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9 October 2026
So, what makes you want to write a review of David Shields’s book, The Very Last Interview?
Then why are you writing one?
Every week? Whose idea was that?
Surely at your age, you shouldn’t be so bound by obligation or by expectation, or whatever you call it?
Yes, but do you really care what these readers might think, and do you even believe that there are such people? Aren’t you being altogether a bit precious?
Do you really think that this helps to pay the mortgage, I mean that this makes a direct and measurable contribution towards paying your mortgage? Or even an indirect and unmeasurable but still valuable contribution towards paying your mortgage?
Well, what else would you be doing?
Surely you’re joking?
Okay, we’ve got a bit off the track there. I will reframe my first question. What makes you think that you are able to write a review of David Shields’s new book?
Don’t you think your humility is a bit mannered?
The Very Last Interview is a book consisting entirely of questions that interviewers have asked David Shields over the years, omitting his answers, assuming he will have answered probably at least most of the questions, and your review, if we can call it that, of this book also consists of a series of questions ostensibly directed at you but without your answers, if indeed there were answers, which is less certain in your case than in the case of David Shields. Is this, on your part, a deliberate choice of approach, and, if so, is it justifiable?
Do you really believe that a review written in imitation of, or in the style of, the work under review inherently reveals something about that work, even if the review is badly written, or should your approach rather be attributed to laziness, stylistic insecurity, or creative bankruptcy?
Has it ever occurred to you that the supposedly more enjoyable qualities of your writing are actually nothing more than literary tics or affectations, and, furthermore, that it might be these very literary tics and affectations that prevent you from writing anything of real literary worth?
Do you think that, by removing his input into the original interviews but retaining the questions, David Shields is attempting to remove himself from his own existence, or merely to show that our identities are always imposed from outside us rather than from inside, or that we exist as persons only to the extent that we are seen by others? Is this, in fact, all the same thing?
What do you mean by that statement, ‘We are defined by the limits we present to the observations of others’?
What do you mean by that statement ‘There is no such thing as writing, only editing,’ and how does that relate to Shields’s work?
Do you think that David Shields, in this book as in the much-discussed 2010 Reality Hunger, sees the individual as an illusion, a miserable fragment of what is actually a ‘hive mind’ or collective consciousness, and that ‘creativity’, so to call it, is another illusion predicated on this illusion of individuality?
You don’t? What, then?
What do you think David Shields would have answered, when asked, as he was, seemingly in this book, “But what is the role of the imagination in this ‘post-literature literature’ that you envision?” and how might this differ from the answer you might give if asked the same question?
Shields was asked if he had written anything that couldn’t be interpreted as ‘crypto-autobiography’, but don’t you think the salient question is whether it is even possible to write anything that couldn’t be interpreted as crypto-autobiography?
Is a perfectly delineated absence, such as David Shields approximates in The Very Last Interview, in fact the most perfect portrait of a person, even the best possible definition of a person, as far as this is possible at all?
But do you actually have a personal opinion on this?
Do you think then that you, like Shields, like us all perhaps, are, in essence, a ghost?
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, classicist and translator who has just been named the 2026 Nobel Laureate in Literature. In Wrong Norma, variously described as prose poems or prose pieces, she confronts writing and ideas. She allows thoughts to take the lead, to follow the other, in sometimes bewildering, sometimes illogical ways to paces where juxtapositions and contradictions segue into each other with a wonderful ‘wrongness’. And what is the idea of wrong? Her description of this project (as most of her published works are: she makes a handmade book, which is then produced as a facsimile by her publisher) is elusive and offers a brief explanation: “...a collection of wrings about different things..” And this collection is wide-ranging in subject matter, from swimming to snow, Joseph Conrad and Emily Dickinson, riffs on Socrates and violence, observations on poverty and displacement, a piece of writing by the Sky, in fact a week-long journal, my favourite being a conversation on Wednesday with Godot, and an image essay reimagining the meeting of the German philosopher Heidigger and the Jewish writing Paul Celan in 1966. Re-reading any one of these prose pieces is submerging. (The idea of suubmerging also links strongly to the first piece on swimming, so desire to be in water, out of air). They are endlessly curious, striving forward, to what one is never completely sure, and this makes them compelling. You return to discover something new and surprising each time, and it makes you ask questions rather than look for answers. In this work, Anne Carson seems to be asking questions and there are these wonderful scrap paper interludes between each piece. Some with merely a faintly typed comment or questions. Others that are dialogue, questions and answers, the questions often repeated, the answers varied — are they questions put to a host of visitors or characters or the author talking to herself? These repetitive questions include: “ Do you like the films of Eric Rohmer?”, followed by “Do you like jam?”, as if asking these simultaneously is a given. The other question that pops up repeatedly is “ What is yor philosophy of time?” With answers variously being: “I’m quite sure we’ll surrender” to “ how it’s sweet and how it’s moving” and “ a shallow closet with narrow bench and a rope to pull you up”. Are the recipients answering this question or even hearing it? Or are we always in conversation at cross purposes? Many of the text peices are reflecting on the process of writing. What is language, and how does it work? When translation is evoked, what happens to the text, whether this is translating yourself or others? Perspective and observation can be wrong and this wrongness leads to discoveries. Anne Carson calls these pieces wrong and enjoys herself. These is intelligent and playful writing. There is much here to amuse, as well as provoke thinking. But who or what is Norma? There is a reference in one piece to Norma Desmond, a character played in a film by Gloria Swanson, but I wondered if here the translator in Carson comes to the fore. Norma in latin can mean rule or pattern; in Greek, examiner. In an interview with Paris Review, Carson describes writing like seeing and following a fox. “I think about it as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it’s interesting. It’s more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It’s just following a track.”
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
THE VALLEY OF UNLIKELY ACQUAINTANCES by Terri Te Tau $38
“This is a real deal Māori sci-fi thriller dripping in small-town charisma, rongoā, and twists. Terri Te Tau somehow manages to prove, with eye-watering brains and a bit of Indigenous futurism, that the highest technology in the cosmos truly is our whakapapa.” —Coco Solid
BEDFORD STREET by Ross Murray $35
”Bedford Street is not just a moving and beautifully presented graphic novel but, as with Rufus Marigold, it invites us to think about relationships, how we conduct ourselves, caring and being responsible.” —Graham Reid, Elsewhere
SIMPLE TOO by Yotam Ottolenghi $75
135 new recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. Every dish has simplicity at its core and can be made in under 30 minutes, cooked in one pot, or prepped ahead. Whatever your barriers to cooking, this book brings you into the kitchen with a promise that even the simplest of meals can be full of flavour and joy.
THE STARVING BRIDE by Catherine Chidgey $38
Catherine Chidgey’s much-anticipated new novel in set in a near future where suffering is presented as an amausement to distract the populace from mounting disasters, and personal appearance has replaced ethics as a guiding force for action (just like our own times on both counts, actually!).
