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16 October 2026
Who are you and who am I? Can one ever be authentic? And what is a person? Thinking about Rachel Cusk’s new novel, if that is what it is, raises more questions then answers. It explores authenticity, fame, and it’s flipside obscurity,. It gives us fine details of place and objects, each chapter starting its progress with an action or an environment which then unleashes a strand of philosophical thought, emotions (in their most calculated way) or unanswered/unanswerable questions: the writer — the I of the novel — assuming we wish to be as observant as them. This ultra-observation is compelling, a puzzle of sorts. What is Cusk doing? Why is she leading me down this path? And yes, I do not know, as I read, where it’s heading. At first, although you find your self adhereing to this structure, you wonder why you keep turning the page. You get the premise: a writer has asked a famous actor if they can write their ‘authobiography’, but it will be fabricated (well, mostly) and the actor, being a ‘good sport’, agrees. In previous Cusk novels, the author has pushed plot and narrative to the edge, one may say pushing these conventions off the cliff. In Life of M, the semblance of character is hang out to dry. This clever analysis of writerly tropes, of the meaning of a writer’s life — poking around into a place within, and observing in a detached manner the world, the people, they know and don’t know — is problematic in a sense, yet we come back for more. Cusk’s choice of an actor as the writer’s muse is ideal for this project. An actor is always being someone else, to the extent that it becomes hard for the watcher to define the ‘real’ self. As it possibly is for us also. Can we know ourselves? The idea of personhood is elusive, and Cusk’s novel cuts to the heart of this dilemma or, for some, escape. Life of M is not all deep philosophy and unaswerable questions, though: it’s also brilliantly funny in that cutting Cuskian way, illuminating the absurd expectations we have of the famous and our fascination with celebrity, and of our idea of personhood. It has the most memorable description of a day spa; makes us yearn for someone to eat the pastries in a meeting room (they will not be touched); and takes us to idyllic settings that can only be invented by power and money. Over and over again, Cusk brings us a seemingly disconnected selection of happenings, curious vignettes, which build a strange rhythm. A rhythm we find difficult to adjust to at first, but one that draws us in until we dancing in the Cuskain way, unsure how we got there but quite pleased we ventured on.
The room in which he had sat, according to L, had been the quietest room in the house, the house being similarly quiet except for the few noises apparently inescapable in even the quietest of houses, the noise of the refrigerator impressing itself most prominently upon him, though to hear the refrigerator from the room in which he sat would only be possible, according to L, if the house was indeed very quiet, quiet both inside and outside, the entire valley being quiet, which it was, he told L, excepting of course those few noises apparently inescapable in even the quietest of valleys, the occasional distant car being most prominent among them, or, when no cars could be heard, the sound of the river, not quite so distant. He had apparently told L. that his obsession with finding quiet had made his hearing remarkably sensitive to the least noise, and at the greatest distance, for it is a property of hearing that it strains to find whatever it wishes most to avoid. If there is even the slightest noise, he said, according to L, I cannot write my review, so I must withdraw from all noise in order to write, I must have quiet. The extreme outward quiet of the house, though, to the extent that it was quiet and to the extent that he was not troubled by the noise of the refrigerator or the occasional distant car or the river, as he had mentioned to L. before, did not bring him the quiet needed to complete, or even to commence, his work, as he had hoped, for the extreme outward quiet revealed to him the extent of his inward disquiet, or whatever is the opposite of quiet, and this he found infinitely more depressing than the lack of external quiet. It is to avoid recognising this inward disquiet that we place ourselves continually in far-from-perfect circumstances, situations of noise, he said to L, for we would do everything to avoid the realisation that the disquiet that prevents our doing what we claim we want to do is an internal disquiet, and not something external that we can use as an excuse for not doing what we claim we want to do but really would rather not do. There is no length to which we will not go, he told L, to avoid what could pass as achievement. The very steps he took, according to L, in order to write the review, were the very steps that made it impossible to write the review, he told L. The review cannot be written but the review still demands to be written, demands that I write it, that I put myself in the best