple, healthy recipes for everyone by Claudine Boulstridge $60
French-British chef and mother-of-three Claudine Boulstridge is passionate about family food. She wants to show everyone how to transform daily meals into flavour-forward, vibrant and healthy home-cooked dishes you and your children, will love at any age. Packed with tempting and creative recipes and practical ideas for a balanced, varied diet, Family will make mealtimes more delicious and help you to nourish adventurous eaters at the same time. Today most people work long hours, meaning that it can be hard to find the time to cook meals from scratch. This cookbook will transform the way you eat as a family without upending your daily routine. With one-pot dishes, prepare-ahead meals, and minimal washing up, Family is the perfect solution for health-conscious, time-pressed families. [Handback]
”Wholesome and delicious go naturally together — like family, really — in this joyful book. Claudine and I have been working together for two decades now, during which I've seen her grow, develop and become a master of ingredients and craft. This book is a perfect reflection of her experience, talent and domestic flair.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
>>Look inside.

How To Use a Fork: Stories of mending the broken brain by Orlando Swayne $39
The science of brain plasticity in demonstrated in human stories of survival and recovery. We meet the woman who thought her arm was a baby, the man who saw mannequins peering at him through the dark, and the patient who found his way back to human interaction through music. As a medical student, Orlando Swayne was taught that a broken brain doesn’t mend. But as a junior doctor, he began to meet patients for whom this was clearly not the case. Intrigued by what he saw, he delved deep into the emerging neuroscience of brain reorganisation, and discovered that over time brain tissue creates new networks and regenerates. Developments in neurology continue to reveal new capabilities that allow functions we thought to be lost to be restored. The key to recovery, a return to some semblance of our previous selves after brain injury, lies in neurorehabilitation: painstaking work that rebuilds shattered lives. [Paperback]
”An incredible voyage of discovery. Intensely moving and awe-inspiring.” —Marina Hyde

Pierre the Maze Detective: The Hunt for the Maze Pyramid by Hiro Kamigaki $38
Phantom thief Mr. X has escaped Lockmaze Prison, announcing his intention to steal the precious Maze Stone from the Valley of the Mazes. Travel with Pierre and Carmen to the Kingdom of Caramelia and journey through an endless desert aboard an enormous mechanical camel. Marvel at the legendary Red Pyramid —home of the prized Maze Stone — and puzzle your way out of a confusing Christmas market and a spectacular Ice Palace. This colorful, illustrated activity book features 15 intricate mazes. Trace your way through each maze, search for hidden objects, spot clues, and solve some extra mystery challenges along the way as you become a key member of the maze detective team! [Large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Other Maze Detective books.

A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:

The Trembling Hand

Little Green Fingers

Embers of the Hands

The Hand of the Hand

Handmade in Japan

The Roof Beneath Their Feet

Football

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand

Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (Translated by Lin King) $38
”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.” —judges’ citation on awarding the book the 2026 International Booker

NIGHT, MA: A memoir by Elizabeth Knox $40
'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

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 

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.

LIGHT AND THREAD by Han Kang $35
Kang recalls a poem she wrote at eight years old in which she imagined a ‘gold thread’ of connection: language. Here she uses that thread to tie together essays and poems, her life and her work, beginning with her Nobel lecture in which she discusses her writing process and the myriad questions that drive her work.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