DIRTY WORK by Nicky Hager $35
An exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right, to use race politics to create division, and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. "I do not care and New Zealanders do not care about this topic." —Christopher Luxon
Over forty years, Anne Carson’s work has spanned poetry, essay, Classical translation, and literary experiment, tautening the threads between the ancient and the modern, between introspection and observation, between audacity and sensitivity, between the personal and the shared, energising the entire length of each of the lines between these poles. Today she was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature. Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning.”
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.
And How Are Things With You by Mia Farlane $40
Franny is AWOL from her French translation job, her cat-sitting gig is making her anxious, and an obsessive personal project is shooting off in more directions than the London Underground. She needs to leave the UK and return home. But Aotearoa turns out to be less relaxing than she thought it would be, because she keeps running into people she’d rather avoid. Wellington is a nostalgia trip on repeat and the last thing Franny needs is distraction. For her own reasons, she is researching suicide, and the material she’s unearthing is almost overwhelming. Bit by bit Wellington begins to grow on her. She finds herself chatting to a woman over kūmara wedges, getting real with a nonagenarian aunt and attending a ‘die-in’ at a bank to protest global extinction. Meanwhile, Franny books a seat to watch the parliamentary debates for the End of Life Choice bill, and her research takes a startling turn. And How Are Things With You is shot through with the dark humour and dry observations that readers loved in Footnotes to Sex, a novel British broadcaster Bidisha described as ‘Seinfeld meets Dorothy Parker’. [Paperback]
‘A frank, acerbic and darkly comic exploration of a deeply serious taboo.’ — Carl Shuker
‘Farlane’s novel is the perfect companion for an overly interesting age: darkly funny, quietly and steadfastly loving, with a charmingly singular protagonist.’ — A.L. Kennedy
>>Exploring a taboo subject.
Sovereignty: The case for consitutional transformation by Claire Charters $20
‘The legitimacy of the state is at best questionable and certainly remains legally unsettled.’ Legal scholar Claire Charters (Ngāti Whakaue, Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi and Tainui) confronts the deeply rooted questions surrounding the legitimacy of the New Zealand state and its sovereignty over Māori. Drawing from her infl uential writings and speeches, Charters critiques the judiciary’s historical silence on the state’s claim to sovereignty, revealing the profound implications of this silence for justice in Aotearoa. Through a rigorous examination of legal doctrines and the role of tikanga Māori, she exposes the contradictions in New Zealand’s constitutional narrative and argues for transformative constitutional reform. [Paperback]
>>A problem for legitimacy.
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish history by Benjamin Moser $75
Until relatively recently, anti-Zionism has been an almost exclusively Jewish position, and it continues to be a stongly held position for many Jews. In this revelatory book, Benjamin Moser uncovers a suppressed tradition that has shaped Jewish thought for generations. Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists and politicians — from Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America — Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism's moral and political stakes — often at devastating personal cost, including censorship, exile and death. Their lives form a sweeping, global narrative that dismantles a powerful myth: that anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. Spanning continents and centuries, these voices — people from the right and the left, Reform and Orthodox, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, men and women, gay and straight — differ sharply in belief and background, yet converge on a shared warning about the consequences of a nationalist project built on exclusion. What emerges is not only a rediscovered tradition of Jewish moral thought, but a startling reappraisal of Zionism itself. Moser's work restores the full scale and depth of Jewish ethical imagination, affirming that Judaism is older and larger than any single political project. Lucid, unsparing and deeply humane, Anti-Zionism cements Moser's place as one of our foremost Jewish writers and presents a framework through which this history — and its meanings — will be understood for years to come. [Hardback]
'An important and revelatory contribution.' —William Dalrymple
'A book of extraordinary moral clarity.' —Nathan Thrall
'A lovingly-written historical primer for the free-thinkers of the West today.' —Isabella Hammad
'What I learned in these pages has profoundly changed my understanding of history — the world's, my people's, my family's, and my own.' —Ayelet Waldman
>>The loss that cannot be repaired.
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (translated from Italian by Tim Parks) $35
Set in post-war Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's novel begins simply and innocently enough: `At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell'. But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the offhanded knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the seemingly perfect new girl, Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. [Paperback]
"Dipped in the blue ink of adolescence, Fleur Jaeggy's pen is an engraver's needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness, growing in the splendid isolation of the small Swiss garden of knowledge into full leaf until it obscures every perspective. Extraordinary prose. Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author: the rest of one's life." —Joseph Brodsky
Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro (translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle) $33
In a quiet middle-class neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, the body of a teenage girl is found dismembered and burned. Thirty years later, her family still lives in the aftermath: Lia, the middle sister, enraged and extranged from her past, now a bookshop owner in Spain, but no further from the pain of that early loss; Carmen, frozen in religious fervour and certainty; their father, widowed, alone, and desperate for a connection with his daughters, alive and dead. Piñeiro takes on the institutions that shape our most intimate connections with unsparing clarity. Church, family, sibling rivalry, sex, cowardice, and rage are the forces that might tear a family apart, but will also never let you go. [Paperback with French flaps]
"One of her strongest novels to date." —Irish Times
"Pineiro beautifully blends mystery and true crime tropes with incisive insights into the church's sexual repression and subjugation of women. It's an illuminating page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly
"With her characteristic edge-of-the-seat storytelling, Pineiro exposes not only the monsters we live among, but also the society that produces them." —The Conversation
"Pineiro is not only a masterful novelist but also a tireless feminist activist. This book is an urgent act of witness. Through myth, noir and social realism, it exposes the violence of patriarchy, the cruelty of church and state, and the extraordinary resilience of women who refuse to vanish. Thrilling, witty, enraged and alive." —Morning Star
All Them Dogs by Djamel White $38
Things are different since Tony Ward landed back in town. The West Dublin gangland has changed. His old mentor is dead, and his best pal Kenny Boyle is on the straight and narrow. After five years keeping quiet across the way, Tony is keen to reinstate himself, and when the opportunity arises to work side by side with Darren 'Flute' Walsh, a top enforcer of notorious crime boss Angus Lavelle, it feels like a no brainer. Biting off more than he can chew has never bothered Tony Ward, but Flute Walsh is not the meek, quiet boy Tony remembers from school. Brooding, stoic and unpredictably dangerous, Tony finds himself drawn to his new associate in more ways than one. With retribution from his past actions always close in the rear view, the protection offered by Flute's standing in the gang is crucial. But how safe is Tony really, when a mutual attraction starts to complicate matters? [Paperback]
”In the best Irish style, Djamel White uses a local voice to blast through language and make it new. His hero, Tony Ward, is a bittersweet confection of self-defeating swagger. A stylish, adroit and gritty debut.” —Anne Enright
”All Them Dogs is a book you inhale, devour, grapple with, and reel from more than read. A coming-of-age novel for an age that comes breathing down the back of your neck. The kind of book where everything is on the edge of a knife and where love, like death, is either a kiss or a bullet away.” —Marlon James
”A moving, fast-paced novel about masculinity, violence and vulnerability, set in parts of Dublin that rarely appear in literature and written in prose at once glittering and tender.” —Sarah Moss
Radical Attention by Julia Bell $40
In recent years tech companies have turned attention into a commodity, a resource to be mined and sold.The terms of the deal appear simple: in exchange for our attention we receive information, entertainment,and convenience. But what are the hidden costs? And what happens to our inner lives when we lose the ability to decide how we wish to pay attention?In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell examines big tech's wide- ranging and extractive assault on human attention, while asking how we might reclaim it. Selected by Ali Smith as one of the five most important books to navigate the next twenty years, this new edition features a new foreword by radical economist Grace Blakeley and an afterword by the author. [Paperback]
”Dazzling, angry, lucid, and shining with insight. Julia Bell has written a book that feels like a dynamite stick.” —Marina Benjamin
>>Redirecting our focus.
