Despite it all, there is no shortage of good books. Whether you want to engage more deeply with the world or seek refuge from it, a book opens a door at your fingertips.
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24 April 2024
I read Swimming Studies when it was released in hardback back in 2017. It’s one of those books that stays with you. I enjoy Shapton’s writing and her quirky book projects, and my first discovery was her relationship breakup novel told as an auction. Swimming Studies is a series of essays on swimming, through word and art. Whether it’s the act of swimming, Shapton’s history of competitive swimming, her daily dips, the other swimmers, or descriptions of water, the science of water, the ocean, the pool, each encounter with the act and the world of swimming is intimate and perceptive. There’s the delight of swimming in the essays, alongside immersive layers exploring memory, adolescence, drawing, obsession and solitude. Aside form Shapton’s particular eye, one of the things that lifts this book above others in the ‘swimming book’ genre is the inclusion of artworks — Shapton’s own. There are abstract watercolours of swimming places, the movements of the bodies in the water, and portraits of swimmers. And being Shapton, there are objects (she was one of the authors of Women in Clothes — out of print at the moment but a new edition looking likely in 2027) — her swimsuit collection. And of course, the stories that come with them. Luckily, Swimming Studies is available again as a lovely Daunt Books paperback with french flaps, complete with all the artworks and a new foreword by author Rita Bullwinkel.
Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nestled in a mouthwatering exploration of food, language, history, and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of its cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear.
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
”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.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
Nothing drives an obsession to unsustainable extremes more than the unnameable terror that a more moderate degree of enthusiasm would be overwhelmed by its complementary revulsion. Our so-called cultural artefacts and so-called social institutions are, likewise, mechanisms for privileging one chosen pole of an ambivalence, mechanisms for giving a (usually) positive cast to what we think of as our individual or communal selves. For some individuals, including, seemingly, Leonid Tsypkin and, especially, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (the ostensible subject of Tsypkin’s novel), whatever it is that separates the existential extremes is either exceptionally rigid and brittle or unusually permeable when unattended or in some way unreliable or, possibly, sporadically assailable, which enables, for those individuals, transports both of remarkable insight and of terrible psychological risk. In Tsypkin’s novel, the narrator Tsypkin (or ‘Tsypkin’) is travelling by train from Moscow to Petersburg to visit the Dostoyevsky museum. As he travels, he reads the diary of Dostoyevsky’s young second wife Anna concerning their time spent in Europe, mainly staying in various German towns and suffering, often, from the financial consequences of Fyodor’s gambling addiction (which he had written about in The Gambler and practiced thereafter). Tsypkin’s astounding book, in which each paragraph is a single virtuoso sentence building, often, to hysterical length, dissolves the distinctions between the author (or ‘author’) and his subject, slipping, unnoticed and often within a few clauses, over a century in time and deep into the inner life of Dostoyevsky, revealing the sufferings, tensions and passions that both caused hardship for Dostoyevsky and his wife and enabled Dostoyevsky to write novels of such psychological penetration. The uncommon access that the past has to the present and to cause harm there, what we might call memory, repeatedly damages Dostoyevsky — for instance the humiliations visited upon him during his imprisonment lead him to repeatedly set himself up for humiliations that replay that he had received at the hands of the commandant — but also provide him and us with an intimacy with aspects of human experience that might otherwise be inaccessible. Dostoyevsky’s cycles of enthusiasm and despair are described with great sympathy, both for him and for Anna, and Tsypkin’s unsparing portrayal of the faults of his literary hero produce a suitably ambivalent effect, often within a single sentence, moving at once towards both ridicule and sympathy (readers of Thomas Bernhard will appreciate the mastery here). How is it possible to love another (as Tsypkin loves Dostoyevsky, as Anna loves Fyodor) despite their faults, despite, even, their unforgivable faults? “Why was I so strongly attracted and enticed by the life of this man?” asks Tsypkin, who, like many other Jews, has found that Dostoyevksy and his novels possess a “special attraction” despite Dostoyevsky’s antisemitism. “It strikes me as strange to the point of implausibility that a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this jealous defender of the insulted and the injured … despised me and my kind.” While keeping to biographical fact, Tsypkin has written a novel that provides the sort of psychological insight that is only available through fiction.
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.
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
Who was Gertrude Stein? And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy's latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out about the avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home there and became godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. In Paris, the narrator meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks — about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language — how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. This is a book about how we put ourselves together — an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire, and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself — a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world. [Hardback]
”In one short and sly book after another, Levy writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both.” —Atlantic
”Wonderfully entertaining; a witty scherzo of a ‘fiction’. We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy — this is ‘a fiction’, after all — but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is — odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining — triumphantly proving her wrong.” —Guardian
”Ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but, at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don't need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story. Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve.” —AnOther Magazine
”A boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud. It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original. As Levy's narrator observes of Stein: ‘Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.’ A compelling contemporary fiction.” —The Conversation
>>In search of Gertrude Stein.
>>Why the novel matters.
No Ghosts by Max Lury $40
After being reunited at Annie's memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead — faces, gestures, glances — in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. The friends' journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie's — and the ghosts' — disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Read an extract.
Hell of Solitude: Selected writings by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (translated from Japanese by Ryan Choi) $40
Hell of Solitude presents a varied and eclectic selection of writings by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of the most important and beloved Japanese writers of the twentieth century. Bringing together fiction, poetry, and philosophical prose – much of it appearing in English for the first time here – this collection showcases the range and intensity of Akutagawa’s imagination. Moving from the whimsical and fantastical to the grave and introspective, the pieces reveal a writer of extraordinary clarity and psychological depth. Interwoven throughout are poems from a prolific body of verse, examples of which are sparse in English, alongside ‘Art and Other Things’, a fragmentary essay in which Akutagawa expounds his aesthetic views while drawing on examples from world literature and art. Translated with sensitivity and precision by Ryan Choi, Hell of Solitude offers a vital reintroduction to a writer whose lucidity, irony, and existential unease continue to resonate across cultures and generations. The collection includes a foreword by writer and translator Polly Barton, questioning why it is that Akutagawa’s work isn’t better known among anglophone readers, and celebrating his ambivalent relationship with the traditional practice of story-telling. [Paperback]
“Perhaps what we have, when we are given less of a story than might be expected, when we have an unstorylike story or a desolate poem, is more of ourselves. We have things as they are, our selves as they are, and life as it is, and sometimes that is hell. Nevertheless, Akutagawa shows us that sharing that hell with others can be electric.” —Polly Barton
”One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa’s style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing.” —Haruki Murakami
”The quintessential writer of his era.” —David Peace
”Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in the style, which is always crystal-clear.” —Jorge Luis Borges
”At long last, a new volume of Akutagawa’s writing has been ushered into English by the consummate translator Ryan Choi. He has rendered the master storyteller’s previously unavailable prose pieces and poetry more readable than ever. The exquisite subtlety and inimitable charm of the tales, sketches, and poems in this volume will captivate new readers and scholars alike.” —L. S. Popovich
”For the past decade, Ryan Choi has quietly been doing the heroic work of bringing Akutagawa’s lesser-known writings into English. What we are given in this collection are impressions and observations, anecdotes, philosophical digressions, stories that read like poems that read like dreams remembered the morning after. The writings are restrained, understated, precise and fractured. The surfaces of these texts crackle with the charge of Akutagawa’s inimitable mind. Choi’s translations are a revelation.” —Stephen Mortland
”Choi is Akutagawa’s boldest – and best – translator. Hell of Solitude restores Akutagawa, the most daring architect of modern Japanese literature, to his rightful state: bewildering beauty, a cascade of shifting rhythms and forms, and the penetrating alertness of a truly aesthetic mind. Akutagawa’s soul is here in this book-shaped vessel, waiting to be known.” —Dreux Richard
>>What do we have when we do not have a story?