possible circumstances for writing, but the fact that this writing is impossible, that the review cannot be written, even in the best possible circumstances, does not reduce the demand to write, in fact it makes the demand ever more urgent, he told L. This impossibility and this urgency, he told L, are probed to the point of exhaustion, if probing can lead to exhaustion, in The Lime Works, the most nihilistic of Bernhard’s many nihilistic and somewhat nihilistic books. Konrad withdraws to the limeworks, though he would, he told L, write limeworks as one word, he said, though the translator made it two, two English words of Bernhard’s one German word, he observed, though he attached no significance to this observation, to write his great work on the sense of hearing, his life’s work that presses ever more urgently upon him and becomes more impossible to write, if impossibility can come in degrees, he thought not, the work becomes ever less possible to write though it was never possible to write, no better. Konrad experiments ever more strenuously upon his invalid wife, upon her hearing, during their years in the limeworks, according to the informants, mainly Weiser and Fro, who tell the narrator what Konrad and others had told them about Konrad and his wife and the experiments on hearing and the book and the complete hopelessness of their life at the limeworks, the whole book being a complex of hearsay at two to five removes, Konrad’s and his wife’s life at the limeworks that began there as hopeless and had that hopelessness increased, if a lack can be increased, with the worst outcome possible. “Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something,” he told L. that Bernhard had written that his narrator, an insurance salesman, had recorded that Konrad had told Fro, or possibly Weiser, he couldn’t remember and had not noted this down, at least according to L. “Words were made to demean human thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought. Depression derives from words, nothing else.” He could not write the review, he told L, but neither could he not write the review. The lime sets as concrete. It is as Bernhard wrote, he told L, “No head can be saved.”
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
THE BRIDGE by Colm Tóibín $35
”Tóibín’s unsentimental prose is flawlessly matched to the austere worlds of people enduring, in their different ways, lives stripped back to the bone.” —Guardian
DIRTY WORK by Nicky Hager $35
An exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right, to use race politics to create division, and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. "I do not care and New Zealanders do not care about this topic." —Christopher Luxon
POCKET OBSERVOLOGY by Giselle Clarkson $28
This pocket nature guide is a useful tool and fun reminder of how to look at the world around you with care and close observation every day.
THE STARVING BRIDE by Catherine Chidgey $38
Catherine Chidgey’s much-anticipated new novel in set in a near future where suffering is presented as an amausement to distract the populace from mounting disasters, and personal appearance has replaced ethics as a guiding force for action (just like our own times on both counts, actually!).
U.X.O. by Brannavan Gnanalingam $30
“Brannavan Gnanalingam has become well known for gripping, occasionally gristly, writing about New Zealand society. From the first page U.X.O. he ups the stakes by writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War. And yet, somehow, the book is a page tuner.” —Murdoch Stephens
Unfortunately, this book is urgently relevant in many parts of the world at the moment, and increasingly relevant elsewhere. Timothy Snyder's ON TYRANNY: Twenty lessons from the Twentieth Century alerts us to the tell-tale signs of a society shifting away from democracy and towards authoritarianism, and gives us some simple but effective ideas on combatting this. His book, first published in 2017, is a bestseller, has been translated into numerous langages, and continues to be a model guide for thinking and discussion. This graphic edition of this important book is given even greater depth and resonance by the illustrations by Nora Krug. In a year of elections across the world and here, the democractic process is ever more at the forefront of our minds and actions. And at VOLUME, we are doing our bit by offering you a special price on this excellent book. Use the code: DEMOS and recieve a 25% discount. Only while stocks last.
Find out more:
What others say:
‘On Tyranny is a must read, a clear-eyed guidebook... a manual for how to protect and preserve democracy’ – Ken Burns, filmmaker
‘Nora Krug has visualized and rendered some of the most valuable lessons of the 20th century’ – Shepard Fairey, artist and activist
‘Her colorful images here - some drawn and some collaged, including many historical photos and artifacts - add a new layer of complexity, and make the search for understanding in images of the past part of the story’ – New York Times
* Use our website to purchase or simply email us to request your copy at the special price!