Negative Essays: On death, love, and depressive realism by Julie Reshe $60
While belonging to the tradition of philosophical pessimism and negative philosophy, these essays approach love, rather than mortality, as what most deeply wounds being. Love knows the darkest truth that death only conceals. Across thirteen essays, Julie Reshe develops a negative philosophy of our involvement with others, moving through depressive realism, the death drive, feminist Satanism, trauma, suicide, motherhood, narcissism, entropy, autism, disability, and aging. Essays include ‘Humor and Depressive Realism’, ‘Therapeutic Society’, ‘Toxic Positivity’, ‘Critical Psychology’, ‘Feminist Satanism’, 'Trauma as Initiation’, ‘Depression as Compassion’, ‘Suicide That Is Not One's Own’, and ‘The Negative Body’. [Paperback]
”Negative Essays is a brave, unsettling, and deeply moving book. Julie Reshe refuses every easy consolation and every therapeutic injunction to transform suffering into recovery. Through death, depression, humor, love, motherhood, disability, and aging, she develops a radically relational account of existence: we do not suffer alone, because we never exist alone. Negativity is not the opposite of love but its most intimate condition-the wound through which we are exposed to one another. At once philosophically incisive and painfully personal, these essays bring thought as close as possible to what thought usually keeps at a distance. A remarkable and necessary book.” —Catherine Malabou
”Julie Reshe is the philosopher of the negative. In addition to her radical reading of the death drive, Reshe here develops a negative philosophy that undermines previous forms of pessimism by locating negativity in our essential involvement with others, not in isolation. It is precisely this involvement with others that is the source of the worst of our wounds rather than any existential loneliness. Reshe radically redefines negativity and the idea of community by turning all expectations about both on their heads. It's a startling book not to be missed by anyone who's ever felt destroyed by someone else.” —Todd McGowan
”I pride myself on knowing Hegel's ‘night of the world’ that pure abyss of negativity that constitutes the subject. And yet Negative Essays is like a map that marks the location of the candle I secretly lit in the basement, the cupboard light that glows through the cracks of a closed door, the torch I've hidden under the duvet. These essays are so uncompromising that they rob the reader of that last defence against the suffering of being: reflection upon it. While the work is philosophically rich, the words have such an existential intensity that you cannot help but feel the burn of the black sun they describe. There is no escape into fantasy here. No therapeutic cure, political utopia or religious salvation. So, with all that in mind, why would I ever put myself through the hell of reading these essays? Because of the sheer enjoyment each one produces.” —Peter Rollins
>>Nonseparation.
Patron Saints of Roadkill, And other stories by Susanna Elliffe $38
A ghost moves into a woman's apartment and begins to cough up teeth. A town keeps building as the sea prepares to take it back. A daughter inherits hunger like an heirloom. In this collection of short stories set along a shifting coastline, the boundaries between body and memory, human and nonhuman, landscape and ocean begin to slip and strain. Houses tilt, animals and ghosts press in, and what is carried — grief, desire, damage — refuses to stay contained. Patron Saints of Roadkill is a darkly tender collection, revealing a world where the familiar is made strange and the strange is given its rightful place in the landscape of things. [Paperback]
>>Unease.
Sebze: Vegetarian recipes from my Turkish kitchen by Özlem Warren $65
A collection of 90 vegetarian and vegan recipes celebrating Türkiye and its food. Inspired by thousands of years of rich and diverse culinary heritage, Sebze champions dishes such as Stuffed Flatbreads, Menemen, Baked Fig and Feta, and Baklava, with recipes that are easy, accessible, seasonal, and sustainable — not to mention delicious. A passionate and skilled advocate for her national cuisine, Özlem Warren will show you how to make meals that you want to — and can — cook, making Sebze the perfect introduction to Turkish food for the home cook. [Hardback]
"An absolute feast of Turkish home cooking" —Diana Henry
"I absolutely love getting lost in this book. Wonderful recipe after wonderful recipe. You are in excellent hands with Özlem as your guide. The text and stories transport you, while simultaneously making you extremely hungry, for food and discovery alike." —Joe Woodhouse
"Sebze is a celebration of some of Turkey's most celebrated and most loved vegetable recipes and there is nobody better equipped to share them with us than Özlem." —Sabrina Ghayour
>>Look inside!
>>Ozlem’s Turkish table.
Palestine: A short history by Rashid Khalidi $38
'Come for a walk with me, if you would, along the streets of Jerusalem. My family has walked these streets for more than a thousand years.' With this invitation, Khalidi offers a powerful introduction to Palestinian history through a century of conflict and resistance. Blending research with his own family memories, Khalidi traces Palestine's story from the British occupation to Israel's ongoing colonial war. Explaining the history behind the world's most visible — and misunderstood — conflict, Khalidi explores why Israel has long fought against Palestine. Engaging and accessible, this book offers everyone a clear and concise account of a century of struggle — and the future of the Palestinian state. Adapted from The Hundred Years War on Palestine for a new generation of readers. [Paperback]
'Informed and passionate. Khalidi's is an elegy for the Palestinians.' —Guardian
'Rigorous and lucid. Rashid Khalidi, the intellectual heir to Edward Said, has written one of the great books on the Israeli-Palestinian question.' —Financial Times
'This act of retelling is itself a form of resistance' —The Nation
'The best book to appear on the struggle for Palestine.' —Avi Shlaim
>>The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
Read what the judges have to say about each of the books shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, then click through for your copies.
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
‘Two beachcombers meet and exchange words at the intertidal; we are in Kent, and it is the near-future, but one that recognises itself to be in the middle of a catastrophe. The sky is glitching, and something strange, formless and growing is soon to come out of the sea, to imitate our speech, forms, and customs. Our left-behind inhabitants scavenge where and what they can, provisional alliances are made and broken, shocking violence occurs, and no one can agree on exactly what has happened. A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering and oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.’