Ashimpa: The mysterious word by Catarina Sobral $40
One day, a researcher makes an important discovery. A mysterious word buried in an old dictionary: ASHIMPA. Quickly the news spreads. Everyone wants to use the new word, but no one knows what it means or even what part of speech it belongs to. A 137-year-old is certain that it's a verb: people ashimped and would always ashimp. A linguist is convinced it's a noun. Soon there would be people who claimed to have seen live ashimpas — and in colour. "They still exist abroad. They're green!" From renowned Portuguese author and illustrator Catarina Sobral, Ashimpa is the story of language that takes on a life of its own, leading young readers through the hilariously ashimpish life and grammar of a mysterious word. [Hardback]
"A tongue-in-cheek treatise on the elasticity of language, Sobral's latest sparkles with profound wit thanks to a wonderfully bizarre premise. Ashimpishly delicious fun." —Kirkus Reviews
>>Look inside!
The Original by Nell Stevens $40
Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle’s home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls. Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena. After years missing at sea, Grace’s cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live. Deftly-plotted and shimmering with distinctive intelligence, style and wit, The Original is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original. [Hardback]
”What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell herself.” —Olivia Laing
”A delightful, playful puzzle of a novel, and a brilliant twist on the nineteenth century orphan-makes-good story. THE ORIGINAL asks whether, sometimes, faking it is the right thing to do.” —Claire Fuller
”A wonderful novel about identity, creativity, money and belonging. It's so witty and propulsive you will forget how brilliantly constructed it is, this tale that brims with the beauty of art, of how to triumph in a difficult world.” —Jessie Burton
”Intricate, and endlessly intriguing. The reader is kept guessing until the very end; as Stevens deftly raises the stakes, the pages seem to turn themselves. The narrative captivates intellectually, too, probing questions of authenticity, imitation, and self-realisation, in love and in art. The overall effect is of an author boldly stepping out on her own, pursuing themes that were hers all along.” —Observer
>>Written by the light of a lava lamp.
Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin (translated from Russian by Roger and Angela Keys) $28
A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator — Tsypkin is on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything ‘right’. Nothing is invented; everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay, Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and gives an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel. New edition. [Paperback with French flaps]
"A short poetic masterpiece." —New York Review of Books
"Gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving." —The Los Angeles Times
”While keeping to biographical fact, Tsypkin has written a novel that provides the sort of psychological insight that is only available through fiction.” —Thomas
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Loving Dostoyevsky.
Chain of Ideas: Great Replacement Theory and the origins of our authoritarian age by Ibram X. Kendi $45
Throughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies 'great replacement theory', which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities. In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi shows how this conspiracy theory has mutated from the extremist fringe into a global ideology, embraced by leaders as varied as Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. He traces its historic roots in slavery, segregation, colonialism and Nazism, and shows how these age-old prejudices have been dressed in new language for a digital age. But this is not a book about extremists on the margins. From Anders Breivik's massacre to the chants of the Charlottesville marchers, from Brexit slogans to the Christchurch shooting, Kendi shows how these ideas have crossed borders, inspired terror and are now re-shaping parties of government. Chain of Ideas is a penetrating history of how reactionary ideas have been repackaged as common sense, and how they shape the globe today. [Paperback]
>>In twenty years most of the world could be racist dictatorships.
>>A renovation of Nazi ideas.
The Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich $38
”It was as though I was chosen-marked out by the python's kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.” Written over two decades, Erdrich's story collection features a range of characters — a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass; immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged; and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father. Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe — a creative collaboration between mother and daughter. [Paperback]
”One of the greatest American writers.” —Guardian
>>Talking animals and the analogue world.
>>Little travels.
Is a River Alive? A journey with water by Robert Macfarlane $30
An exhilarating exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings who should be recognised as such in imagination and law. The book flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. Macfarlane takes readers on these unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days. Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is the River Alive? is Macfarlane’s most personal and political book to date, reminding us what is vital: the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has. Now in paperback. [Paperback with French flaps]
” A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.” —Elif Shafak
>>’The river is writing me’ — Q&A
>>The Power of Rivers
>>Poetry and Adventure
>>The Rights of Nature
>>Read an extract
>>Can personhood recue a river?
>>Also available in hardback.
Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, tragedy, and history’s greatest Arctic rescue by Buddy Levy $39
In 1908-09, American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, in separate expeditions, both claimed they'd reached the North Pole first, but their claims were seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian Roald Amundsen — who'd made history and a name for himself by being the first to sail through the Northwest Passage and the first man to the South Pole — attempted to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location. However, Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, and launched a major rescue operation. [Paperback]
Te Ahikāroa: Artists and stories of Dunedin Public Art Gallery $70
This stunning book displays Ōtepoti’s Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s significant collection of artworks made either in Aotearoa or overseas, from the Renaissance to the present, and is full of both iconic works and suprises. Te Ahikāroa is the result of collaboration between the Gallery, mana whenua and other writers from around Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. A joint introduction by Director Cam McCracken, alongside Claire Kaahu White, Robert Sullivan and Paulette Tamati-Elliffe creates a foundation that places Kai Tahu values in relation to the journey of the Gallery since its establishment in 1884. Essays by curators Lauren Gutsell and Lucy Hammonds explore the history and vision of the Gallery. Each artwork in the book is brought to life by subject experts, who contribute new perspectives on everything from beloved historic artworks through to recently acquired contemporary works. This publication brings together written contributions from Ruth Buchanan, Komene Cassidy, Gina Cole, Sophie Davis, Edward Ellison, Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds, Rauhina Kohuwai-Banks, Moewai Marsh, Ngahiraka Mason, Sophie Matthiesson, Finn McCahon-Jones, Cam McCracken, Anna McLean, Olivia Meehan, Gerard O'Regan, Hana O'Regan, Joanna Osborne, Bridget Reweti, Anya Samarasinghe, Robert Sullivan, Taarati Taioroa, Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, Claire Kaahu White. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $42
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The cult of Solvej Balle.