Save democracy and save 25%
A selection of books set more or less in academia. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
City Like Water by Dorothy Tse (translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce) $33
The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Though so much has vanished with it — classmates, teachers, counterfeit watches, the erotic toe cleavage that used to lead the way down secret passages — you still catch snatches of conversation lingering in the air and glimpse sun-dazzled residents retreating into dark crevices. But then the disappearances come closer to home. Your mother joins in a housewives' protest over fake lotus roots only to be turned into a glittering bronze statue by the police. Then it's just you and your father at home, until he is quietly absorbed into the enormous new TV gifted by the government, and you spot him picking through leftovers in the background of soap operas. And didn't you once have a little sister, before she flew away in her school uniform? As the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you? Lucid, nightmarish and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own. A dream elegy for the political death of Hong Kong, from the author of Owlish. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Through the vibrancy of his account, Tse binds us to our narrator, even as he remains apathetic to the damage mounting before his eyes. Strip away the magical devices, and the novel describes the loneliness that enfolds and isolates people as popular movements flag, as the gravity disperses, and brighter possible futures are extinguished. In City Like Water, Tse suggests that so long as its citizens conserve the memory of their distinct and irrepressible city, whether in prison or exile, a chink of hope remains.'
—Katherine Waters
'City Like Water is a synecdoche for wider realms of social and political unrest. But by the end of its nineteen chapters, the novella devolves into a twisted tale of mutilated memories and shifting realities in a post-protest, increasingly authoritarian city. In the face of structural censorship, all that remains is the remembrance of things past. Tse knows that memory is ever-rippling, uncapturable, and more inclined to the minor, passive tremors of everyday life than the major events that mark the act of narration.'
—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Words Without Borders
'City Like Water is playful, and it is sinister. Tse blends these moods and twists inside a surreal, hypnotic cityscape, accented by ferocious bursts that will describe — for example — the thud of a falling body using the image of a meteor that bores through the narrator's skull, turns it to coral, and crushes her at the bottom of a black ocean. Tse's piece, short enough to call a novella, is experimental without pause. But its maze of impressionistic anxiety, sensory overload, and random reality shifts are not purely aesthetic. The maze and its terrors are means for insight into a place in time where place and time — and the will to live, the why to live — are becoming unmoored.' —Angus Stewart, Asian Review of Books
'How to describe a city when its very existence is at odds with a dominant narrative? In City Like Water, Dorothy Tse conjures a corroded reality inhabited by strange (and estranged) citizens, seductive illogic and bizarre meals of haunted lotus roots and rice. With shimmering prose — gorgeously rendered by Natascha Bruce — Tse evokes the disquieting collision of revolt, nostalgia and desire.' —Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
The Houseguest, And other stories by Amparo Dávila (translated from Spanish by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris) $44
Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila's stories are terrifying, mesmerising, and expertly crafted — you'll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest you'll wonder how this secret was kept for so long. [Paperback]
"The Houseguest will make you paranoid; you will second guess every shadow and slight movement that catches your eye. Amparo Davila's prose, her psychological awareness, and the beauty of her characters' misery is encompassing. I cannot believe that this is the first that I am experiencing Davila in English." —Nick Buzanski, Book Culture
"Like a dream, Davila's fictional realm is filled with signs and symbols, with hybrid creatures who appear to defy the laws of nature, and with characters who do not act according to logic or reason. Davila has said in interviews that one of her favorite subjects is the mysterious, the unknown, that which is not within our grasp. Her writing is intentionally opaque and allows readers to draw a number of different interpretations; it is this intriguing, elusive quality that has perhaps led to her enduring popularity in Mexico." —The Paris Review
"Each of these stories is equal parts Hitchcock film and razor blade: austere, immaculately crafted, profoundly unsettling, and capable of cutting you. Amparo Davila is Kafka by way of Ogawa, Aira by way of Carrington, Cortazar by way of Somers, and I'm so grateful she's in translation." —Carmen Maria Machado
>>The crying cat.
Ply by Hernan Diaz $38
Centuries from now, an orphan adrift in an American city grows up to become a pincher. Stealing electricity from the grid to power the vibrant downtown music scene she adores is a risky occupation, and the city she moves through can be dangerous. She is right to be wary. But soon, she is drawn into a paranoid maze where her closest friends and even her own identity are put into question — all while following a thread leading to a scientific experiment that could change the fabric of reality itself. Set in a future filled with both uncertainty and promise, Ply is a humane novel that interrogates the role of technology in a deeply changed society. A gripping quest for truth at the dawn of a new historical epoch, it offers us a deep dive into the burden of capitalism, while charting the boundaries of selfhood, and the distance that stands between us and those we love. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust. [Paperback]
”Ply is majestic. A cracked mirror world, a lot like ours; peopled by survivors, a lot like us; sentences so fine they break the skin; a plot that swerves through loss, love, trust, betrayal, art, science, society and control.” —David Mitchell
”Ply, like Trust, is a tricksy novel. It delivers intriguing homilies on technology and ownership that follow on nicely from the themes of Trust. The most compelling thread is the one rooted in physics, which tethers Diaz to the present and launches him towards his most exciting ideas about the future.” —The Times
>>Literature as a linguistic event.