The Disappearers by Marlon James
‘The Disappearers is among Marlon James’s most ambitious and history-making works, a novel that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy. Beginning in late 1980s Kingston, it follows eight male actors rehearsing what is billed as Jamaica’s first openly gay play. When the men become victims of brutal homophobic violence, the novel shifts register: in the years that follow, one survivor sets out to investigate the fates of the others, and what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning. James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange. The Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.’
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
‘How does an aspiring actor survive in contemporary London, where monthly living costs can rise well over a thousand pounds? The obvious solution – be born rich – has eluded Black Bag’s protagonist, a 37-year-old man who cobbles together an artistically and financially unsatisfying life performing in productions that stretch and undermine the meaning of theatre. That is until he gets a job showing up to student psychology lectures dressed in a black bag. Luke Kennard’s of-the-moment satire considers anonymity and disgust, the online rackets of cryptocurrency and energy drinks, and what it means to find love in our unstable times. There’ll be a lot of discussion about what the novel has to say about the state of modern masculinity (fractious; confused) – we also admired its sharply crafted sentences, memorable sex scenes, and humour.’
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
‘Perry combines the story of a reserved museum curator who recreates historical banquets, using a careful array of fake pies and pomegranates – with the story of a medieval king, reluctant to occupy the throne (and possibly unfit for it anyway). It’s a wonderfully enticing, and eye-opening, combination of themes, woven together with an extraordinary delicacy of touch. You can’t read May We Feed the King without reflecting on the fragile boundary between the present and the past. What’s the difference between historical fiction and historical fact? Can history ever be a safe place we can go to escape the present?’
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
‘Set in the contemporary United States, Strout’s novel focuses on Artie Dam, a 50-something high-school history teacher in a small coastal town with decent friends and wholesome hobbies. The Things We Never Say quietly unpicks all that, to show that the ordinary is not quite as ordinary as it might seem. Strout’s prose is about as far from a rant as you could imagine, brilliantly understated and all the more powerful for that. It’s a devastating look at the dangerous cracks in family life and in the contemporary world at large.’
John of John by Douglas Stuart
‘A 22-year-old arts student reluctantly returns from Edinburgh to his home on the Isle of Harris in Douglas Stuart’s third novel. We loved the rich, textural detail of the story, which is set in the 90s and examines young Cal’s fraught relationship with his domineering father. There’s a vivid sense of time and place, as the island becomes the site of bristling tensions between secret lovers, feuding families, and a stand-off between tradition and modernity. This excavation of family, violence, and shame is woven through with beautiful imagistic detail, and – unexpectedly but wonderfully – shades of hope.’
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Read our 501st newsletter! (Still going!)
2 October 2026
Is it possible to be terrified as you read a novel? You know you can close the book, that it is merely words. Tīhema Baker lets you in easy. The door is opened wide to the domestic scene of father, mother and child. The baby, Wī, not sleeping, the parents Āniwa and Hōhepa sleep deprived. Nothing unusual here, aside from Hepa’s vivid dreaming. Everyone is feeling trapped, the grind of life with a small child, a first child and all the changes this entails. None more so than Hōhepa: bereft at moving from the public service of Wellington central to up the coast at the city council, a little at sea with fatherhood, and isolated from his past social circles, as well as his tūrangawaewae. Add to that the pressure of never enough money, and Hepa’s desire to be a good father and partner – to be a good role model to his son, to both protect and provide, and be sensitive to the needs of his family, while juggling work, protesters outside the office, racism at work and in the news, and a sense of panic at all the evils that could befall his son. If you have read Turncoat, you’ll recognise a few familiar themes – concerns over the degradation of te Tiriti, institutional racism, Pākehā ignorance — and Baker’s ability to slice humour into his books without degrading the serious and confronting aspects of his novels. Unlike Turncoat, and Baker’s young adult novels, there is no sci-fi here. This is a contemporary setting, well bogged down in the quotidian life of a middle class Māori father. But this is Tīhema Baker writing, so expect the unexpected. There’s another entity, one that comes in dreams, who like One Day a Taniwha seems relatively benign at first. The pāua-shelled eyes appear to look with curiousity from the face of the lizard; it is silent, appearing in Hepa’s dreams at first as a bystander, a witness. Yet Hepa is right to be wary of this visitor. Talking to Uncle Bush, he finds out you can travel in your dreams, some believe to actual places and people. The dreams become more vivid, the taniwha less benign, the pāua shell eyes teasing and bullying, the creature shapeshifting, its voice inside Hepa’s head goading him, to the point where Hepa’s is looking for a way to have dreamless sleep. As Hōhepa’s lack of sleep and the pressure he puts himself under pushes him to the edge, the darkest emotions and actions take place in his dreams. There is a violence there that is difficult to read without being shaken; it is a violence of frustration, the violence of colonisation and its ongoing consequences, and a battle of ideas about masculinity. The edges are fraying, unravelling at pace, and when dreams and reality merge, the consequeces are frightening. In One Day a Taniwha, Tīhema Baker examines fatherhood, masculinity, and male Māori mental health. Deceptively playful at first, this crescendo of a novel, is a powerful piece of writing.