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3 July 2026

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While being generally uncomfortable about comfort, he wrote when asked what he read for comfort, in times of particular stress or despair I do find that re-reading any of the novels of Thomas Bernhard makes me feel better, though I am also uncomfortable about the concept of feeling better, he wrote. He had been re-reading Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters, a book that he had read before, and, indeed, reviewed before, so, he thought, he would not review it again, he would just read it for what he, not without irony, called comfort, not that he understood the word. Bernhard’s sentences are unrelentingly beautiful and his negativity so intense that it becomes ludicrous, he wrote. Everything exaggerated moves towards its opposite, so I often find my negativity turned, too, he also wrote, and then, he thought, I have finished answering the question I have been asked, not only answering it but explaining my answer, too, which was more than I had been asked to do, even though I have done it rather briefly. The first time he had read Woodcutters, he had been younger than the narrator, and younger than the author when he wrote the book, the narrator and the author sharing rather more than their age, he thought, but now he was older than the narrator, and older than the author was when he wrote the book, and also older than the author was when he died, or, rather, committed suicide, whichever is the better description of the author’s death. The narrator of Woodcutters has not committed suicide, obviously, and does not even do so at the end, but the entire novel is narrated in the evening of the day of the funeral of one of the narrator’s former friends, who, finding herself denied artistic success merely through mediocrity of talent, which is not necessarily sufficient to exclude someone from success, depending on how you understand the word success, but perhaps sufficient to exclude someone from success in what the narrator calls Vienna’s art mill, the art mill that grinds even those with talent into powder, most effectively by acclaiming their talent, and, by doing so, destroying it, whereas Joana, losing all that she had going for her, which is a strange turn of phrase, spent many years in alcoholism and despair, in decline, so to speak, and hanged herself in the village in which she was born, just before the narrator’s return to Vienna after an absence, apparently, of some twenty years. The host of the dinner party at which the narrator observes the proceedings without involving himself in them, as he says, was once a talented composer, or at least so it had seemed to the narrator when he had been involved with him twenty or even thirty years before, before the narrator had left Vienna in disgust with Vienna and with the artistic and literary circles of Vienna, but now the host has been destroyed by his talent, or by the acclaim accorded his talent, and in this way relieved of this talent, and the host, one Auersberger, or so he is called in the novel, though it is perhaps interesting to note that the book was banned in Austria after one of Bernhard’s former patrons reognised himself in the character, is now little more than ludicrous or pathetic. And the same could be said, and indeed is said by the narrator, albeit to himself, as he sits in a chair just off the main room, observing them, of the other guests at the dinner party, the dinner party styled by its hosts an artistic dinner held in honour of an actor who is rather late to arrive, but really more of a gathering of members of the artistic and literary circles that included both the narrator and Joana twenty or thirty years before, when the narrator, like the author, if the author can be distinguished even a little from the narrator, was an aspiring writer who was supported by persons like Auersberger, or by the person who recognised himself as Auersberger, writers who had talent but whose talent has been destroyed by Vienna’s art mill and other persons whose talent has been similarly destroyed. “As I see it they haven’t become anything. They’ve all quite simply failed to achieve the highest, and as I see it only the highest can ever bring satisfaction, I thought.” But, thinks the narrator, these people, the people of this so-called artistic circle, have been more than complicit in the destruction of their talent. “All these people have contrived to turn conditions and circumstances that were once happy into something utterly depressing, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, they’ve managed to make everything depressing, to transform all the happiness they once had into utter depression, just as I have.” When the celebrated actor finally arrives and the narrator moves with the other guests to the dining room, the narrator’s focus moves, if the narrator can be said to have a focus, from his opinions formed in the past of those present, attitudes which caused him to leave Vienna twenty years ago, when his love for those present, and for Joana, had turned entirely to disgust, when he had taken from them all he could, to his observations of what is said and done, though not said and done by him, who only observes the proceedings and does not participate in them, or so he says, in the present, at the artistic dinner itself, observations, it must be said, no less vitriolic but rather more ambivalent, by which I mean, the bookseller thought as he paused in his train of thought, a train of thought that had begun to resemble a review but was not a review but only a train of thought, unless a train of thought can be called a review, and he thought not, he thought, not the popular misconception of ambivalence as some wishy-washiness, if he was writing a review he would replace wishy-washiness with a better word, or at least an actual word, but ambivalence in its true, etymological and Freudian sense of being beset with equally overwhelming but opposite inclinations. The narrator, he thought, loathes those most like himself, all his loathing is self-loathing, and to loathe, therefore, is the greatest act of sympathy, the strongest form, he thought, of identification. “We are not one jot better than the people we constantly find objectionable and insufferable, those repellent people with whom we want to have as few dealings as possible although, if we are honest we do have dealings with them and are no different from them. We reproach them with all kinds of objectionable and insufferable behaviour and are no less insufferable and objectionable ourselves — perhaps we are even more insufferable and objectionable, it occurs to me,” the narrator of Woodcutters says. To grow older, the bookseller thought, is not to become more certain but to become less certain, certainty is for the young, he thought, certainty is for those who do not think, not that it is necessarily true that the young do not think, there are, no doubt, some who are young who do think, but they have not thought long enough, being young, to realise that all thought leads to the destruction of certainty, all thought leads to ambivalence, to the undermining of anything that might be said to be one’s own identity, there’s no such thing as one’s own identity anyway, he thought, except in the thoughts of others, and hardly even then, all thought is its own undoing. As the guests depart from the dinner, the narrator, the last to leave, thanks the hostess for a lovely time, after apparently hating it the whole time and hating everything about it and everyone who was there and everything they said and did, kisses her, and then runs through the streets of Vienna, away from his home, towards the centre of town, in the wrong direction, in a dishevelled state of mind, so to term it, completely dishevelled and confused. “To think that I was capable of such hypocrisy, I thought as I was speaking to her,” he says to himself about the only words he actually speaks in a book full of words. “To think that I am capable of telling her to her face the precise opposite of what I feel, because it makes things momentarily more endurable.” Well, thought the bookseller, I can understand that, we all tell others to their faces the opposite of what we feel because it makes things momentarily more endurable, and, in fact, we also do feel what we tell them, that is how we survive and that is how we destroy ourselves, we destroy ourselves by surviving and we survive by destroying ourselves, this is what thinking tells us if we think our thoughts through to the end, this is the truth that is hidden from the young by their youth, this is why I resist my own existence, at least internally, whatever that means, whatever form that resistance could take, and, at the same time, this is why I long to exist, for my nonexistence to end, though my nonexistence cannot end, it can only be obscured, for a chance to take refuge from thinking in busyness, so to call it, in the busyness of my life, the life I therefore both long for and resent. He felt comforted by this thought, he thought, my negativity has become so intense, he thought, through reading Thomas Bernhard or through the thinking that accompanies reading Thomas Bernhard, through thinking like Thomas Bernhard and not thinking like myself, that it has become ludicrous, and always was ludicrous. Everything exaggerated moves towards its opposite like this, he thought. I find my negativity has turned, he thought, and this, he thought, is a comfort.

Where to start with this slim novel? It’s brilliant. The writing is crisp. Lerner not only writes well, but with economy. Each word feels as though it belongs on the page, each action or non-action vital. Transcription is about things that matter; not a cluster of meaningless or fabulous characters or plot twists that may entertain but don’t add up to much in the end, like much of what passes as a novel in the oversaturated publishing world — as well as other social media that tell ‘stories’. Ironically, a central theme in this novel is technology, and it’s definitely exploring ‘story’: what gets told, what’s said or supposedly said, what’s remembered compared to what’s recorded (or not). The novel opens with the unnamed narrator heading by train to Providence. It’s the return of the nervous protégé to his alma mater to record the ‘final interview’ with Thomas, a famous cultural critic, who is now in his 90s. The narrator is restless, travelling backwards (which makes him nauseous), photographing his masked self in the reflection of the moving train’s window. He looks at the photo and deletes it. He begins a conversation about the morning's problems by txt. This small passage tells the reader so much. It’s sometime after the lockdowns; recording yourself and then just as easily deleting yourself on your handheld device is a common phenomena; our awareness of ourselves in place and time determined by or acted out through the technology we hold close to us (continuously). This same technology enables us to escape the present by replaying or reimaging the past, or determining a future that will never be actual. Time is a central player in the conversations in the three distinct parts of this novel, and the way in which Lerner seamlessly takes us through conversation from America in the 2020s, then to late 1990s and back to Germany in the 1940s, not layering in historical facts or particular incidents but rather by reference to cultural touchpoints, mentions of music, philosophers and writers creating what made me think of a series of vibrations. Vibrations that resonated through not only time, but the shared (and often differently interpreted) experiences of each of the main characters. Are these vibrations a transcription of a sort?