>>The Faber edition of this volume is also available, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.
My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden) $45
A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods. With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. [Paperback]
"Djabbarova debuts with a potent portrait of illness and gender oppression in contemporary Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia . . . This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch." —Publishers Weekly
"Essential feminist, anticolonial reading. My Dreadful Body is about power. The power of one nation to colonise another, which is in turn echoed by the power of men to control women. It is about having the power to be in control of one's own body. But it is also about having the power to fight back." —Full Stop
"A woman maps cultural expectations and desires onto her ailing body in Egana Djabbarova's singular novel. An incisive novel, My Dreadful Body celebrates women's agency, mourns physical losses, and rebels against inherited boundaries." —Foreword Reviews
>>Tongue.
>>Silence speaks.
>>Illness as a sometimes-liminal space.
Discipline by Larissa Pham $40
When two people fall apart, who gets to tell their story? Christine is a young writer touring her debut novel — a thinly disguised tale of the affair she had with her professor ten years earlier. He was magnetic, domineering, both the sponsor of her early promise and its destroyer. But he surely forgot her long ago, and the temptation to exorcise her past was overwhelming. Then, between hotel rooms and bookstores, formal dinners and road-trip hook-ups, she receives a series of sly, unsettling emails and finally an invitation to visit the professor's isolated house on an island off the coast of Maine. Against her better judgement, Christine is drawn back into his orbit, risking forever losing control of the narrative she's worked so hard to create. [Hardback]
”Discipline coolly questions the ethics and processes of fiction and art, examining the toll they take both on the practitioner and anyone unlucky enough to be in their orbit” —Financial Times
”A deceptively quiet and beautifully written story, Discipline plays masterfully with issues of consent, memory and artistic licence. It asks its readers to judge which is more real: what actually happened in the past, or how we feel about it in the present.: —Buzz Magazine
”A story of ideas, but it combines deep philosophical inquiry with thriller vibes.” —Crack
>>Protect that pain.
>>Writing toward the void.
>>”I want to lie.”
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec (translated from Fench by David Bellos) $30
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface — What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity — and possibly his sanity — as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed — but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s novella presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968. [Paperback]
”Perec's novels are games, each different. They are played for real stakes and in some cases breathtakingly large ones. As games should be, and as literary games often are not, they are fun.” —Los Angeles Times
>>A one-sentence review.
>>Questioning the quotidian.
False Calm: A journey through the ghost towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff (translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver) $28
With time I have reached the conclusion that, as it is in my personal history, isolation is present in everything I have ever read about Patagonia . . . I returned to write an account of this eminently Patagonian characteristic. I wanted to see the shapes it takes today; I wanted to locate it at its furthest extremes. Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next. Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia's complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld. [Paperback with French flaps]
”An artful, atmospheric, thought-provoking depiction of life between silence and open space.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
”It has a magical quality, an intimate journey, so humane, one that opens the imagination and reminds us of who we have been and what we have, and have lost.” —Philippe Sands
Women Without Men: A novel of modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (a new translation from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh) $40
An internationally acclaimed novel that traces the interwoven destinies of five women — including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher — as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, the novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men. Originally published in Persian in 1989 and banned in Iran ever since, Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Foreword by Shirin Neshat. [Paperback]
”Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
"Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer." —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepoplis
"Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Parsipur continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming, powerful novella." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.
>>An interview with the author and the translator.
>>The book was made into an astounding film by Shirin Neshat.
Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal el-Mohtar $45
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. [Hardback]
"An essential collection of work from one of today's most poignant speculative writers. El-Mohtar creates immersive worlds with beautiful language." —Library Journal
"A collection of 14 stories and four poems that shine both individually and as a whole, while still showcasing El-Mohtar's characteristic lyricism and striking imagery. There's not a false note here." —Publisher's Weekly
>>Womanhood, identity, and fairy tales.
>>There is no art that is separate from politics.
Cello: A journey through silence to sound by Kate Kennedy $30
Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic and ultimately fatal concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world's greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his 'Mara' Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked off Buenos Aires. Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author's reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy's own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello and, crucially, the absence of the cello had meant to some other cellists, past and present. [Paperback]
”This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life.” —Hermione Lee
”Kate Kennedy's quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power.” —Jenny Uglow
>>A different life.
>>Kammersonate.
>>The ’Mara’ Stradivari.
Nocturnal Apparitions by Bruno Schulz (translated from Polish by Stanley Bill) $28
A fantastical collection of short stories by one of the twentieth century's most iconic cult authors. The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical. Contents: August / Visitation / Birds / Cinnamon Shops / The Street of Crocodiles / Cockroaches / The Gale / The Night of the Great Season / The Book / The Age of Genius / My Father Joins the Fire Brigade / The Sanatorium under the Hourglass / Father's Last Escape / Undula. [New paperbback edition]
“One of the the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” —John Updike
”One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
”Schulz redrafts the lines between fantasy and reality.” —Chris Power
”I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life.” —David Grossman
”Bruno Schulz has this weird sense of humour, this tenderness, and at the same time his writing is very complex. Reading him for the first time was something totally unique. That is still what I feel when I read him.“ —Alejandro Zambra
Black Bag by Luke Kennard $38
A penniless out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation. A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane. [Paperback]
”Gleefully absurd, a triumph of deadpan comedy. From his gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life. Kennard is superb at capturing a chaotic interior life. The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters, and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
”Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair — through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other.” —Joe Dunthorne
>>Theories of attraction.
>>Waiting for it to happen.
MEDesque: Everyday recipes with Mediterranean roots by Georgina Hayden $60
”Warmth, boldness, approachability and a general sense that all is good in the world. All this applies to the food in MEDesque. It's joyful, generous and drenched in olive oil.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
”With this wonderful new book Georgie takes us on a dream tour around the Mediterranean and picks up all the best bits so that our meals can be sunnier, happier, easier and infinitely more delicious — what a treat!” —Itamar Srulovich, Honey & Co.
”Irresistible recipes that spark cravings on every page.” —Yasmin Khan
Includes: Lamb, apricot and feta sausage rolls; Gnocchi puttanesca; Spiced lemony roast chicken with crushed baby potatoes; One-pan 'nduja, pepper and three cheese lasagne; Double chocolate pannacotta with cherries; Salted honey butter madeleines. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>All of Hayden’s cookbooks should be on your cookbook shelf.
Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we’ve been reading and recommending. Choose from our new releases bulletin. Read our interview with Lynley Edmeades.