For some reason it had become a habit for him to write his reviews of books in the style of the books themselves, or as near a style as he could manage, a habit or an affectation, he wasn’t sure which, but this habit or affectation, if it was indeed a habit or an affectation, did have a serious intent, and was therefore not really a habit although it still could be an affectation, in that he somehow seemed to believe that a review written in the style of the subject of the review might reveal to him, and possibility to the readers of the review if there chanced to be any readers of the review, if such things could be left to chance, really such things were always left to chance, what was he saying, he seemed to believe that a review written in the style of the subject of the review might reveal something otherwise unnoticed or essential or incidental about the book in question, perhaps he was attempting to remove himself from a position of agency or of responsibility for the review by enticing, if that is the word, the book to write a review of itself. Form generates content, he shouted, frightening the cat, I want to write like a machine, I want to tinker with form until it purrs like a literary motor, then I will be able to put anything at all into the hopper, switch it on, and out comes literature. The cat was quick to resettle, she was used to this kind of excitement. If I were to write a review of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus in the form of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus I would also be writing it in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he thought, I would be writing it in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus because Signe Gjessing has written her book in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in order, he thought, to see what kind of poetry could be generated by such a form, in order to use form as a machine for the generation of text, in order, he thought, to test the limits of language, to see what it is and is not good for, just like Wittgenstein, or just like Wittgenstein thought he was doing at the time he wrote that book. If Wittgenstein made no distinction between form and content, the same must be true of poetry, he thought. If for Wittgenstein the limits of knowledge are the limits of language, what are we to say of poetry, always straining as it does, or as it should, he thought or thought that perhaps he thought, into the unsayable? If Wittgenstein sought the limit of what can be said, through progressing out linguistically from the obvious towards that limit, pushing at it and establishing it, he thought, he entails that beyond that limit there exists not nothing but rather that about which nothing can be said. What cannot be said is signified by the complete exhaustion of that which can be said. Gjessing also is obsessed with the limit with which Wittgenstein was at the time he wrote his book obsessed, but she stands at that limit as if from the habitat beyond, both Wittgenstein and Gjessing are concerned to discover the nature of the limit inherent in language, if there is such a limit and such a limit is inherent, but Gjessing wants, he thought, to destroy that limit or even to show that the destruction of the limit inherent in language is itself inherent in language. He had written in his bad handwriting in his notebook that Gjessing had written in the introduction to her book that “The poem is a modification of the universal — as though the sayable were an incapacity of the unsayable,” and, he thought, Gjessing is running Wittgenstien’s machine in reverse to see what poetry comes out. If the world is comprised not of things but of states of affairs which are the grammatical relations between things, there is no reason to think that that which is not the case is not governed by or, he thought, even generated by this universal grammar. Texts are comprised not of words but of grammar, he shouted, but the cat was long gone. Well, he thought, if I was going to write my review of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus in the form of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, I should have started earlier, I should have started, as does Gjessing, as does Wittgenstein to whose text Gjessing’s text is a response and a rejoinder, with a number of numbered statements on the first level to which another number of statements numbered to the first decimal respond or are implied and to which another number of statements numbered to the second decimal respond or are implied and so on until perhaps the fourth decimal or what we could call the fifth level, I’m not exactly sure if this is clear, a shining rack of cogs used in Wittgenstein’s case to generate philosophy, if he believed at that time there even was such a thing, and in Gjessing’s case to generate poetry, or whatever we might choose to call it, if I had written my review like this, he thought, what would I have written? Perhaps if I can devise such a grammatical machine to write reviews, a machine I can just turn upon any text, I can perhaps be relieved of certain of my duties, except perhaps to now and again apply a little oil, and perhaps get sometimes earlier to bed.
In this thoughtful science-fiction thriller emerging from te ao Māori, a research scientist and her friend struggle to hold their community together after the discovery of human remains in a local cave reveals a devastating history dating back to the 1800s that threatens to undermine their restoration of a Wairarapa forest. A very effective and enjoyable blend of time travel, environmentalism, local humour, whakapapa, rongoā, and immediacy.
>>Find out more.
>>Speaking to our current moment.
>>A new chapter.
>>Not ticking a box.
>>Read an extract.
>>The artwork on the cover.
>>Solid, but fluid.
>>Books from Spoor Books.
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
LIFE OF M by Rachel Cusk $37
Rachel Cusk’s new novel continues her project of applying stress to the conventions of the novel in order to make fiction reveal truths about life that we are conditioned to avoid. In Life of M a character who observes and writes describes or defines the life of a character who performs and is observed, a film star who finds no more autonomy in the role of herself than she does when she is acting.
ON THE EQUALITY OF ALL THINGS: Physics and philosophy by Carlo Rovelli $50
”Carlo Rovelli is the best thinker out there articulating physics, philosophy, and literature. There simply are no scientists of his caliber who also are humanists of the first order. His prose has the enviable ability to expand the realm of the utterable and, with it, the reach of our intellectual experience.” —Hernan Diaz
EXIT PARTY by Emily St. John Mandel $38
”What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel's imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights. Extraordinary.” —The Guardian
HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY: The story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple $40
”Vast in scope, elegiac in prose, this book brings to life the profound humanity of those who stood up to the blood soaked ethno-nationalisms that led to so many of the twentieth century's storied horrors. All the while, Crabapple never lets us forget that they were also fighting for a world that would not give rise to such evil. This book is many things: an ode to the grand legacy of anti-Zionist Jewishness; a profound reflection on whether history has morals; and an essential resource for anti-fascist history, concepts and tools.” — Jason Stanley
DIRTY WORK by Nicky Hager $35
An exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right, to use race politics to create division, and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. "I do not care and New Zealanders do not care about this topic." —Christopher Luxon
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.
Bedford Street by Ross Murray $35
The much-anticipated new graphic novel from the author of Rufus Marigold, Bedford Street is a darkly comic exploration of social decay, hardship, recklessness and the ways in which we care for one another. Eight loosely interwoven stories create a mosaic of lives lived in the growing maelstrom of 21st century Aotearoa, where some submit to their worst impulses and others try their best despite it all. Beautifully done. Subtle. Devastating. [Paperback]
'This is one of the most deeply truthful depictions of humanity I've ever read. Beautifully bleak and chocka with delicious moments of dark humour, Murray has created a truly captivating cast of (highly) flawed yet loveable characters.' —Tom Sainsbury
”Bedford Street is not just a moving and beautifully presented graphic novel but, as with Rufus Marigold, it invites us to think about relationships, how we conduct ourselves, caring and being responsible.” —Graham Reid, Elsewhere
>>Look inside!
>>Read an extract.
>>What has happened in our society?
>>Deeply flawed.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Rufus Marigold.
>>Other superb Aotearoa graphic novels from Earth’s End.
Whose Knowledge Counts? From warp drive to waka huia by Pounamu Jade William Emery Aikman $20
‘The miracle of knowledge is that it speaks across time and space, from tūpuna to descendant.’ Knowledge takes many forms, but not all are valued equally. Pounamu Jade Aikman shows how particular ways of knowing underpin life in Aotearoa, to the exclusion of others. Ranging from Foucault to Spock to school lunches, Aikman traces the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge systems. He looks at the impact of this on our economy, prisons, politics and constitutional relationships, asking is knowledge, like space, our final frontier? Challenging, optimistic and ever curious, this Text explores how we value knowledge, and what that means for us all. [Paperback]
A Guide to Making Fragments from Diaries by Joshua Beckman $45
Joshua Beckman's new book, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries, gathers poems found or made in various forms — chapter summaries of non-existent books, body poems, an assemblage of his mother's remarks while painting his portrait, lists of thoughts and things (one of all the uninvited animals and insects who entered his house over the course of a year!). The book culminates with the guide, including light instructions toward finding fragments within a notebook or diary. [Paperback]
”If you take a broad squint at our nation's new poets you can find two general strategies: poets who are carrying the torch, and poets who are using it to start fires. And then we have Joshua Beckman. He seems to be doing everything.” —Daniel Handler, The Believer
>>Early 1984.
>>A sequence of prompts.