Yet it is technology that lets the narrator down. He drops his phone in the sink. It’s kaput. And, as much as he tries to suggest that the interview could be the next day, and the evening for ‘catching up’, Thomas is keen to get started, and the narrator is too cowardly to say his phone isn’t working. So the interview goes ahead without a recorded transcript. The protégé doesn’t even take notes. Or so it seems. There is the possibility that Thomas suspects there is something amiss. There is the possibility that even if the phone had worked the subsequent published interview would have been a fabrication. Ben Lerner is leaning into this idea of the real and imagined, of what is fiction? And the novel is dotted with this concept. Of how we look, how we remember, and what happens when we start to think that something is imagined or described rather than ‘real’ – whatever that may be. When his phone doesn’t work, the narrator begins to ‘notice’ everything, “The stones are stonier”.  He has no google directions. He would have used them if his phone was working even though he knows the way. Without his phone, time shifts as his head has space to imagine and remember, and he’s walking through the campus of his student days. If this sounds nostalgic or overwrought, don’t worry: it’s not. These moments are often depicted wryly, with a wink to the reader and a self-deprecating honesty.

The characters in Transcription are ordinary and real (and possibly often Lerner himself, or facets of). They are fallible and not always likable. There are no heroes, although maybe sometimes heroic, if you can call it that, attempts to deal with our contemporary world, that’s a world on the intimate as much as the wider scale. This is most telling in the passages where the narrator talks about his relationship with his daughter,  and Max (his friend from college, who also happens to be Thomas’s actual son) discusses his own daughter’s problems. Both children have issues with the world, and these issues visit upon their bodies. One through anxiety and a refusal to participate (go to school) and the other through a refusal to eat. Both these problems are overcome to some degree via mindless games and social media dross. That this distraction, although empty, can be an antidote for other more harmful problems, puts our devices, and what they deliver to us, into that ambivalent space, providing a lifeline despite appearing meaningless. How do we measure this against the ability of the book to provide a place to escape to?

Transcription is completely satisfying — it’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that ends so well. Ben Lerner  covers so much ground in these 130 pages. Here we encounter interviewer, author, and cultural critic; here are the fathers, Thomas the elder, Max the son, and the unnamed narrator — the cultural son. There are the issues of the modern world (climate, politics, image), threaded through but never belaboured. There is memory and misremembering — what is invention? And where does fiction start?

We will be discussing Transcription at our next Talking Books session on July 14
Find out more and join in by Zoom

”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.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Caught in the crackle of the radio.

• Read an extract.

• The walls may or may not be visible.

• At the edge of the known.

• Diesel, dried blood, and scorched soil.

• An interview with the translator.

A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:

Silence

A Silent Language

Silence in the Age of Noise

Twenty Minutes of Silence

Silence Is My Habitat

A Voice for the Silenced

No Time for Silence

Landscapes of Silence

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.

Kieron Smith, boy by James Kelman $48
Rejected by his brother and largely ignored by his parents, Kieron Smith finds comfort – and endless stories – in the home of his much-loved grandparents. But when his family move to a new housing scheme on the outskirts of Glasgow, a world away from the close community of the tenements, Kieron struggles to find a way to adapt to his new life. Kieron Smith, boy is a brilliant evocation of an urban working-class childhood, capturing the joys, frustrations, injustices, excitements, revels, battles, games, uncertainties, questions, lies, discoveries and sheer of wonder. Kelman is an outstanding writer, uncompromising and with deep sympathy for the downtrodden, and it is good to see his works coming back into print. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Kieron Smith, boy is one more in a line of uncompromising, honest, passionate, radical and perfectly crafted books from a writer who has not given up on the questions of freedom and justice.' —Sean O'Reilly, Stinging Fly
'Kieron Smith, boy gives voice to an honourable decency which guides the human spirit even in the midst of its own brutality. This is an outstanding novel of immense power, and is Kelman's best yet.' —Simon Koevesi, The Independent
'By forcing us to rethink childhood, (and therefore adulthood), Kieron Smith, boy is a magnificent and important novel, and might just be Kelman's greatest achievement to date.' —Irvine Welsh, Financial Times
'An outstanding, living, breathing novel that powerfully documents the life of a Glaswegian boy in his own voice. This book is almost impossible to review, because it is simply too good. Kelman is not beating up the contemporary novel — he is simply showing how it's done and shoving the bar that bit farther up and out of reach for most British writers.' —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
'James Kelman's best novel so far, Kieron Smith, boy  is Kelman's tender evocation of his own childhood.' —James Wood, New Yorker
'The boy's voice, to my ear, is flawless and brilliantly sustained. The diction, the syntax, the sudden cliff-edges Kelman brings us to, where language fails — these are the product of years of careful listening to people who're never listened to.' —Kathleen Jamie, Granta
>>Read an excerpt.
>>The war against silence.

Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette (translated ffrom Fench by Kate Briggs) $42
In an opulent villa near the English channel lives a well-to-do family. A man--a husband, father, and employer--has been shot dead. The bullet is from his own gun, which he got from the Germans during the war. In this family, the father has a safe, a monkey wrench, a wife, and a maid named Rose. The son has a swing, a croquet set, a rain coat, and a car. They all read detective novels to fall asleep (the father), to stay awake (the son), to distract herself from an empty marriage (the mother). Packed with brutal revelations, the novel centers on the twenty minutes of silence it takes for the family to alert the doctor (who lives next door) of the father's death. Everything in this high-octane drama is subject to change, including the setting and the characters, who are truer to life than might at first appear. But who if anyone is the true criminal and who is the victim? In this marvelous and sui generis novel, written in Bessette's signature taut and stripped-back prose, the detective novel is turned inside out and wholly on its head. Introduction by Kathryn Scanlan. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Twenty Minutes of Silence is a sublimely rare thing: a feat of experimentation that defies comparison. Helene Bessette's phrasings (translated by the brilliant Kate Briggs) pulse with a bass drum and freewheeling speed, as she upends the sentence so that we can reconsider our relationship to language and the stories we tell with it. Thrilling.' —Makenna Goodman
'Discovering Helene Bessette through Kate Briggs's incredible translations has felt like having a light switched on. I can feel so many of us excitedly learning and re-exploring the potential of the novel, which as a form, multiplies in Twenty Minutes of Silence. The brilliant modernist and anti-commercial styles that run through it feel perfect for us now and I am grateful we get to write and think in the extraordinary milieu of Bessette and Briggs.' —Holly Pester
>>With the revolver in the library.

Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno $42
Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child's life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more. [Paperback]
”Kate Zambreno's oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an interrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence.” —Paris Review
>>Worthwhile ghost.
>>Writing postpartum.

The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Alison L. Strayer) $25
One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women's conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie's memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. The Other Girl explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ernaux repeatedly stuns by the depth and honesty of her psychological observations, as she does by her frugal and unsentimental language. This book, beautiful and profound, attests to what we already knew from her other works — that Ernaux is one of the great writers of our time, and a truly worthy Nobel.” —Magdalena Miecznicka, Financial Times
”Across over twenty books and for the better part of the last five decades, Ernaux has gathered, broken and reassembled the infinite, singular matter of her history. Perhaps no other literary figures, save Proust or Knausgaard, have come as near to achieving so Promethean a project.” —Jamie Hood, The Baffler
>>Other books by Annie Ernaux.

Maybe Baby by Emma Neale $39
Nate, a grieving widower, is determined to honour his late wife and find a way to have the child they were desperate to raise together. After various attempts to identify a suitable surrogate come to nothing, Nate is compelled to try something radical. He travels to London to take part in a groundbreaking medical trial. As things progress, he becomes caught in the complex hinge of three powerful desires: his loyalty to his late wife, a primal urge to be a father, and his knee-weakening attraction to Sadie, who has her own reasons to resist starting a family. [Paperback]
”An irresistible story of grief, hope and the miracles we dare to chase.” —Catherine Chidgey
>>By page 25 she is dead.
>>Grief and desire.

Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora (translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery) $40
An archaeological novel that digs into the strata of the European soil, and uncovers a long history of oppression, expropriation and erasure. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European feudalism is starting to crumble. Newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small Prussian town to claim a plot of arable land and the simple life of a freehold farmer. Digging a grave for his wife’s body, Redo finds the body of a soldier. The next day, Redo uncovers two soldiers from an earlier time, perfectly preserved. This novel contains the story of Redo's mysterious life, and the great love at the heart of it, revealed in chapters of increasing length: as the bodies proliferate, the story gets more complicated. What will be excavated from the earth, and what will remain buried? Astounding, bursting with ideas and novel thoughts. [Paperback]
‘Mora embarks on a radical adventure in a Europe ravaged by wars and revolutions that has no reference in our current literature.’ —La Vanguardia
>>Hidden and revealed delights.
>>Freedom through structure.
>>Melville in miniature.

Repetition, A novel by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $25
As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange. It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Hjorth writes with the feminist bluntness of Annie Ernaux, the psychic precision of Javier Marias and the lyrical repetitions of Jon Fosse.” —S.C. Cornell, The New York Times
”For Freud the 'compulsion to repeat,' as he called it, was an unconscious expression of what had been repressed by memory. Here, Hjorth brings that compulsion to life in prose, making the reader feel, at once, the desire to remember and the desire to forget, which battle it out on the field of memory. The novel's explosive power comes from the tension between those competing desires, and its suspense comes from the presence of the unnamed trauma, which sits outside the family's house like a hungry beast in the darkness. If Will and Testament shows us the process by which a repressed truth rises to the surface, Repetition shows us how it gets repressed.” —Madeline Gressel, Parapraxis
>>Never let it go.
>>Finding words.
>>Familiar and strange.
>>Unfolding the past.
>>Other books by Vigdis Hjorth.
>>Other Repetiton.

When the World Sleeps: Stories, words and wounds of Palestine by Francesca Albanese (translated from Italian by Gregory Conti) $38
The spirit of a place lies in the people who inhabit it, in the stories that intertwine through its streets. And this is especially true of a land like Palestine, the witness to defining historic transitions to one of the most painful chapters in contemporary history. With a voice both authoritative and deeply human, Francesca Albanese (who lived in Palestine for many years while following the legal battles of numerous Palestinian families and is currently a United Nations Special Rapporteur) takes on the role of narrator of the ongoing conflict, starting with the stories of the people she met. Anyone following the harrowing events that have unfolded in the Middle East who wants to understand Palestine will discover in When the World Sleeps a gallery of stories, characters, and places that allow us to understand what Palestine was like until recently, and what it has become today. [Paperback]

Motherland: A feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy by Julia Ioffe $40
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home mothers. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women. [Paperback]
'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia. Julia Ioffe tracks the transformation of Russia from dictatorship to democracy and back again in sharp, engaging prose, filling in the blanks, telling the stories left out by so many others.' —Anne Applebaum

Search and Find: Alphabet of Alphabets [and] Number of Numbers by Allan Sanders $30
There are hours of fun in this epic search-and-find activity book! Children can practise their letters and numbers in this interactive activity book designed to engage and entertain. There are over fifty fully illustrated 'search-and-find' activities, each themed on a number or letter of the alphabet. In Alphabet of Alphabets, you'll take a ride through twenty-six fully-illustrated alphabets, from an A to Z of Birds to an A to Z of Zoo. Then, flip the book over for Number of Numbers, where you can count the animals going into Noah's Ark two-by-two, spot thirteen scary skeletons at the haunted house on Halloween, visit Farm Fifteen and more. Dip in and out of the pages or do each one in order for a unique reading experience. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Being: Why its harder to be a human than a hamster or a herring by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies $40
From early childhood, we start to become aware of the difficulties we must all inevitably face. We will battle an inner critic across the entirety of our life. We will never truly know those around us and time will destroy all we create. Death becomes a reality, and we cannot escape the knowledge that it is coming for us all. These are the problems of being; the existential truths that make it harder to be human than a hamster or a herring. Many other problems emerge from the knowledge of our own mortality. How do we find meaning, choose a life path, form an identity, face uncertainty, cope with hardship and, ultimately, bear the loss of all we love? How do we make peace with the inner voice that won't stop attacking the choices we've made and the opportunities we've missed? How do we deal with the uncertain and unpredictable nature of the world and our future? [Paperback]
'Few books capture so powerfully the paradox of being human: that self-awareness both elevates us and unsettles us. Being is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand anxiety, identity, and the shadow of mortality.' —Professor Thomas Heidenreich, Esslingen University