17 April 2026
A Skinful of Shadows is an immensely compelling novel for children and adults alike. Frances Hardinge creates wonderful characters, intriguing plots, and ideas that will stay with you long after you shut the covers. A Skinful of Shadows is set in England in the 1640s, the English Civil War is brewing, Puritans and Catholics are at loggerheads, and so are the King and parliament. In a small village called Popular, Makepeace lives with her mother. Making a piecemeal living from lace-making and odd jobs, they live in a small barren room in the home of her aunt and uncle, barely accepted by them or the village. When her mother dies, Makepeace is sent to the home of the aristocratic Fellmotte family, where she becomes a kitchen skivvy. Makepeace, an illegitimate child, has the Fellmotte gene, one that enables them to possess ghosts. The Fellmottes have dangerous and dark plans for her — ones that will consume her in their obsession to preserve the family line, the Fellmotte power and property. Not everyone is an enemy, though, and she makes plans with her half-brother James to escape Grizehayes. After many failed attempts, the chaos of the Civil War gives them the perfect opportunity to escape. When James lets her down, Makepeace finds herself in an even more precarious situation, but with the help of a bear and her overwhelming desire to survive she begins a journey across England to find a document worth more than gold, a document that will grant her freedom from the Fellmotte family and ensure their fall from grace. Like all good mysteries, there are plenty of turns and forks on the road, and those that help and those that hinder. Yet the more intriguing elements are those that involve the ghosts or the souls that are possessed, some of which are malevolent, others helpful. Makepeace is an excellent heroine and her relationship with Bear is endearing. A story about power, possession and purpose.
Sand absorbs water poured upon it just as it absorbs blood spilt upon it and the actions committed upon it. Where does this water, this blood, and where do these actions go? Can they be recovered? How do they return? Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel is comprised of two parts. The first, told in the third person, describes with elegant impassivity and equivalence the actions and movements of an officer in the Israeli army in the Naqab/Negev desert during the 1948/49 Nakba. Although we gain no access to his thoughts (how could we gain access to his thoughts, after all?), we are witness to his obsessive washing routines, his watchfulness for spiders and insects within his hut and his destruction of them, his tending of a festering spider bite on his thigh, his journeys into the surrounding desert either in vehicles with his soldiers, using maps, searching for Arab ‘insurgents’, or alone, on foot around the camp, following the topography. The other soldiers have no reachable dimension other than being soldiers because any such dimensions would be irrelevant. The officer is the only one who speaks, and that hardly at all except for a long lecture expressing the view that the desert is a wasteland that can be made fertile when cleansed of its current inhabitants. As the rituals of army life are repeated and repeated, the tension builds beneath the narrative. The soldiers come across a group of unarmed Bedouin at an oasis and kill them and their camels, taking a dog and a young woman back to the camp. Their mistreatment of her, culminating in gang rape and later her murder and burial near the camp, can be felt in the narrative long before they occur. The howling dog witness shifts the first section of the book to the second, where a howling dog keeps the first-person narrator awake at night in her house in contemporary Ramallah. She has become obsessed with the fate of the young woman, which she has read about in a newspaper article, and by “the conviction that I can uncover details about the rape and murder as the girl experienced it, not relying on what the soldiers who committed it disclosed.” What happens to those who have no agency in their own story? The narrator cannot accept that the young woman is “a nobody who will forever remain a nobody whose voice nobody will hear,” and, with a borrowed ID, which will help her to enter different areas, and a rented car, one weekend she sets out to see if she can find out more. She takes a pile of maps: the official Israeli maps that show the roads, checkpoints, settlements and army zones in the Negev but do not mark even still-existing Palestinian settlements, and maps of the Naqab before 1948, which give information possibly relevant to her search. Maps are a way in which power imprints itself on territory, and Shibli spends a great deal of careful attention in both parts of the novel to the movements of her main characters over the land, contrasting the movement associated with maps with that concerned with and guided by the terrain. These different ways of moving have, for each of them, quite different results. The movements of the officer in the first section imprints power upon a territory, a pattern traced by the woman in the second section over land that holds the trace of violence in itself. The past is never left behind though it can never be recovered, either. In the first part, the officer has complete ease of movement, heading wherever he wishes, inside or out; in the second part the narrator has her movement checked and restricted wherever she goes (until she reaches the Naqab). “The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences,” she notes, waiting at the checkpoints in the wall that divides the territory. “There are some who consider focusing on minor details as the only way to arrive at the truth, and therefore proof of its existence, to reconstruct an incident one has never witnessed simply by noticing little details that everyone else finds to be insignificant,” she says, as a reason for her search. This may be true, but if such minor details exist their significance may also be unrecognised by the searcher. In the military museum that she visits, the only ‘evidence’ is the soap, the jerricans, the uniforms, the vehicles and the weapons mentioned in the first part. Intention leaves no residue. Also these objects constitute the majority of the soldiers’ experience of that day, given how little the woman meant to them. Part of the narrator’s and Shibli’s project is to uncover the particular from the general, the experience from the history. Although both she and the author bewail injustice, the narrator shows no enmity towards any of the people she meets, all are treated with sympathy; harm arises only from structures of power. Power withdraws the evidence of its actions, hides its victims, disappears into the understructure of everyday life. There is no residue unless the land holds a residue. The second half of the book is lightly told, in keeping with the personality of its narrator, and often funny (she describes a film rewinding in a museum and the settlers dismantling their houses). She visits the settlement with the name of the place where the crime occurred and learns that the actual place is no there but near by, she visits the place and finds nothing of interest, she walks through the surrounding plantations where the desert has been made fertile, but is frightened back by a dog. “I am here in vain,” she says. “I haven’t found anything I’ve been looking for, and this journey hasn’t added anything to what I knew about the incident when I started out.” Reluctant to return to Ramallah, she drives back and forth in the desert, gives a ride to an old woman, and then decides to follow her through a military zone, where she comes across an oasis. The land has drawn her to the core of her quest, but she has no way of recognising it as such, and she does not expect that her quest will be, still unknowingly, fulfilled in the last sentence of the book.
This superbly well written novel is comprised of two reflecting parts: the first narrating the fate of a young woman abducted by soldiers during the 1948/49 Nakba; the second telling of a contemporary woman's obsession with finding out more about this 'minor detail' of history. Shibli is interested in how the past remains in and shapes the present, and in how mechanisms of power harm both the wielders and the victims of that power.
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On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $33
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The New Directions edition of this volume is due later this week, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.
The Way to Colonos: Sophocles retold by Kay Cicellis $38
First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone — a stylish woman in her thirties —wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II. As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work-written in English, her second language, offers particularly "shocking insight into the secret lives of young women" and is only now "free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes. … The book is written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master." [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Myths of meaning.