Brother BrontBrontë by Fernando A. Flores $37
The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech-industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of its mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick's pockets. Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Proserpina and Neftalí. One of Three Rivers' last literate citizens, Neftalí hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalí's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick's forces, Neftalí and Proserpina, with the help of a wounded Bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel aunties, rise up to reclaim their city — and in the process, unlock Rivas's connection to Three Rivers itself. A mordant, gonzo romp through a ruined world that, in its dysfunction, tyranny, and disparity, feels uncannily like our own. [Paperback]
"Flores's style has an exhilarating punk, D.I.Y. aplomb; it's as if he feels he's inventing literature for the first time." —Mark Leyner, The New York Times Book Review
"This crazy, cakey world-making of Fernando A. Flores is all of literature: wide, plaintive, melancholy, and full of feminist fellow joyousness and ways." —Eileen Myles
>>Read an extract.
Land, Race, and the Settler Imgination by Liana MacDonald $20
Liana MacDonald exposes how settler colonialism is sustained by the places we move through, the institutions we work in and the stories we tell. Deconstructing the ‘settler fantasy’, she reveals how a settler understanding of race, land and power is made to seem natural, even inevitable. Well-meaning efforts to challenge it can reinforce the very thing they oppose. Once we recognise our part in these stories, MacDonald argues, we might begin to remake our relationships with one another, in our everyday lives and workplaces. [Paperback]
Noriko Smiling by Adam Mars-Jones $30
'Late Spring, directed and co-written by Yasujiro Ozu, was released in 1949, which makes it an old film, or a film that has been new for a long time...' So begins this remarkable essay in narrative reconstruction, which elicits a world of meanings from the reticences of one classic Japanese movie, and reserves to the very end a resolution of its mystery. Adam Mars-Jones gives a virtuoso performance as that lost figure from the earl days of cinema: the film explainer. There has never been a film book like this one. [Hardback (clothbound)]
>>The light is sixty years old.
>>Demystifying the master.
>>Watch Late Spring.
Kupe me te Wheke nui a Muturangi nā Mat Tait $30
Te haerenga a Kupe ki Aotearoa! I ako a Kupe mō te wheke nui, mō te wheke wehi nāna tonu ngā ika o te moana i kai, arā, kua kore ngā kaimoana hei kai mā ngā tāngata o Hawaiki. Nā, ka whāia taua wheke rā e Kupe, ka whiti atu i Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Nāwai rā, ka kite a Hine-te-Aparangi i tētahi whenua me tētahi ao tea roa: Aotearoa! Ākona ngā kōrero mō te pakanga nui i waenga i a Kupe me te wheke nui. [Uhi mārō]
>>Tirohia ki roto!
>>Kupe and the Giant Octopus of Muturangi.
Hinterlands: journeys through Europe’s unfinished frontiers by Hannah Lucinda Smith $55
Long before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, conflict was simmering on Europe's borders. In overlooked territories in eastern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus — from the Balkans and Cyprus to Abkhazia on the fringes of Georgia — local disputes spiral into regional crises, global alliances are forged and broken, and power is brokered while the West looks elsewhere. In Hinterlands, correspondent Hannah Lucinda Smith draws on vivid first-hand encounters with politicians, spies and ordinary people caught in the crosshairs to paint a gripping portrait of Europe at its edges — and the struggles that will define its future. [Hardback]
”Brilliantly reported and sharply analysed, Hinterlands shines a light on the disputed on the disputed regions that are on the frontline of great power conflict.' —Gideon Rachman
'A gripping and elegantly written exploration of Europe's little-understood frontiers. Hannah Lucinda Smith reveals why the continent's borderlands matter — and how they are quietly reshaping the future of the continent.' —Peter Frankopan
’An important book which provides a compelling reminder of Europe's half-forgotten border conflicts, each of them capable of erupting once again into war’ —Sam Miller
The Hidden Globe: How wealth hacks the world by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian $28
Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist's riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens' rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had — bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centres where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by foreign governments and multinational corporations — and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids. [Paperback]
”This book did nothing less than make me re-see the world. Original, and very clever.” —Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
”In describing insidiously interconnected global regimes of inequality and injustice, Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.” —Pankaj Mishra
Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks $38
Philip Deval, a soldier recently returned from the beaches of Normandy, arrives in Palestine on a ‘peace-keeping mission’ in the final days of the British Mandate. The Sea of Galilee glitters in the distance as war-weary troops marvel at the novelty of oranges and sun — a paradise that belies a fierce new conflict about to erupt. Some years later, Philip begins work teaching at a school in the English countryside and meets the enigmatic music mistress, Frances Darwood. Over long evenings spent listening to records in her music room, they grow close. But Philip is a changed man, and must confront the secrets and scars of all he has lived through — which threaten, even now, to upend his future. Farewell to Eden is a portrait of an embattled post-war Britain. It asks the question: how, after great suffering, do we retain our humanity, learn to love again, and believe in the promise of a better life? [Paperback]
”A fascinating, timely and densely pleasurable novel, written with measured and impressive intelligence and tremendous narrative aplomb.” —William Boyd
”A beautifully written and deceptively deep novel of moral choice set in the aftermath of the Second World War. The characters are as utterly convincing as the story.” —Antony Beevor
”Faulks is one of the titans of historical fiction and has this gift for really bringing to life the minutiae of the suffering of war and violence. It's a really arresting book and important work of storytelling.” —Afua Hirsch
The Jewish Bakery: Over 100 family recipes from East London’s oldest Jewish bakery by Jennifer Rinkoff $65
From Rinkoffs, a family-run Jewish bakery in London's East End, comes The Jewish Bakery, an exciting selection of their tried-and-tested recipes, all of which bring the joy of the bakery into your kitchen. Ranging from simple treats to more involved recipes, you'll find traditional and celebratory Jewish items, with something for everyone. Try your hand at much-loved specialties, including challah and beigels, as well as more modern creations, like matcha babka and vegan chocolate banana bread. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
This is a selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel $38
2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party. Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong. Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality — and may hold the key to a very different world. Exit Party is an electrifying novel about freedom and surveillance, art and survival, love and loss in a broken world. From the author of Station Eleven. [Paperback]
”Ambitious and captivating, the novel will rightly entrance new readers while gripping Mandel's existing ones. Exit Party feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author's early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven.” —The New York Times
”What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel's imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights. Extraordinary.” —The Guardian
>>Disagreeing on basic reality.
>>Don’t blame Emily St. John Mandel.
>>Seeking joy at the end of the world.
The Star Path by Witi Ihimaera Smiler $35
A young whale searches for the whale rider's heir and a teenager takes an epic voyage to Antarctica with a fleet of waka hourua to claim his lost inheritance, in this breathtaking return to the world of The Whale Rider, over thirty years on. Sixteen-year-old Teva has grown up between worlds. Raised in France, he knows almost nothing of his father's Polynesian heritage — only that a family rift has kept them apart. But when his astonishing talent is discovered by a circus master, Teva's journey leads him across the Pacific and towards a destiny older than memory. Deep within Antarctica's treacherous ice mazes, the royal tribe of Mysticeti whales fears their ancient leader has brought them there to die. Decades earlier, he stranded them on the east coast of Aotearoa. As winter closes in, they must find the whale rider's heir, the only one who can lead their chief back to warmer waters. But nobody knows who that is, let alone where they can be found. Sweeping from France to French Polynesia, Aotearoa and Antarctica, myth and reality, past and present, meet in an unforgettable story of identity, belonging and hope. [Paperback]
>>Get this edition of The Whale Rider.