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

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26 June 2026

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An appealing history of Japan in the nineteenth history, Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a tale both personal and encompassing. Tsuneno is the daughter of a priest. Growing up in a small mountainous village, the temple is central to her life and expectations. Married at 12, life seems mapped out: she will be a diligent temple wife. Yet 15 years on and with no children in sight, she is sent home again with the divorce papers—not an uncommon occurrence in the nineteenth century, where women would be remarried—a failed relationship not necessitating disaster. Two more marriages down the road and the picture for Tsuneno isn’t quite as rosy, her family are losing patience with her and she has other ideas. Seeking independence, she goes against her family’s wishes and knowledge, pawns her belongings (mostly clothes), and makes her way to the city of Edo in the care of a family acquaintance—someone she thought she could trust. In a relatively short time, Tsuneno’s world is turned upside down. Not only has the trustworthy friend betrayed her, physically and emotionally, but he has also left her in financial peril and abandoned her in the city. Living in a tiny room, at the mercy of her landlord, without money or warm clothes, bedding or utensils, she is desperate to find work. Her dreams of a good position in a Shogun household are remote, but she does get a job working long hours as a housemaid. It isn’t ideal, but it enables her to stay in Edo, a lively city with prospects. Tsuneno rises and falls alongside the city. This is the story of a woman and the story of a city, Edo, at the end of a golden age, known as the Great Peace, a time just prior to the arrival of the American gunship and Commodore Perry. As we read we fall into step beside Tsuneno, seeing the informal structures of the city — the migrant workers and peddlers — that underpins the economic structure of the more formal organisations, the geisha and the theatre performers that brighten the evenings, the temple priests, the samurai of all classes (one of whom will impact this woman’s life more than she expected) and the hierarchies of the ruling shogunate classes. Pieced together from letters (between Tsueno and her family), family records kept at the temples, combined with historical events (famine, fire, political machinations) and research, Amy Stanley creates a gripping account of a woman who chose between family and freedom, who made the most of the hand she was dealt. Rich in detail with its vivid descriptions of the environs (urban and rural), and lively portraits of Tsuneno, her family and the people of Edo, Stranger in a Shogun’s City is a compelling history of an ordinary woman in a fascinating time and place. 

An essay is a literary form but a collection of essays is not a literary form, or, rather, a collection of essays, unless written specifically as a cohesive set, which is unusual for collections of essays, and in which case they are not usually considered a collection of essays but something else, only becomes a literary form, and only if we stretch our concept of what constitutes a literary form, at the point at which the essays are assembled, selected and ordered by someone, plausibly not even the author of the essays, some time, perhaps some considerable time, after they were written, at various times perhaps over a considerable period of time, during which the author may or may not have changed her approach to whatever and however she writes and may or may not have written and had published any number of other literary forms, if she happens to be an author who also writes other literary forms. ‘Selected works’ is not a literary form, and essay collections often tend to be selected works, these works often having appeared in various periodicals or other platforms over the years preceding their collection, or, generally more accurately, selection. Reviewing a collection of essays, as an instance of a literary non-form, presents certain difficulties as the reviewer is denied the various familiar analytic tools that are dependent on form, usually ending up making some generalised statements about the author, her qualities and importance, and then garnishing these comments with snippets pulled from various of the works in the collection, each work of which could be analysed as a literary form but none of which tend to be so treated, except perhaps cursorily, due to lack of space and time, space and time being a single entity in writing as they are in physics. If a reviewer does not quite know how to approach the literary non-form of a collection of essays this is because a reader, of which a reviewer is merely a pitiful example, does not know how to approach a non-form. A reader has no obligations towards the collectedness of pieces towards which, severally, he may have obligations, but also, at least, thankfully, tools dependent upon the form of the several pieces, but what obligations does a reviewer have towards the collectedness of the pieces? It is hard to review something that you do not recognise as a thing. Lydia Davis is best known for the devastating precision of the sentences that comprise some of the shortest, sharpest stories you are likely to read, and for her subtle and precise translations of Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, Foucault, Leiris and others. Her economy of expression astounds, whether that economy is displayed in a single-sentence fiction, indefinitely extended in a translation, or in such various essays as are collected in this book. The essays, which are of various forms, all concern the relationship between language and lucidity; they all concern writing: either writers or the practice of writing; they are all about reading (of which the practice of writing is a peculiarly freighted subset). The essays all both demonstrate and concern what we could call ‘the mechanics of form’, the way in which language, well used, creates, sharpens or transfigures meaning in literature. Davis shows us how to narrow our linguistic aperture in order to maximise our literary depth of field. She is full of good advice, suggestions for new reading, exemplary sentences and memorable observations: “If we catch only a little of the subject, or only badly, clumsily, incoherently, perhaps we have not destroyed it.” Because a collection is not a literary form, you have no obligation as a reader towards the totality of the volume, but there is much here to enjoy and discover, much that will sharpen your writing and your reading of the writing of others, much to return to and re-read. Most likely you will read it all. 

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.

"Said the Dead is one of those rare books where a reader encounters the writer and her characters at a dazzling and bewitching height, at a place where essence meets essence. A piercingly beautiful book that is wounding sometimes and consoling at others, the work, in the end, is life confirming: encompassed in the volume is the unparalleled expansiveness and depth of human minds and hearts." —Yiyun Li

• In the casebooks.

• Lost voices from the asylum.

• Messiness of process.

• Eleven photos.

• Grateful to live these days.

• From the author of A Ghost in the Throat.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Our 486th newsletter!

19 June 2026

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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.

Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them — and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing? A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real — to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth. From the author of A Ghost in the Throat. [Paperback]
”The effect is electric, like seeing a ghost returned to life.” —New Statesman
”Obliterates every clear definition of genre and form. Astounding and utterly fresh.” —Irish Independent
”Lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go: sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity.” —Sunday Times
”Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death — dichotomies abound, but the questions of women's lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.” —Paris Review
>>Lost voices from the asylum.
>>Grateful to live these days.
>>Also available in hardback!