The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis $38
A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality. Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina's son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it's not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered. [Hardback]
”Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.” —Neel Mukherjee
”Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that casts out a multitude of unforgettable scenes, while shining a steady granular light on the hidden depths of the human psyche.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”In the world The Shadow of the Object brings to light — now sharply focused, now only uncertainly defined — Chloe Aridjis patiently layers signs and symbols into a resonant network. A beautiful, eerie, grief-haunted novel.” —Chris Power
”With The Shadow of the Object Aridjis cements her status as the laureate of the peripatetic — of all that's serendipitous, strange, improbable and, for these very reasons, true.” —Tom McCarthy
”The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka's.” —Zadie Smith
”A subtle and courageous writer.” —Ali Smith
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle $30
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a collection of prose poems that invites the reader to consider the relationships between internalised beliefs and the development of illness, drawing on psychology texts and the language of self-help, and the exploration of character traits and dramatic tropes. What are the appropriate emotions. Even with a map, it was difficult to determine. An ache which means let go. If she didn't have the thought, she wouldn't have the feeling. Wheels fall off to create drama. Through shifting frames of reference, wordplay, aphorism, and inversions, the poems reform, unfold and rebound to create a collage of melancholy and comic transformations. One thing leads to a mother. Butcher-McGunnigle's poems explore the relationship between unexamined subconscious thinking and physical and mental health, resisting singular, fixed meanings and inviting the reader to reflect on their own experiences. [Paperback]
"These poems are compressed and layered like paper folded to its tightest square. Here is an exquisite restraint that feels almost brutal, that always manages to surprise. This book has a rare force." — Sholto Buck
"Butcher-McGunnigle transforms malady into force; a leaf in a whirlwind, splitting memory from frame…this collection forms a prelude to her stunning body of work." —Autumn Royal
"Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a prequel to Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s catalogue, one that enriches all you’ve read from her before. Bleakness and a light touch. It all comes back. I read it in one sitting and it felt like being spelled." —Hollen Singleton
”Butcher-McGunnigle’s work is fulll of moments that, to me, are perfect — consummately whole, exactly right, every element in glowering harmony, as densely fixed as a neutron star." —Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Sydney Review of Books
"Butcher-McGunnigle is compulsively readable, hilarious, wonderful — a master of the whiplash turn, the dark plunge." —Ashleigh Young
>>Read an excerpt.
>>About the writing of this book.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.
Autobiography of a Marguerite by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle $33
We are made up of stories, but which ones belong to us? What are the boundaries between our bodies and the outside world? Autobiography of a Marguerite is a profound, book-length poetic work about chronic illness, family dysfunction, and identity, and how they can shape one another. The narrator struggles with the effects of her autoimmune illness, and struggles to separate herself from her troubled mother. A doctor tells the narrator that there is 'no cause and no cure' to her ailment, but the book attempts to explore how familial environments might contribute to the development of ill health. Butcher-McGunnigle's experimentation with form overlapping voices, footnotes, fragments, found text and photographs illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self, the repressed grief of chronic illness and its disruptive effect on the sufferer's sense of time's passage. The poems make visible the often-hidden experience of disability, and the reader becomes both a witness and an actor, piecing together a narrative that challenges what an autobiography can be. New edition. [Paperback]
"Recursive, clear-eyed and flatly funny, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle captures here all the strangeness, fragility and wry sufferings of a young life." —Jessica Au
"Like nothing else you’ll encounter. A meditation on pain and illness made strange by close proximity, a child and parent leaking into each other. Butcher-McGunnigle has developed a brand new way of creating story to make this stunning work possible." —Pip Adam
”One of the most innovative New Zealand books published in recent years.” —Siobhan Harvey, Booknotes
”Astonishing. This poetry is unlike anything I have seen.” —Paula Green
”A grand achievement. The writing goes to the aching heart of disconnection and of longing for repair. Butcher-McGunnigle has created a crooked beauty out of shards.” —Sue Wootton, Takahe
>>Read an excerpt.
>>A note from the author about the book.
A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the radical history of mothering by Elinor Cleghorn $40
Mothers make history. Yet for centuries, patriarchal control of motherhood has relegated acts of growing, birthing, nurturing and loving children to the sidelines, deeming the work of mothering to be unworthy of historical enquiry. In A Woman's Work, Elinor Cleghorn retells the story of motherhood, showcasing the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, and community leaders who have shaped the course of history. These inspiring figures include Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval nun and mystic with pioneering views about the maternal body; Mary Wollstonecraft, who laid the intellectual groundwork to release motherhood from male control; and Sojourner Truth, who drew attention to the abhorrent treatment of mothers under chattel slavery. Beginning in the ancient world, we learn how each era constructed its own idealised notion of motherhood — from the misogynistic dogma of the early church and the stigmatisation of single mothers in 17th century England, all the way through to the post-war myth of the perfectly contented housewife. But we also learn how mothers of all classes and circumstances fought back, and lobbied to be valued, respected and supported — not as reproductive vessels, but as people. From the author of Unwell Women, A Woman's Work is a bold and radical new history of mothering, and a timely reminder that the fight for reproductive justice is far from over. [Paperback]
>>The horrors persist.
>>Women aren’t the solution to an aging population.
Sororicidal by Edwina Preston $38
A punk-gothic historical novel in which sisterhood is the defining experience of two women's lives — and also the potential death of them. Well-born Mary and Margot are raised on a vineyard estate above Adelaide in the early years of the last century. Mary, brilliant and beautiful, dazzles all as her quiet, serious sister trails in her shadow. But Mary's high-handed malice finds a match in Margot's growing resentment at mistreatment; her revenge will be served at absolute zero. Set against a backdrop of privilege and propriety — and unfolding in an era of global conflict and radical new ideas about art and female agency — Sororicidal is an account of Edwardian-era sisterly love that mutates into a very modern tale of rivalry and betrayal. The polite cruelty of their childhood games becomes adult battles where the endgame is to split the nuclear family, releasing utter devastation. Sororicidal is the story of womanhood across a convulsive century — and the ordinary lives of two sisters who remain inextricably linked across a lifetime: as mirrors, rivals, and executioners of one another's dreams. It is a novel about the necessary and unendurable entanglements of family; the thin, volatile line between care and spite; and how love is a flame that both feeds and consumes. [Paperback]
Small Comfort by Ia Genberg (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $28
Intricately built and wickedly humorous, this is a novel in five parts, all about one thing: money. From an interview with a child star turned thief to the mysterious death of an employee at a drug manufacturer — or the couple feigning married bliss to keep their inheritance, Small Comfort carefully unravels the value we place on both money and people. What does it really mean to be in debt to someone? How does our financial worth permeate the ways we think and feel? And what do we lose when we supposedly win? Small Comfort skewers its characters, slyly implicating the reader along the way. [Paperback]
”Money makes the world go round and Ia Genberg has a deep, clear-eyed vision of how. The dramatic distinctness of the five stories that make up Small Comfort speaks to the might of Genberg's imaginative powers, while the intricate threads tying them together are testament to her subtleness as a thinker. It couldn't work without Kira Josefsson's staggeringly flexible translation, which also stands out for the naturalness of its dialogue and wonderfully rhythmic prose. This duo's writing zings and smarts in all the right places as we see ourselves reflected in the characters, warts and all. Breathtakingly original, profound but with a delicious dose of irreverence.” —2026 International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>Read an extract.