To Tell a Story by John Berger and Susan Sontag (edited by Benoît Bourreau) $28
Despite their status as intellectual giants of the twentieth century, John Berger and Susan Sontag's artistic collaboration — and intense friendship — remains virtually unknown. Published for the first time, To Tell a Story offers a glimpse into their shared history that spanned nearly a quarter-century. From sources such as their eponymous film broadcast, personal letters (several of which are included here in facsimile), and archival recordings, the composite fragments build a portrait of a relationship that was often lively and challenging, sometimes trivial and always affectionate. Berger and Sontag's voices echo throughout these pages, riffing off the other as they grapple with their respective concerns. Above all, their conversations reveal a deep reciprocal admiration and an exchange of ideas about storytelling, the self and society that informed their own work. [Paperback]
Disavowal by Alenka Zupančič $24
This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupančič contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy. The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupančič adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality. This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us. [Paperback]
Gertrude Stein: An afterlife by Francesca Wade $30
'Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,' wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding — and contested — writers of the twentieth century. In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso's portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography — a veritable celebrity. Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas's turn to tell the stories — especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible. This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human. [Now in paperback]
"Wade on Stein is a perfect miracle. I feel like I have been waiting for this book my entire life." —Sheila Heti
"Francesca Wade's great coup here is to make us understand that there are as many Steins as readers of Stein; that her non-essential essence resides in the relays between her, Toklas, a gaggle of male modernists, a media that wanted a personality but not the challenge of her prose, and a posterity that's only just beginning to find labels for what she was doing. It's a double-coup: to track these shifts and, in their very transpositions, their reflections and diffractions and inversions, to coax an image sharply into view, clear as the lucid if continually morphing picture inside a kaleidoscope." —Tom McCarthy
"A thrillingly intelligent and original book. Not only a tour-de-force of biographical writing, but also a breakthrough in biographical form." —Edmund Gordon
>>Devotion to the cut.
>>Charlatan or genius?
>>Not everyone got the joke.
Days of Light by Megan Hunter $28
Easter Sunday, 1938. Ivy is nineteen and ready for her life to finally begin. Her sprawling, bohemian family and their friends gather in the idyllic English countryside for lunch, arranging themselves around well-worn roles. They trade political views and artistic arguments as they impatiently await the arrival and first sight of Frances, the new beau of Ivy's beloved older brother, Joseph. In this auspicious atmosphere of springtime, Ivy's world feels on the cusp of something grand-but neither she nor those closest to her predicts how a single, enchanted evening and an unexpected tragedy will alter the rest of their lives. A radiant, philosophical, and intimate journey through time, Days of Light chronicles six pivotal days across six decades to tell the story of Ivy's pursuit of answers — to the events of this fateful Easter Sunday and to the shifting desires of her own heart. Moving through the Second World War up to the close of the 20th century, Hunter captures the galvanic love and transformative moments that define a winding, beautiful life. [Now in paperback]
'Think One Day written by (and starring) Virginia Woolf. This is a lyrical and captivating book, dropping decade by decade into a single day in the life of the brilliant, headstrong Ivy.' —The Observer
’Days of Light is luminous in content, structure and language, and a telling portrayal of a woman’s life through changing times.’ —Stella
>>Read Stella’s review.