Dear Memory: Letters on writing, silence, and grief by Victoria Chang $40
For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly and in the silences of her father. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In letters to family, past teachers, fellow poets, and to the imagination itself, Victoria Chang offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories. Illustrated with artworks by the author. [Paperback]
"Groundbreaking. Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." —NPR
"Dear Memory is an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection. Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still. Her own project is not to erase those incisions — or even, as a child might hope, to heal them — but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." —New Yorker
>>Look inside.
>>The grammar of loss.
>>A different kind of life.
>>Other books by Victoria Chang.

Hexes of Deadwood Forest by Agnieszka Szpila (translated from Polish by Scotia Gilroy) $38
Anna Frenza hates the tyrannical tree huggers and the idiotic eco-warriors, after all, she's the CEO of Poland's biggest oil company. But then she finds herself in a trance, sleepwalking into the woods and making love to a tree, manically, all caught on camera. Her career ends and, in the fallout, she discovers her husband's disturbing secret. Her mind splinters and whether by delusion or possession of spirit, she finds herself in medieval province ruled by the Catholic Church. Deep in the past, Anna falls in with Mathilde Spalt, leader of the Earthen Ones — a congregation of women who live in the woods and reject all patriarchy, instead engaging in ecstatic, sensuous worship of Mother Earth and learns to love the forest . . . until the Church decides to fell the forest and all the women within it. [Paperback]
”The kind of debut that grabs you by the collar and doesn't apologise, it's bold, surreal, feminist and ferociously funny — exactly the kind of book that rewires your brain. A fever dream of feminist fire, we've never read a book quite like it.” —Service 95
”You're holding a torpedo of a book in your hand. Take a seat and get comfortable. This novel's energy, humour, and rebel spirit will awaken your mind and change your way of thinking.” —Olga Tokarczuk
>>Ecofeminist rollercoaster.
>>Alchemical dreams.

B is for Bird by Lily Emo $25
Make your way through the alphabet with this stunning book featuring a cast of familiar birds. From albatross to fantails, ganets to quail, and all the way to the silvereye (also known as Zosterpos lateralis), B Is For Bird is a beautiful celebration of birds, illustrated with collage and written by Whakatū artist Lily Emo. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>How the collages were made.

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. They make us wonder how to make sense of people who lived long ago (from angry landlords to giggling senators) — and to think harder about our own world, to look at it differently. In Talking Classics, Mary Beard points to the surprising connections between antiquity and the present. From revolutionaries to dictators, Bob Dylan to Beyoncé, she joins forces with the varied modern characters who have been transfixed by the ancient world. It's not compulsory, she argues to be excited by antiquity, but it's a shame not to be. After half a century teaching and studying classics, she fills the book with lively stories, curious facts and some good gossip. Talking Classics explains why the deep past does really affect us all. [Hardback]
”This book is a true delight, a thought-provoking, engaging and deeply personal look at the classical world from an author who understands it like no other.” —Elodie Harper
>>A laboratory for understanding what it would be like to be different.

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan $38
Dilara's father is disappearing. His memories are collapsing, dementia stealing a little more of him each day. She has persuaded him to move in with her, hiring builders to adapt her apartment to his new needs, but when the renovation is complete she discovers a big problem: instead of a new en-suite bathroom, the builders have installed a Turkish prison cell. At first she is outraged. There has surely been some mistake. Dilara's family are exiles — they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her estranged homeland appearing uninvited in her new home. But as the weeks pass, her indignation gradually gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners murmuring, rustling, crying out in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue. Even as she struggles to care for her father, to keep the family finances afloat and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, Dilara is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her — to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets — drawn inexorably back to Istanbul. [Paperback]
”Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told — like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodovar — I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end. Kenan Orhan is a truly gifted writer, drawing us down into a tunnel of memory and madness.” —Avni Doshi
”Elegant, propulsive and wholly original, The Renovation is a profound meditation on familial duties, memory, displacement and the devastating longing for a home that exists solely in the past. It will stay with me for a long time.” —Cecile Pin
”The Renovation brilliantly describes what it's like for ‘elsewhere’ to be ‘here’. An instant entry not just into the canon of migrant literature but into the literature of now.” —Isabel Waidner
>>A thing and a half.
>>A place that no longer exists.

Ngāti Kuia: He pūtake, hei pakiaka ora; A history by Madi Williams $60
Ngāti Kuia are tangata whenua of Te Tauihu-o-Te-Waka-a-Māui (the northern South Island). Descended from the ancestress Kuia, their whakapapa sits within a rich and complex Māori lineage, connecting with the stories held by neighbouring iwi - particularly the other Kurahaupō waka groups. Their networks also stretch towards the head of the country, linking to iwi originating from the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island), such as Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu, Muaūpoko, and ultimately back to the Polynesian homelands, Hawaiki. 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. From the stories of such tīpuna as Kaikaiāwaro and Hinepopo, through early encounters with neighbouring iwi and European settlers, to recent events such as the Treaty settlement process, this expansive account places Ngāti Kuia at the heart of the region's living, layered history. As Te Kenehi Teira observed during the Ngāti Kuia Treaty claim, the history of the iwi resembles “one huge jigsaw puzzle — you have to find all the pieces and put them together”. In this book, the pieces finally sit alongside one another. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Strength and agency.