>>Not the way it was planned.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio) $38
Hana has nothing but she's hopeful. She's fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears. Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana's dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that caters to hostesses and their marks, small-time crooks, men with low morals and deep pockets, and anyone down on their luck. Suddenly Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible. But in the seedy streets of Setagaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana's hope, her optimism, and her drive, will be tested to the limit. Twenty years later, Kimiko is on trial. Now Hana must wrestle with her own actions, and face their devastating consequences. [Paperback]
”I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami.” —Haruki Murakami
”Mieko Kawakami is a genius.” —Naoise Dolan
>>Sisterhood, survival, and finding hope in the darkness.”
The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín $32
In the stories collected in The News from Dublin Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home. A woman in Galway hears of the death of her son in the First World War. An Irishman seeks anonymity in Barcelona, haunted by crimes he has committed. A man goes to Dublin from Enniscorthy to implore the Minister for Health for a special favour. A young woman is pregnant during the Spanish Civil War. An undocumented worker finds himself living an illegal life and must leave San Francisco, and his child, after thirty years in America. Three sisters who have been living in Argentina decide to return to Catalonia. [Paperback]
”Tóibín is the consummate cartographer of the private self, summoning with restrained acuity (and a delicious streak of sly humour) the thoughts his characters struggle to find words for.” —Clare Clark, Guardian
>>A complex business.
>>How evil is tolerated.
The Last Witch on the Knock by Aimée MacDonald $38
”Wouldn't you rather be a witch than a victim? I didn't realise those were my only options.” In need of a fresh start, Thomasin leaves her toxic boyfriend, absent father and empty friendships to spend the summer in the Scottish Highlands with her eccentric Aunt Agnes and stern little cousin, Nina. But amidst the sprawling fields and ragged hills thrums a secret that has cursed the land for generations. 300 years earlier, Kate McNiven labours in The Big House by the Knock hill, wishing for a brighter future far away from the lecherous clutches of her master, the Laird. When she is exiled as a witch for refusing to succumb to his advances, Kate finds the escape she so desperately seeks in Thomasin, whose vulnerable body becomes her unwilling host. In the thin place between centuries, through a pulsing wound that bleeds out history, the truth of the past is finally ready to be revealed. [Paperback]
”Tense, harsh and haunting, The Last Witch on the Knock explores toxic relationships in myriad ways. Through a blend of body horror and poetic insight, Aimee creates a compelling tale.” —Lynsey May
”A lyrical exploration of identity and shared trauma, reminding readers of the power of folk. MacDonald's writing is unflinchingly visceral.” —Amy Twigg
”Mesmeric from the first page. A twisting, haunting tale where the present thrums with the bloody heartbeat of the past. MacDonald's prose is poetic and sharp.” —Lucy Steeds
”The Last Witch on the Knock does witches differently; here, a feral, intimate honesty lights the pyres.” —Charlotte Tierney
Read our 476th newsletter.
10 April 2026
From the rusting hulks of the industrial era, from China to America, from the bodily functions of blood to the philosophical musings on the allegories of nature and man, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Rust in the 'Object Lessons' series is a fascinating exploration of this chemical process. Fittingly introducing us to his subject through the most obvious - and what comes to mind immediately (for me at least) when we consider rust - Rabaté describes industrial wastelands and the slow decay of iron as it oxidises creating layers of rust. In a country where corrugated iron and steel infrastructure is synonymous with growth and decline, construction and patched sheds, placing ourselves in the world of the American Dust Bowl or the industrial decline of China or the agricultural wastelands of Australia is more a matter of scale than of foreign territory. In these discussions of rust, Rabaté draws on cultural references in literature and film: Paul Hertneky’s memoir Rust Belt Boy, Wang Bing’s documentary Rust, and an Australian novel by Paddy O'Reilly, The Fine Colour of Rust. Where the reader starts with the idea of decay and decline, Rabaté's analysis moves us to see rust also as a saviour, a surprising and not always negative keeper of time. Using the same method, the conversation moves towards the metaphoric, and here again texts illustrate the author’s thinking. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K is explored as a metaphor for renewal and the land giving, through its richness in iron, a plentiful supply of vegetables — the one the main character is most enamoured of being the red-orange (rust-coloured) pumpkin. As we are drawn into this examination of the notion of rust, oxidation, iron — the ideas of nature in flux — the text moves into deeper discussions of the works of several philosophers: Hegel and Ruskin each have chapters devoted to them, lovingly entitled 'Hegel and the Restlessness of Rust' and 'Ruskin: Nothing Blushes like Rust'. These are thoughtful, lively and witty explorations worth re-reading. Alongside these more academic musings are anecdotal tales from the author’s childhood - his pet turtle features with her rust coloured shell, as does his anaemia and the prescribed medicine of fresh horse’s blood. Another writer explored in response to the ideas of rust and decay is Kafka, and his story ‘Jackals and Arabs’, which features rusty scissors and is also an allegory for his views on the politics and machinations of Zionism and its effect upon the Arab communities of Palestine. In the final parts of the book Rabaté extends the conversation of rust to imperfection, to the flaw that makes an object exquisite — the mark of time, nature and artist — in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, in the sculptural works of monuments purposely made to alter over time through oxidisation, and in architecture that allows the metal to record time on its facades. The concluding chapter introduces the hopefulness of rust - the discovery of ‘green rust’, an ecological tool that can clean iron-heavy waters and that may lead to technology that will break down waste. Rust is ‘infinitely restless’ in all its guises — physically, emotionally and intellectually — and Rabaté’s musings are infinitely provocative with their eclectic amalgams. Another excellent addition to the 'Object Lessons' series.