The Savage Landscape: How we made the wilderness by Cal Flyn $37
This book takes us into the wild – deep into dark forests, to the top of mountains and into the heart of deserts. It addresses our deep yearnings to be awed and inspired by landscapes that remain beyond our reach and examines what nature gets up to in the absence of humans. In 10 chapters, each loosely structured around a visit to some of the world’s wildest and most invigorating landscapes, the book asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might best be appreciated or preserved. These locations have been chosen for their physical beauty, their perceived isolation, and the moral or emotional complexity of the human stories that can be found there. What kinds of people are drawn to the wilderness, and why? [Paperback]
'A thrilling, tender, acute tour through the wildernesses of the world outside us and the far wilder worlds inside. Why does the desolate allure? It's an urgently important, complex question. We need to know for the sake of our souls, our politics and our planet. Flyn is the perfect guide.' —Charles Foster
'Cal Flyn is one of the most exciting writers around - for the poetry and precision of her prose, for the vast scope of her learning, for her fearless (and self-questioning) spirit. In The Savage Landscape, she opens one door after another, to wonder, to terror, to rich and mixed feelings, so that we can see the world anew and in all its deepest dimensions. This book is at once thrilling adventure and bracing meditation.' —Pico Iyer
Shifting Sands: A human history of the Sahara by Judith Scheele $33
Judith Scheele reveals the rich history and complex reality of the world's largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research, and years spent living in the region, Scheele leads us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present — and the race for resources that will define the future. The Sahara covers parts of eleven countries, and Scheele follows in the footsteps and tyre-tracks of the many people who cross the desert, taking us into the homes, mosques, palm groves and battlefields where history is written, spoken and remade. Encompassing the geology, religions, peoples and politics that shape and fracture the region, Shifting Sands tells the immersive story of a place whose future holds implications for us all. [Now in paperback]
”Scheele presents a detailed, often gritty, picture of a fragile world. Her travels trace the web of exchanges, linguistic and material, that crisscross a harsh, vast and sometimes impassable terrain. Instead of ‘mental maps of vertical and historically immutable trade routes’, Scheele finds a pattern of pathways that, like the grazing routes of the pastoralists' livestock, shifts with changes in climate, economics and politics. This is a clearsighted and unsentimental study of life on the edge.” —Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal
No Land to Stand On: Protest, Palestine, and being unfree in America by Mahmoud Khalil $40
'Are you Mahmoud Khalil?' This was the question asked by ICE as they took the Palestinian student and U.S. legal resident from his pregnant wife and home in New York City, transported him across the country, and locked him up in a Louisiana detention camp under threat of deportation. His 'crime': exercising his right to free speech at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leading voice against the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No Land to Stand On is his indelible account, the story of a man confronting the reality that he had become target number one in a lawless regime shredding basic rights. Drawing on his prison diary and writing in vivid, page-turning detail, Mahmoud Khalil conjures the despair and cruelty of ICE detention, where prisoners can vanish overnight and visiting families risk their own deportation. There is humanity, too, in the men's acts of care, as they help each other with documents, and make a prison cake for Mahmoud after he can only follow the birth of his son on a public payphone. In tandem, he tells the multi-generational story of a family expelled from Palestine to a Syrian refugee camp, of flight from Assad's regime to Lebanon, of arrival in an America that promised permanence and protection, and of the enduring struggle for Palestine. A work of immense courage and resistance, No Land to Stand On is a call to all of us to defend the inalienable right to safety, freedom, and a place to call home. [Paperback]
”No Land to Stand On not only recounts, with chilling precision, an intimate experience of the free world's sinister new tyrannies, but it also describes a longer and ongoing ordeal of exile and ostracism. And yet, while troubling our consciences, Mahmoud Khalil opens our minds and hearts with his dignity, compassion and hopefulness. With its spiritual and intellectual power, his book is already a classic of dissident literature, a true peer of Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope and Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind.” —Pankaj Mishra
WAR by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano $40
WAR is set in an unnamed city in an unnamed country. It tells the story of Kat, a fourteen-year-old graffiti artist who finds her life turned upside down when her home city is invaded. When her father is taken and held without charge by the invading forces, Kat chooses not to flee with her mother and little sister, instead sneaking off to remain in the city and try to rescue her father. Also featured is Adam, a young conscript who struggles to understand why he is being made to fight. This graphic novel is based on accounts from children from actual war zones. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
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.
The Starving Bride by Catherine Chidgey $38
Look at her. How serene she is in her long white dress, eyes closed like a stone copy of herself. Perhaps she lives on air. We would like a little piece of her — a hank of hair, a pared fingernail slender as a new moon, a wisp of skin peeled from a sunburned shoulder. England, the near future. Dumped by her boyfriend, fired from her job and estranged from her parents, Hazel Whitlock signs up for a sideshow act in Blackpool. The seaside resort has revived all the cancelled old favourites and she will be the Starving Bride. On display in the iconic Blackpool Tower, with a ravenous lion prowling the enclosure, Hazel must lie in silence while strangers view her body.As the days tick down, thousands are captivated by Hazel's transformation. Some are inspired. Some are obsessed. And some are watching far more closely than they should be. Hazel's old friend Gilda becomes increasingly worried for her welfare. Councillor Frank Marsh warns that the Tower could collapse — but no one will listen. As the spectacle spirals and the world outside grows increasingly unstable, Hazel must confront the truth: how far is she willing to go to be seen? [Paperback]
>>Ozempic and The Starving Bride.