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a world of change by Rebecca Solnit $37
”An old world is dying; a new world is being born; now is the time of monsters'.” —Antonio Gramschi. Solnit maps the extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights that we've experienced over the last fifty years, which has profoundly changed our world. In recognising the interdependent and symbiotic relationships in nature and among humans, this revolution is beginning to overturn capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the human domination of nature — despite the best efforts of the old world to fight back. The Beginning Comes After the End is a culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach. [Hardback]
”The optimism of this book arrives like a breath of fresh air. Solnit is adamant that positive change — social, political, climate — is not only a possibility but inevitable.” —Irish Times
”It would be easy to think we inhabit a global-digital age of despair. Think again, says Rebecca Solnit. In nine deft chapters, she pushes back on the current political gloom, setting it against the achievements made since the 1960s in decolonisation, environmentalism and gender equality, as well as within her own experience of US civil, labour, LGBT+ and indigenous rights.” —Financial Times
”Beautiful and inspiring: this book gives us the courage to face change, and to make it.” —George Monbiot
”A powerful meditation on transformation in turbulent times. Solnit argues that the current turmoil signals the dying throes of patriarchy and colonialism. A rallying call for all those who yearn for a just, sustainable and flourishing society.” —The Conversation
”Timely. As a deliberate exercise in reframing — as an open-ended invitation to consciously adopt new paradigms — The Beginning Comes After the End is very effective. Solnit is wise to focus on the nonlinear, and sometimes almost entirely invisible ways that change happens.” —Guardian
>>The change has begun.

Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen $28
Life on a remote Scottish island is turned upside down by a stranger's arrival, testing bonds of family and tradition and leaving a young dreamer's future hanging in the balance. It's no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence. The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper, known as The Father, and his otherworldly son, Ouse. Them, and the occasional lodger to keep the wolf from the door. When one of those lodgers — Firth, a chaotic writer — arrives from Edinburgh, the limits of the world the keeper and his son cling to begin to crumble. A tug of war ensues between Firth and the lighthouse keeper for Ouse's affections — and his future. As old and new ways collide, and life-changing decisions loom, what will the tides leave standing in their wake? [Paperback]
”A kaleidoscopic and linguistically daring work.” —Ocean Vuong
”A quirky and original debut that sizzles with scintillating prose.” —Bernadine Evaristo
”Michael Pedersen is a rare writer of real passion and power and this debut is phenomenal.” —Matt Haig

The Secret Life of Fungi: Exploring the otherworldly beauty of New Zealand’s micro-marvels by Jay Lichter $50
Obsessive fungi photographer Jay Lichter takes you on an extraordinary journey into the mysterious world of fungi — from the tiniest fruiting bodies barely visible to the naked eye, to the sprawling mycelial networks that stretch for kilometres beneath our feet. From urban backyards to suburban parks and beyond exists a magical world that weaves every living thing together in a vast underground web of connection. Without fungi, there would be no plants, no animals, no us. With his stunning photography and infectious curiosity, Jay uncovers the bizarre beauty, hidden intelligence and ecological genius of the fungi world. Funny, fascinating and a little bit filthy, this book celebrates the unsung heroes of our planet — the recyclers, the networkers, the quiet alchemists who make life possible. Once you've glimpsed their secret world, you'll never look at fungi the same way again. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Shuffling in the moss.

Insuring the Future: Reimagining home insurance in Aotearoa by Jonathan Boston $35
Securing home insurance is no longer a sure thing. Nor is it always affordable. In this clear-eyed work, public policy expert Jonathan Boston tackles one of the defining policy challenges of climate change: how can residential property insurance remain accessible and affordable as climate-intensified risks escalate? Given New Zealand’s distinctive natural hazards profile and numerous at-risk communities, small policy changes won’t be enough. Sustainable insurance affordability will require a paradigm shift in risk governance, adaptation planning, and property insurance arrangements. We need fair, collective risk-sharing, vigorous risk avoidance, and serious public investment in risk reduction, including planned relocation where long-term protection is neither cost-effective nor feasible. Navigating the stark realities of climate-intensified risks and implementing effective reforms will be challenging. There are powerful political incentives for procrastination and buck-passing. But delay will be costly; poor policy choices likewise. To enable progress, evidence-informed public debate about the policy options is vital. Insuring the Future seeks to encourage that debate and proposes a practical, integrated set of reforms. [Paperback]
”Urgent and timely.” —Max Rashbrooke
>>A climate-impacted future.
>>”Politics is the art of the possible.”

A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:

Stranger in My Own Land

Our Strangers

The Needs of Strangers

Strange Beach

The Welcome of Strangers

Nation of Strangers

Stranger in the Shogun’s City

Recognising the Stranger

The days are cooler and the evenings closing in early. It’s time to stay in and cooking a satisfying meal. Making your own pasta is both sasifying and rewarding. If you’ve got a pasta machine, it’s time to get it down from the top shelf or out of its box, give it a dust and you’ll be set to go. No pasta machine? A good rolling pin and a little extra patience.

Start with the….shapes! The Geometry of Pasta is a delight and you will discover new swirls, twists and frilled edges — over 80 to explore! Know your bigoli frrom your cappelletti, your gemelli from your pici. Designer Caz Hildebrand provides the stunning black and white illustraions, and chef Jacob Kennedy enlightens you with history, descriptions and recipes. For each pasta type there are its dimensions, thickness, what it’s good with, which Italian region it’s from, and its relatives. Reading this will make you a pasta expert.The Geometry of Pasta is packed with information and over 100 authenthic recipes, complete with an index of sauces for every occassion and palate.

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Looking for something that’s good for your budget and tasty on your tongue? Try Pasta for the People, the new cookbook from the Northern Pasta Co. along with a bunch of their favourite chef friends. This is joyful comfort cooking, reimaging classic favourites, with a little fusion and some twists on what you know. Tomato and Tamarind Gigli brings all the flavours while keeping the process simple, Harissa Peperonata Casarecce is a one-pot vegan wonder, and sastfy a crowd with the eggy delights of Pasta Mista Frittata. Pasta for the People is full of moreish everyday mouthfuls — comforting and refreshing.

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Elevate your pasta cooking with Tipo 00: The Pasta Cookbook. Here are the professional tips and elegant recipes. Andreas Papadakis, a Greek chef based in Melbourne, is known for his small pasta bar, Tipo 00, and in his cookbook he’s sharing the scerets of excellent pasta-making and some of the recipes fans queue for. All you will need to know about ingredients, equipment and pasta dough making is covered in the first chapter, and then you move to the ‘long’ pastas or as Papadakis states ‘Why Spaghetti is King’. Then there are the pastas – shaped and filled – along with a wine pairing guide. Then move aside the fillings for a full chapter on Risotto (who doesn’t want to improve their risotto?). It’s not all pasta: there’s a selection of recipes for sides and other delecious tidbits; and, of course, dessert. Tipomisu anyone?