The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje (translated from Dutch by David McKay) $48
Inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë, this 700-page book — acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century — pulls readers into a narrative that redefines time itself. In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May's only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it's labelled as 'ghastly' and 'immoral'. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own. In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May — both before and after her death — unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister's letters; her biographers' words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later. In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontës themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death. [Paperback]
"The reader advances across Mr. McKay's superb translation as though compelled by a fierce highland wind. In the book's telling, the Drayden sisters' imaginative visions are so powerful that they reshape the way people experience reality. Readers, too, will finish this vast, teeming novel with a sense of a world transformed." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"A sprawling meditation on death, sisterhood, and the mysteries that refuse to be buried. Daanje boldly grapples with unsettling questions, challenging our conception of time and the ways it governs our experience of death and grief. The Song of the Stork and Dromedary stands as another example of Daanje's brilliant storytelling, cementing her status as a writer to watch for years to come." —Chicago Review of Books
>>A gothic puzzle across time.
>>The translator’s passage.
This Dark Night: The life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz $50
Emily Jane Bronte was 27 when she started writing the wayward novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire. Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Lutz reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë's days, bringing us closer to the great and fierce writers, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art. This book has much to reveal to readers of Wuthering Heights, as we accompany Emily Brontë around the wild moorlands she loved so much. Also threaded through with the contemporary politics and events of the era (from the early labour movements of the Chartists and reformists, to the slave uprisings in the colonies), and authors and locals that Emily Brontë read about or knew (from proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the masculine lesbian Anne Lister). Featuring illuminating readings of her poems, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily Brontë's irrepressible spirit and wild imagination. [Hardback]
”Emerald Fennell 's hallucinatory adaptation of Wuthering Heights invited us to consider Emily Bronte in one light; Lutz's painstaking account shows her in quite another. Far from the eccentric, isolated genius , Lutz's Bronte is grounded in her material reality, from everyday household tasks to illness and grief.” —Guardian
”It says much for Lutz's skills as a writer that she succeeds in creating such a seamless and compelling narrative out of her materials. Her insight and sensitivity as a critic, as well her deep knowledge of the sources, allow her to open up the inner life of her famously reclusive subject. The result is a convincing portrait and an impressive achievement.” —Lucasta Miller, The Spectator
Hometown by Shaun Tan $38
You need to know who I am. What I think and how I feel. Then you'll know why I did what I did. Imagine living in a perfect world. You have a loving family, a beautiful home and awesome friends. Everything is just as it should be. Until one day, when a stranger arrives. A stranger who looks just like you. A stranger with a troubling message... From the creator of The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia comes a visually stunning, moving and humorous meditation on all the things that make us who we are and how we choose to live. [Hardback]
'Loved it!! Chockfull of magic!!' —Guillermo Del Toro
'I can't overstate how much Shaun's work has meant for me and my family over the years. And now, his latest is a passionate, clever and inspiring tale about how we choose which family to love. I am so excited to share this one with mine.' —Darren Aronofsky
'Where The Arrival was about leaving home for the strange but hopefully welcoming new world, Hometown is about what makes us what we are—family, friends, environment. A joyful, surprising, marvellous book.' —Kelly Link
'Here is a cornucopia of a world to set beside the densely realised imaginings of Topor or Miyazaki — a many-splendored thing.' —Dave McKean
>>Look inside!
>>Twenty years in the making.
>>Just an ordinary day.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translate from Danish by Martin Aitken) $28
In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who comes to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they perform unchristian acts and can steal people's happiness, cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake. Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe. Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources, such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires. [Now in paperback]
”Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There's nobody else doing quite what she does.” —Samantha Harvey
”I gulped The Wax Child down and dreamed wild dreams about it. Just brilliant.” —Max Porter
”An incantation that explores womanhood, motherhood and bodily autonomy. Martin Aitken's mesmerising, exquisitely precise translation is, literally, breathtaking. To be read in one sitting, on a dark winter's night.” —The Irish Times
>>Holding the skin girdle.
>>Witch trials and wax narrators.
>>Get the hardback!
>>Other books by Olga Ravn.
This Little World: A new history of Tudor and Stuart England by Nandini Das $65
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England Shakespeare's 'scepter'd isle', proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. But beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, lies a more complex and connected reality. England at this time was far from insular. Travelling in and out of the country were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, African innkeepers and Native American envoys. There were people like the Flemish artist Levina Teerlinc, probably the only painter to be employed by four English monarchs. There was William Adams, a Kentish navigator who became Japan's first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the colony in Virginia, who battled in the courts for herself and her son. Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life, yet alive to the sweep of history, This Little World offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England's past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making on the cusp of empire told through the traces of those often written out of it. In reframing England's story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental ideas — about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging. [Hardback]
”Contains a wonderful gallery of precisely drawn yet constantly surprising Tudor and Stuart portraits, like an album of perfect Hilliard miniatures that dazzle us with their cosmopolitan attitudes and globalised lives. Taking us from Italian renaissance scholars in Oxford to English Jesuits in Goa via a Kentish samurai in 17th-century Edo, this is a perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic and provincial terms.” —William Dalrymple, Guardian
”Look into the early modern period with Das as your guide and you will find that strangers, as they were called, were everywhere. Das is so immersed in the material that her imagination can take flight. It is unusual for historians to write with contemporary issues so openly at the forefront of their thinking, but Das is no ordinary historian. This Little World is at once an engaging and entirely fresh look at a period that is a foundational part of our national identity and an impassioned examination of our ideas about inclusion and exclusion, belonging and non-belonging, hope and fear. It works because it is rooted in exciting scholarship and lifted by wonderful writing, pulsing with "the restless energy of the in-between space." —Lucy Moore, Spectator
Reason, Carnival and Honour: An anthropology of free speech by Matei Candea $50