>>Our always-performing world.
>>Scrutiny of women’s bodies.
>>Other books by Catherine Chidgey.
Dooneen by Keith Ridgway $33
Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that — there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Home by invitation, he has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumour, with tunnels, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unraveling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices, and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, "one of Ireland's best writers, in a country with no shortage of them" (The Times). [Paperback with French flaps]
'Ridgway has written a near perfect dream — a rebellion against reality, against space and form — but the blood is real, the panic, the love and friendship are there in front of you, can almost be touched. They don't like you to say "masterpiece" in the endorsements, but read it, and tell me, what else can you call it?' —Ben Pester
'Dublin through-and-through but universal, timeless yet punctual to the world right now. Ridgway's uniquely questioning, epigrammatic voice picks out the personal, the political, the absurd, the deeply serious, strobing away at how to read, how to write, the dangers of narrative and other oppressions, how to find meaning and how to resist, how to live. In this mysterious, miraculous novel Ridgway's prose has the unarguable lucidity of genius.' —Richard Beard
'Dooneen is surreal and unsettling, and will subvert your understanding of what time and reality — and even consciousness — is. It is also a poignant love story, and is Beckettian in its melancholy, wit and — most especially — its humanity. Keith Ridgway is a writer whose primary concern is the suffering of others, and his great skill is how quietly and subtly he evokes psychic pain.' —Mary Costello
'Comparisons become ridiculous at the level where Ridgway is working, but I will just say that for me there is a sense-memory of Kafka's The Castle and Ishiguro's The Unconsoled in my experience of the intimate and dreamlike Dooneen. The feeling is that of seeing fiction's power of implication stretched before your eyes.' —Jonathan Lethem
'Call it Ursula K. Le Guin's speculative vision in the voice of Samuel Beckett amidst the Dublin housing crisis —or The Repossessed: An Ambiguous Dystopia. A love letter from the end of the world — and to the difficult possibilities after old worlds end.' —So Mayer
>>Ambivalence on the page.
>>Wonky Dublin.
>>The future is the past.
>>Home and imago.
>>Other books short-listed for the 2026 Goldmsiths Prize (for novels that “extend the possibilities of the form”).
Shane Cotton: Moerewa; Liquid Sleep by Anthony Byrt $90
For over thirty years Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) has developed a rigorous and evolving painting practice, using the medium to layer the visual languages through which Aotearoa can be seen and understood. In this book leading art writer Anthony Byrt takes us on a voyage into Te Tai Tokerau to unravel the relationships, landscapes and histories that are the wellspring of Cotton's art — the world of Kororāreka and Hongi Hika, of mission stations, revolutionary religious ideas and Te Tiriti. By travelling deep into Cotton's visual universe, Byrt helps us make sense of the paintings and the world-changing collisions that occurred in the nineteenth-century North — collisions that still shape Aotearoa today. Working through the remarkable range of Shane Cotton's work, this is a vital, expansive and necessary account of one of the country's most important living artists. A beautiful, breathtaking, surprising book. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
I Liked Rex by Diane Williams $45
Diane Williams is one of the great masters of the American short story: her tiny, coruscating tales are among the most tender, funny, peculiar, and searching works in all of contemporary literature. I Liked Rex is Williams's newest collection, which explores sex, love, marriage, and all that comes after; it is a book about living, but more importantly, about how to be alive. In these stories, a woman sees her soon-to-be ex-husband on the street, walking patiently at the end of a line of geese; a mother implores a total stranger to watch over her small child at the beach; a guest arrives at an orgy uninvited, and takes a nap beneath a dusty carpet; a woman reflects on her life with a man who used to belong to another, but is hers now — though can anyone really possess anyone else, truly? Williams's genius lies as much in what is left unspoken as in what is laid out on the page; behind images of startling beauty and strangeness, entire chamber dramas of the heart unfold, and the pleasure of these sphinx-like tales comes from their unremitting mystery, which is the same mystery fundamental to life and to love. Introduction by Merve Emre. [Paperback]
"Is this America's smartest-strangest-short-story writer?" —Leo Robson, The Telegraph
"Not a single moment of the prose, here, is what you expect, and even the ordinary is, in the context created by Diane Williams, no longer ordinary: it is fresh, happy and peculiar — or is it we who are refreshed, happy and more peculiar than before after reading her?" —Lydia Davis
"Williams's stories court laughter first, then, and only in retrospect, long-accumulated tears: tears of regret for opportunities lost, for people mislaid; tears of despair for the strangeness, the separateness that intimacy reveals and fails to overcome. Williams can do more with two sentences than most writers can do with two hundred pages." —Merve Emre, The New York Review of Books
"I'm convinced that Williams — as a writer and as an editor — has access to some hidden, ancient source of energy and inspiration. She gives attentive readers the sense that anything in life can be written about in a dynamic, heroic way. The horizon expands with limitless possibility — the most sublime gift." —Kathryn Scanlan, Southwest Review
>>Let us fall for whatever we want to.