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Rachel Kushner’s essays in The Hard Crowd read both like edgy youthful memories giving us a window into a life lived on the edge of danger, as well as intelligent analyses of political structures and cultural output. From the daring of her motorcycle racing days and obsessions with classic cars (it’s not surprising the opening scene in The Flamethrowers kicks such adrenaline on the page), in the opening essay 'Girl on a Motorcycle' to her conversations about literary intrigues Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector and Denis Johnson to mention a few, to her knowledge of Italian 1970s politics and prison reform which play a major role respectively, in The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, to her connections and interest in the New York art scene, the collected essays are varied in style. Some are self-effacing and gritty, in line with the popular 'personal essay' trend, yet Kushner’s memories remain dark, honest and absorbing without the cloyingness of the self-reflective and sometimes self-satisfied elements of this form. In her essays about writers, she is endlessly fascinating, almost finding her way through the writing — through description, analysis and the anecdotal to an understanding or a reflective essence of the writer and their work — giving us, the reader, an insight that makes us wish to seek out not more about the said author, but their output — to delve for ourselves into their words. There’s also a great essay with accompanying images (film stills, photographs and other ephemera), 'Made to Burn', which considers the influences and research for her novel The Flamethrowers. It’s filled with quirky snippets of information, as many of the essays are, which cast small surprises like flitting shadows and light bulb moments — observations that rub up against each other creating a texture that marries guns and art, writers and alcohol, and the adrenaline of competitive danger with fierce loyalty. And in pure juxtaposition to this hard-arse style are essays that will stop you in your tracks: a heartbreaking visit to a Palestinian refugee camp that is so established that it is functionally a dysfunctional town, and a conversation with an American prison abolitionist that raises some hard questions about incarceration. In The Hard Crowd, Kushner describes herself as the soft one, but these punchy essays make me think there are different kinds of softness, and Kushner's is one that has a core of steel, unafraid to look with intent.

If the first recorded ‘drawing’ by an animal was a picture by an orangutan of the bars of its cage, what does this tell us about art? Are we ‘creative’ only to the extent that we are constrained, and is that constraint always therefore the underlying subject of our art? Nabokov’s assertion that such a drawing was made at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes zoo cannot be verified by documentation but seems to contain a truth that is too appealing to discredit (possibly this ‘seeming to contain a truth’ is more important to us than an actual truth, expressing a shared subjective state beyond the reach of facts, even though such thinking is the basis of our worst sorts of actions as well as of our best), but it is interesting that this supposed drawing was made by the sort of animal we see as most ‘similar’ to ourselves and that this ‘art’ occurred in a zoo, a place where we, as adults at least, see our own predicament in the constrained lives, boredom, helplessness and frustration of the animals, but are also kept separate from them by the grammar of the cage. The two zones demarcated by a single set of bars differ perhaps in physical scale more than they do in type. Is it for this reason that zoos are "deeply sad”, as Zambreno states in one of their reports that comprise ‘Zoo Studies’, the first half of this little book. “There is perhaps no more pronounced gap of awareness between a child and adult than when visiting the zoo,” writes Zambreno of visiting the zoo with their children, though they acknowledge, too, that children may experience the intense melancholy inherent in the species-alienation and the gazes that pass between the viewers and the viewed, gazes predicated on the bars through which they pass. Do we visit zoos to see in animals that which we are not or do not want to be? Are children more able than adults at seeing the actual individual behind the label on the cage? As adults are we blinded to the experiences of others by the very indignities of separation, classification and containment that we have expressed upon them? 
The second half of Zambreno’s book, ‘My Kafka Method’, considers the actual impossibility of such a separation, through an accumulation of observations and fragments responding to first the life and then the animal stories of Franz Kafka. They see Kafka’s ambivalence about what could be called his ‘animal’ nature (though, when written, this term seems ludicrous) as the source of both his sufferings and his writings. If there is a zoo, Kafka is within the bars, his subjectivity complicated and enriched by the inescapability of his identification with the object of his attention. Our awareness, after all, is primarily a property of that of which we are aware. A text is a kind of cage in which the writer both performs for and avoids the gaze of the reader, a zone of both connection and separation, a space of porous and conflicted subjectivity, but Zambreno shows how, in Kafka’s stories, the circumstances of the writer, of the animal in the story, of Zambreno, of the reader — both of Kafka and of Zambreno — converge and begin to align. “Animals live in an ongoing present tense, the setting, possibly the subject, of this story,” Zambreno writes of ‘The Burrow’. Kafka does not exploit his animals as metaphors (“To make a metaphor of the animal is also to ignore the animal.”); he gives them enough vagueness of description to make them uncageable; he does not burden them with the sorts of meanings that would make their stories ‘signify’. “Don’t call them parables,” said Kafka. “If anything, call them animal stories.” We inhabit a zone of undifferentiated subjectivity. To draw a conclusion is to misrepresent the material. 

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. How does each of these shape our experience of ‘being in the world’, our relationships with others, our independence and creativity? As we receive and transmit the voices of others, how can authenticity survive between flux and fixture?
After the narrator of the novel drops his cellphone in the handbasin of the hotel on his way to conduct what will be the final published interview of his nonagenarian mentor, Thomas, a cultural eminence, he finds himself unable to admit that he is not recording, and ends up reconstructing the interview from memory. Towards the end of the book, the narrator’s onetime friend and alter ego, Thomas’s son Max, transmits a very different version of his father, showing that even our concepts of identity and value, intimacy and influence are altogether slippery and contingent.

• Stupefying and overwhelming.

• The philosophical and the intimate.

• The duck-rabbit of fiction.

• Parents, ghosts.

• The impossible interview.

• Vehicles for criticism.

• The interview experience that gave Lerner the idea for the book.

• Glass flowers, rotten fruit.

• Transmission.

• See you later, alligator.

• Please join us online to discuss this book on Tuesday 14 July.