“Fact is to me a hindrance to memory,” writes the narrator in this remarkable collage of passages evoking the ways in which past experiences have impressed themselves indelibly upon her. The sleepless nights of the title are not so much those of the narrator’s youth, though these are either well documented or implied and so the title is not not about them, but those of her present life, supposedly as “a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home”, waking in the night “to address myself to B. and D. and C.— those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to through the night.” As if the narrator is a projection of the author herself, cast forward upon some distorting screen, the ten parts of the book make no distinction between verifiable biographical facts and the efflorescence of stories that arise in the author’s mind as supplementary to those facts, or in substitution for them. Elizabeth the narrator seems almost aware of the precarity of her role, and of her identity as distinct from but overlapping that of the author: “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.” Hardwick writes mind-woundingly beautiful sentences, many-commaed, building ecstatically, at once patient and careening, towards a point at which pain and beauty, memory and invention, self and other are indistinguishable. Spanning over fifty years, the book, the exquisite narrowness of focus of which is kept immediate by the exclusion of summary, frame or context, records the marks remaining upon the narrator of those persons, events or situations from her past that have not yet been replaced, or not yet been able to be replaced, by the ersatz experiences of stories about those persons, events and situations. “My father…is out, because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded.” Hardwick and her narrator are aware that one of the functions of stories is to replace and vitiate experience (“It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction”), and she/she writes effectively in opposition to this function. Observation brings the narrator too close to what she observes, she becomes those things, is marked by them, passes these marks on to us in sentences full of surprising particularity, resisting the pull towards generalisation, the gravitational pull of cliches, the lazy engines of bad fiction. Many of Hardwick’s passages are unforgettable for an uncomfortable vividness of description—in other words, of awareness—accompanied by a slight consequent irritation, for how else can she—or we—react to such uninvited intensity of experience? Is she, by writing it, defending herself from, for example, her overwhelming awareness of the awful men who share her carriage in the Canadian train journey related in the first part, is she mercilessly inflicting this experience upon us, knowing it will mark us just as surely as if we had had the experience ourselves, or is there a way in which razor-sharp, well-wielded words enable both writer and reader to at once both recognise and somehow overcome the awfulness of others (Rachel Cusk here springs to mind in comparison)? In relating the lives of people encountered in the course of her life, the narrator often withdraws to a position of uncertain agency within the narration, an observatory distance, but surprises us by popping up from time to time when forgotten, sometimes as part of a ‘we’ of uncertain composition, uncertain, that is, as to whether it includes a historic ‘you’ that has been addressed by the whole composition without our realising, or whether the other part of we is a third person, indicating, perhaps, that the narrator has been addressing us remotely all along, after all. All this is secondary, however, to the sentences that enter us like needles: “The present summer now. One too many with the gulls, the cry of small boats on the strain, the soiled sea, the sick calm.”
Written in beautiful, surprising, vegetal prose as if written by the rainforest in which it is set rather than by a human hand, this novel incants to life Antonio de Erauso, a real figure from the Spanish conquest of South America, a trans man disgusted with religion and authority, hiding in the jungle with two Guarani girls he has rescued from slavery. Only in the jungle, where the categories imposed by human understanding are in flux, can transformation and liberation be effected.
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Night, Ma by Elizabeth Knox $40
For three and a half years, calamities hit Elizabeth Knox and family in rapid succession. Her sister suffered a psychotic break and was hospitalised against her will, her husband’s brother died by violence, and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. In time, she was able to write about it. Night, Ma is a book about the net of family which people are held by, but also slip through. About the actual daily work of love; the physical and cognitive work love requires. Knox is a gifted storyteller who has given us other worlds; now she invites us into her own. With characteristic generosity and transcendence, she guides us through time, illness, loss, and the loneliness of unutterable experiences. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Absolutely brilliant. This radiant, radically honest memoir pulls the pin on a sequence of domestic grenades, from the perils of semi-feral childhood to a cruelly compacted series of family crises that, like shock waves, sweep all before. Armed with inimitable wit, the consolation of cats and a forensic gaze that spares no one, least of all herself, Knox interrogates the act of caring; the ties that burn and bind, that we somehow survive.” —Diana Wichtel
”An unforgettable record of love and pain, as wide and deep as the ocean and as mighty. There is such life in this, such wit and goodness. Telling the truth of how we are, all of us, trembling on the edge of a great and terrible mystery.” —Noelle McCarthy
>>Never letting up.
>>Workshopping.
>>The film that laid an egg.
>>The closely noticed husband.
The Clean: In the dreamlife you need a rubber soul by Richard Langston $50
In 1978 in Dunedin the Kilgour brothers, Hamish and David, and their schoolfriend Peter Gutteridge, got together to form a band called The Clean. When Robert Scott joined in 1980 the band found a combination that endured for nearly forty years. The Clean profoundly changed alternative music: hitting the New Zealand charts for months with a single made for $50, 'Tally Ho!'; helping establish Flying Nun and a music scene independent of the big labels; pioneering a low-fi, do-it-yourself approach to rock music; and touring internationally to influence bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. Raw and immediate, this is the story as told by members of The Clean and their inner circle - fellow musicians such as Chris Knox, Martin Phillipps, Graeme Downes and Ira Kaplan, friends and family, pub promoters and sound engineers, and their good friend, Richard Langston. From teenagers in a Dunedin practice room to New York City on 9/11 - this is the band's history as it unfolds. A remarkable piece of multivocal oral history, bursting with images both familiar and surprising. [Flexibound]
”Much needed and long overdue. … A book that tells the story of the band at the heart of New Zealand underground music and that became synonymous with things like Flying Nun Records and the "Dunedin Sound" that travelled around the world. It is written by the ideal author who was not only there when it all happened, but who also recognised why it really mattered more than most.” —Matthew Goody, author of Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988
”In 1980 The Clean blew my mind open at Coronation Hall on a Sunday afternoon. I stood adrift on a sea of wooden floorboards, drinking classic clanging brilliant amp sound, guitar notes shimmering all around me like scattered metal hail . . . All I knew was that this was where all music came from.” —Alastair Galbraith
>>Look inside.
>>Anything could happen.
>>Getting older.
>>Obscurity blues.
Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne $42
Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly... Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her. [Paperback]
”Ghost Driver devises a new genre of administrative horror: by turns addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar. Malory's inner and outer worlds, like the novel's prose, feel agonisingly poised on a knife edge - gothic in the cruellest, off-kilter sense. I am obsessed.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Nell Osborne is a genius. Ghost Driver is brilliant and hilarious and dark and true. I loved it.” —Sarah Bernstien
>>Every wrong turn.
>>Getting evil freely.
>>A tapestry of humiliation.
Spit by David Brennan $38
Welcome to the village of Spit, where Danny Mulcahy is losing the run of himself, and where, as he and his friends dream of escaping, an unexpected death sets the rumour mill into motion. Suffering an unexplained, perpetual banishment the Spook of Spit is watching everyone and everything - nothing goes unnoticed. Bearing witness to the village's half-truths and suppressed secrets, fragments of its own dark and obscured history are unveiled. As events spiral out of control, the past, present and future are set to collide. Can there be redemption for past deeds? How do you escape when you are fated to remain? What does it take to break free from the confines of Spit? [Paperback]
”There are whispers of Synge and Kevin Barry but Brennan has a full-throated and thrilling voice of his own. Spit gets hold of you and won't let you go.” —Estelle Birdy, The Irish Independent
”Crackling with dark humour and incantatory force, every line pulses with linguistic relish.” —The Irish Times
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen $30
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar. Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise. From the author of Dropbear, winner of the 2022 Stella Prize. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Stella Prize.
”Rageful, desireful, artful, sorrowful, hauntful. A blaze of a book.” —Michelle de Kretser
”Evelyn Araluen's poetry and prose is created with a passionate intensity, razor-sharp intellect, beauty and compassion as she turns her mind to the broad sweep of history and a dynamic engagement with the spirit of our times.” —Alexis Wright"
”Blistering, brilliant, lacerating, wry, elegiac, The Rot is a hymn to girlhood, to resistance, to solidarity. Araluen is a masterful stylist, braiding air-fryer abjectioncore with bathtub meditations on the machinery of colonialism — and the whiplash and fury of witnessing and protesting genocide in the digital age. For all its allusions to mould and decay, The Rot is exhilarating in its defiance and staunchness.” —Jennifer Down
>>Dissecting the rot.