>>Thomas on Williams’s stories.
Fancy Work: Unpicking past lives by Alice Hattrick $38
Blending biography, memoir and art criticism, Fancy Work explores the ever-shifting tensions between family, labour and gender through the history of embroidery, or 'fancy work'. At the heart of the book is Alice Hattrick's encounter with the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle: from her father William Morris to her mother Jane, an artists' model and embroiderer herself, and M.F., May's gender non-conforming partner for twenty years. Searching for guidance, Hattrick looks to May's life — alongside others who have found, in textiles, a means of resistance — to understand better their own queer identity, family ties and fractious working conditions in an ableist society. In the ephemeral nature of textiles, Hattrick finds a mirror to archival research. How can the past help us to imagine alternative domestic circumstances and create unconstrained lives of our own, especially when not all traces remain? Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work is a radical and thrilling work that reminds us that we can think differently, inviting us to place the needle in our own hands and stitch our a loop in the chain. [Paperback with French flaps]
'This illuminating, expansive and intricately connected book on embroidery made me giddy with the ideas and knowledge it reveals. In detailing so diligently the histories, practices and techniques of needlework, insights into craft as a whole open up. Fancy Work shows how fluency in non-linguistic forms enriches language, sharpens political thought and articulates some of the most radical ways of living.' —Holly Pester
'There are so many layers to this book; every page left my mind brimming with detail, colour and affection. Fancy Work somehow contains multitudes while remaining clear, intimate and curiously joyful. I knew at once it was a book I would treasure and return to.' —Sara Baume
>>Embroidery as a form of resistance.
Sail Away Land by Ben Pester $38
Sail Away Land is the space where we might go when we're no longer alive (sometimes only temporarily). In this uncommon and disarming collection of stories, the characters go 'there' with or without knowing it. Maybe they have been living there all along without noticing — just like they hadn't really noticed that everyone is carrying a shiny black suitcase. These stories are about normal things — losing the people we're closest to, forgiving them, finding love and managing to hold onto it — but also about going to parties through a door in the back of a colleague's head, housebreaking in search of a sister's ghost, and asking the strangers in the kitchen to resurrect you at midnight. Like brilliant and strange anxiety dreams in prose, the stories in Sail Away Land are full of temporal weirdness, life and non-being, psychological acuity, imagination and wit, all while being effortlessly, seductively readable and undeniably moving. [Paperback with French flaps]
”I hugely enjoyed Sail Away Land. Bizarre and disquieting. Very few, if any contemporary writers, capture the drudgery of life in capitalist society, the scourge of deferred gratification, in quite the way that Ben Pester does, the feeling of being constantly trapped inside an anxiety dream.” —Sara Baume
”Ben Pester is rightly celebrated for his combination of hard-won surrealism and the anxious poetry of 21st century working life. But it's a dream-logic that clarifies the thorniest corners of our hearts; and a perfectly pitched prose style that also evokes our maddest, most familiar thoughts and speech patterns. Sail Away Land is a triumph of near-peerless emotional accuracy. He's so much more fun than most writers and also twice as serious.” —Luke Kennard
>>Left behind.
>>The paperback edition of The Expansion Project has just arrived.