What does ‘free speech’ really mean? How does our understanding of it differ around the world? Why does it divide us — and how can we find common ground? What free speech really means is hotly contested. Is it increasingly under attack in our democracies, or is it being weaponised by the powerful? These debates don't just happen in the news: they divide families, strain relationships. This is because, anthropologist Matei Candea shows, arguments about free speech are not just about abstract principles: they question what it means to be a good person, to have empathy and courage. They involve fears for the future and longings for the past — and they demand that you pick a side, right now! In order to move away from the simple binaries of polarised debate, Candea shows us that we need to start counting to three. Deploying the power of thinking anthropologically, Reason, Carnival and Honour outlines three visions of free speech — Reason, or civil rational debate; Carnival, or the right to be outrageous; and Honour, the duty to stand by one's word. Sometimes supporting each other and sometimes at odds, they entail very different understandings of what language is and does, of what it means to be free. Building on years of research and an exploration of anthropological literature from around the globe — from tales of French cartoonists to Egyptian Bedouin women, Finnish talk-show hosts to Tibetan Buddhist monks — Reason, Carnival and Honour reveals a richer landscape of differences, to help us find new alliances and even answers to the question of what it is we're really arguing about. [Hardback]
”A book like no other on free speech, Candea deftly sidesteps polarised debates, bringing an anthropologist's eye to what people really mean and, in doing so, offers fresh, illuminating ways to understand ourselves and one another.” —Alpa Shah
Hīkoi: A Māori alphabet book for little (and not-so-little) activists [and] Toitū by Pania Tahau-Hodegs and Josie Selkirk $29 each
Inspired by the hīkoi in response to the Treaty Principles Bill, this story draws on the words of resilience and resistance that have inspired generations of Māori in the determination for our land, language and right to live as Māori and shape our own destiny. In the story, a koro and his moko join the hīkoi to parliament and remember past actions and activists who marched for justice. In the march, there are many figures from many communities and many walks of life, but they all walk in the same direction, unified in a vision of the future in which people thrive. The words of the story inspire us to be resilient and remind us that we are not alone, and that in coming together we are powerful. Hīkoi introduces Māori words, with the text in English; Toitū is entirely in te reo Māori. [Paperback]
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The Issa Valley by Czesław Miłosz (translated from Polish by Louis Iribarne) $25
'Thomas was born in the village of Gine at that time of year when a ripe apple thumps to the ground during an afternoon lull.' So a boy's life begins in a winding river valley on the Polish-Russian border where time is measured by seasonal rhythms and ancient songs. For Thomas, the ghosts in the forest are as real as the magical water-snakes that live in the Issa; in the village he is entranced by the women with their cinched waists and the men in their long boots. But when he is shown a map, he discovers a kingdom all his own and starts to dream of leaving the valley behind. [Paperback]
”A lyrical account of a rural boyhood, dominated by family, nature and village life. One is constantly aware of being in the hands of a master — of a talent that is original, unhurried, almost serene. He is a remarkable writer.” —Larry McMurty
”An idyll of immense charm and poetic depth. It takes a masterpiece to reveal the sheer unreality of our modern creative modes and poses, and Milosz's novel is such a masterpiece.” —John Bayley, The New York Review of Books
Capitalism and Its Critics: A battle of ideas in the modern world by John Cassidy $40
At a time when we are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability and morality of the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence. John Cassidy adopts a new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system's critics. From eighteenth-century weavers who rebelled against early factory automation to Eric Williams's paradigm-changing work on slavery and capitalism, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, this absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It looks at familiar figures - Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi - from a fresh perspective, but also focuses on many less familiar, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labour union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; and J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics. Blending biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time. [Paperback]
Whether this is the first VOLUME newsletter you have read, whether you have read all 500 over the VOLUME decade, or whether you have joined the VOLUME community somewhere along the way, thank you for being part of what we do! Thank you for your support and for the purchases that make VOLUME possible.
25 September 2026
As it is our 500th newsletter, we have been casting our eye back over the last ten years of reviews. I was intending to review Tīhema Baker’s excellent new novel, One Day A Taniwha, but I’m still a few pages from the end (you can read my review of Turncoat in the meantime, though). My excuse for the unfinished book: emptying my mother’s house. I’ve been sorting, packing and discarding, and cleaning. While looking back at 10 years of reviews, I came across one of my favourites from the ‘Object Lessons’ series – Shipping Container. I was intrigued by this theme for a number of reasons. Firstly, I live in a city with a port; secondly, I had delivered a Pecha Kucha back in 2008 called ‘Cargo’ about the act of making jewellery and shipping it to Amsterdam for an exhibition; thirdly, if you sell goods, you are aware of the movement of these goods; fourthly, I love history and what it tells you about how we change and adapt; fifthly, containers are a designed object that carries all objects; and sixthly, containers can’t help but be considered in a socio-political context. There are probably quite a few other reasons to be fascinated by the shipping container (e.g. the opening and closing mechanisms — and then I start wondering if I could make these on a jewellery scale…) but back to why I am intrigued all over again. This week is the skip week ( after the sorting, and taking-to-op-shops-and-recycling-centre). Many things in the basement have to go. All those dusty workshop materials that might of been handy and are no longer so, the kitset cupboards that were never quite right and abandoned, the worn-out-but-not-thrown-away-because-there-was-still-some-use-in-them appliances, the tools with blunt ends or sharpened so often they no longer are the objects they started as, the off-cuts, the small pieces of pipe, generally had-it things, well used but now not useful. And as I loaded the skip, and looked back at our reviews, I suddenly saw the shipping container and the skip as sister objects. One bringing in goods, the other sending them away. Our consumption, even of objects well-used over time, a marker of something both personal and universal. And then I started to think about the Gulf and the containers stuck at sea, of the shenanigans of rogue players and what does it mean to control the seas, and who benefits from shortages and interruptions, and who suffers? And then, what’s in all those containers? I hope for useful and/or beautiful objects, but I imagine there is a mulitude of cheap, plastic five minute wonders. But the good news is: books continue to come across the seas, sometimes we wait a while but it’s worth it. And now that we are in the season of publishing there will be a flurry of new arrivals to add to our reading piles.
You can read my original Shipping Container review here. And see the wide range of ‘Object Lessons’ series here. And coming up in October, I’ll be talking about books that feature objects on RNZ.
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.
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT by Chloe Aridjis $38
'Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.' —Neel Mukherjee
DIRTY WORK by Nicky Hager $35
An exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right, to use race politics to create division, and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. "I do not care and New Zealanders do not care about this topic." —Christopher Luxon
PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $40
‘The novel’s kaleidoscopic structure combines with its chronological sweep to create a portrait of a community that is at once epic and intimate, precise and universal. At times it has the feel of a dark fairy tale, with elements of magical realism and echoes of Hasidic folk legends; at others, we are unmistakably in the realm of historical reality.’ —Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times
U.X.O. by Brannavan Gnanalingam $30
“Brannavan Gnanalingam has become well known for gripping, occasionally gristly, writing about New Zealand society. From the first page U.X.O. he ups the stakes by writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War. And yet, somehow, the book is a page tuner.” —Murdoch Stephens
LIFE OF M by Rachel Cusk $37
Rachel Cusk’s new novel continues her project of applying stress to the conventions of the novel in order to make fiction reveal truths about life that we are conditioned to avoid. In Life of M a character who observes and writes describes or defines the life of a character who performs and is observed, a film star who finds no more autonomy in the role of herself than she does when she is acting.