>>Poetry, rage, and the power of not surrendering.
>>”I wrote The Rot.”
Three Stories of Forgetting by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (translated from Portuguese by Alison Entrekin) $35
Three men haunt these pages. Perhaps they are tormented ghosts who cannot find rest. All three have been expelled in some way, sent on solitary journeys into the night. Celestino, an old slave trader, returns to the solitude of his home and garden after a life of horrors. Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan who served on the Portuguese side in the Colonial War and has become a valet in Lisbon, writes endlessly to his daughter, asking for her forgiveness. And Bruma, an enslaved man, initiates a young writer, Eça de Queirós, into the world of literature. In discrete yet overlapping tales, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Three Stories of Forgetting explores the experiences of those who live within the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese Empire. In these unstable chapters, we find incarnations of our despair at the questions that history does not answer, and allegories that may yet reveal new ways of seeing through the dark. [Paperback]
"A brilliant, yet understated, critique of a past that Portugal most likely hopes to forget. Lyrical, enigmatic, and subtle: an accomplished work." —Kirkus Reviews
>>What the garden remembers.
>>600 years of colonialism.
>>Co-creatoirs.
The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson $48
The Wayfinder is an epic, sweeping novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu’i Tonga Empire. At its heart is Korero, a young girl chosen to save her people from the brink of starvation. Her quest takes her from her remote island home on a daring seafaring journey across a vast ocean empire built on power, consumption, and bloodshed. With the grandeur of Wolf Hall, Shogun, and War and Peace, The Wayfinder immerses readers in a world untouched by Western influence, evoking the lost art of oral storytelling. Far from a conventional swashbuckling adventure, it conjures a world of outrigger canoes and celestial navigation, weaving a narrative that is as much about survival and self-discovery as it is about the sweeping history of the Tongan people. In this monumental literary work, Adam Johnson explores themes of indigeneity, ecological balance, and the resilience of humanity in the face of scarcity, marking the novel as a meditation on both individual and cultural legacy. [Paperback]
"Novels are long divorced from the oral tradition; few are designed to last beyond their reading. But some books — Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), for instance, or Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (1985) — continue to be passed down, like legends. Predicting posterity is impossible, but The Wayfinder is this kind of work, modern and mythological. It is good enough, wondrous enough, to endure." —The Wall Street Journal
"An epic that feels less created than unearthed, Johnson's dizzying attention to the mercurial crosscurrents of conquest recalls Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. His bold melding of magic and psychological realism casts a spell as captivating as Marlon James's Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Yet The Wayfinder is sui generis — a tapestry of South Pacific myth, archetypal quest, political allegory, environmental jeremiad and feminist revision that feels both ancient and impossibly relevant." —The Washington Post
>>Celestial navigation.
>>A very real experience.
The Raven’s Eye Rebellion by Calire Mabey $25
When Getwin, Lea and Buckle — with the help of Sharp the raven — unearth the trickster Book of Blacke, they embark on a quest to undo the controls on their world, seeking justice for the Scribes who are forced to work and for those who have never been allowed to read or write. The city of Wyle comes alive with danger and intrigue as our heroes contend with the secrets of the Scholars Library, a magical boat, curious creatures, a secret reading and writing society, sleeping trees and the twists and turns of the ancient city. Can the friends stay safe? Will they be able to free the Scribes? Will Getwin's family ever be reunited? This sequel to award-winning The Raven's Eye Runaways is rich with wonder and a thirst for justice. [Paperback]
”Sparky and spooky, humorous and luminous.” —Elizabeth Knox
Kin by Tayari Jones $38
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother's death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life. A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South. From the author of An American Marriage. [Paperback]
"Tayari Jones's great subject is family loyalty. Kin alternates with metronomic precision between her main characters' first-person narratives. Loyalties and fortitude are repeatedly tested in this immersive drama. Resilience abounds." —The Wall Street Journal
"Jones's dazzling novel traces the complex range of the Black experience — rich and poor, queer and straight, blessed and cursed — in the Jim Crow South." —People
"One of the many pleasures of Kin is how deftly Jones builds the story within the context of the Jim Crow South in mid-twentieth century America. Another novelist might have made these broad social concerns the focus of the story, but Jones foregrounds her characters and lets them navigate these national tensions as naturally and confidently as they move through the streets of Atlanta and Memphis." —Ron Charles
Lost Wonders: 10 tales of extinction from the 21st century by Tom Lathan $28
Lost Wonders is a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth. From giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies, Tom Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime. Drawing on the personal recollections of the people who studied these species, as well as those who tried but ultimately failed to save them, Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world. It is also an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp. Most of the species considered in this interesting book were unique to isolated locations in the Pacific. [Paperback]
”Lathan's superb storytelling makes ecological crisis personal, local and often scarily visible. He doesn't let the tragedy hide, as it usually does, behind graphs and abstractions. Yet there's hope here too, in spades. This is an exhilarating and vital book.” —Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild
”A beautifully crafted elegy for the lost species of our age. In repopulating the world with extinct snails, lizards, bats and rats, Tom Lathan makes us marvel and care almost as much as the conservationists who tried and failed to save them.” —Kate Teltscher
The Only Way Is Up: On foot to Rome by Jennifer Andrewes $38
Setting out from Canterbury and walking some 2400 km to Rome along the Via Francigena, Jennifer Andrewes undertakes a personal journey across England, France, Switzerland and Italy. What begins as a physical journey soon becomes something deeper: an exploration of momentum, mindset, and the quiet power of putting one foot in front of the other when the way ahead is uncertain. Structured as a series of daily stages, the book follows the rhythms of pilgrimage life — early starts, long days on the road, chance encounters, moments of solitude, and the simple rituals that sustain a walker: coffee stops, conversations, rest, reflection. Along the way, Jennifer meets fellow walkers from around the world, navigates doubt and discomfort, and learns to trust the unfolding path rather than trying to control the outcome. While written through the lens of walking to Rome, The Only Way Is Up speaks to anyone standing at a crossroads. The author’s experience living with Parkinson’s is part of the landscape, but it does not dominate the narrative. [Paperback]
”'I have not walked the Via Francigena, but I recognise much in Jennifer's account from my own journeys on foot. Walking has always given me clarity, perspective and a steadier sense of leadership and decision-making. This book captures that rhythm beautifully. With insight and honesty, Jennifer shows how sustained movement builds resilience, momentum, and unexpected connection. A generous, reflective and uplifting account of pilgrimage as a framework for navigating change.” —Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand
>>The power of walking.
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2 April 2026