Rangatira: He pūrākau nā Paula Morris (nā Hinewai Pōmare i whakamāori) $38
Winner of the New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction in 2012, Paula Morris's Rangatira is a remarkable New Zealand novel, here translated into te reo Māori for the first time by Hinewai Pōmare. Gottfried Lindauer, the Bohemian painter, is about to sail to England. He's just begun work on a painting of the Ngāti Wai rangatira Paratene Te Manu when into his studio walks Paratene himself. Hearing of Lindauer's planned trip to England reminds Paratene of his own journey there in 1863 with a party of Northern rangatira. Over the next three days, as he sits for Lindauer, Paratene retreats deeper and deeper into the past, from the triumphant meetings with royalty and aristocracy to the disintegration of the trip into estrangement, poverty, and mistrust. [Paperback]
>>The English-language edition.
The Castaways of Disappointment Island by Robyn Belton and Robbie Burton $25
Charlie Eyre was a sailor aboard the Dundonald, which was wrecked on Disappointment Island in 1907, deep in the Southern Ocean. This book tells the true story of how he and 13 of his shipmates endured starvation, brutal storms and perilous ocean crossings before they were finally rescued. Theirs is one of New Zealand’s greatest survival stories, an unforgettable tale of courage, hardship and determination. The book features illustrations by beloved Aotearoa illustrator Robyn Belton. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Selected Poems, 1965—2005 by Mary Oliver $35
Few modern poets are as beloved or as quoted as Mary Oliver. Spanning the major decades of her long career, this extensive collection (450pp) showcases Oliver's lyrical powers and her reverential attention to the natural world. Her poetry sees life everywhere and asks what to do with it — how can we find our place among such beauty, such pain? Populated by wading birds, early snowfalls and swaying cornfields, her reflections are the record of a life spent walking alone in the wild. These poems meet and touch their reader in any season of life, brightened by Oliver's gift for amazement, shadowed by her constant awareness of harshness and death. Her words teach us to live with our eyes open wider. [Paperback]
Introducing the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher $40
A clear and accessible account of the research behind Ned Fletcher's award-winning study of the Treaty's English text. Drawing on the same careful archival work as the larger book, this short edition guides readers through the origins, intentions and meaning of the English text, and the wider imperial context in which it was drafted. Fletcher's research argues that the English and Maori texts of the Treaty reconcile — that those who framed the Treaty intended Maori to retain authority over their own affairs (rangatiratanga) and ownership of their lands. This original understanding, however, was later eroded as imperial policy shifted and hostility toward Indigenous rights intensified. By tracing how and why that change occurred, the book offers readers a compelling account of what the Treaty was understood to mean at the time it was signed. Written with narrative clarity and scrupulous scholarship, Introducing the English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi equips readers with a firm foundation for understanding one of Aotearoa New Zealand's most important constitutional documents — in both its nineteenth-century context and its continuing significance today. [Paperback]
>>Get the longer, fuller work.
Ko Aotearoa Ināianei: New perspectives on protecting Māori knowledge and cultural expressions edited by Jayden Houghton and David V. Williams $60
From mānuka honey to haka, and across patents, trade marks, copyright and geographical indications, the protection of traditional knowledge, cultural expressions and genetic resources is one of the most complex legal and political challenges of our time. On the fifteenth anniversary of Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, the Waitangi Tribunal's landmark report on the Wai 262 claim, sixteen leading legal scholars offer new perspectives on how authority over and guardianship of traditional knowledge, cultural expressions and genetic resources might be recognised and protected in contemporary legal systems. Ko Aotearoa Ināianei takes up the wero laid down by the original Wai 262 claimants and extends their kaupapa into the present. The chapters confront pressing and unresolved questions. How should offensive or derogatory uses of taonga be remedied? Could legal personhood be applied to intangible Māori taonga such as waiata, and what would that recognition require? What might knowledge governance grounded in tikanga Māori involve, and how might it challenge or reshape Western intellectual property frameworks? Through wide-ranging essays engaging with law, policy, theory, science and culture, the authors advance aspirational visions of cultural ownership, control, inheritance and identity, grounded in the shared whakapapa of people, land and knowledge. Ko Aotearoa Ināianei contributes to global debates on Indigenous authority and knowledge protection. [Paperback]
>>List of contents.
Read our latest newsletter. Find out about the 2026 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Choose what you will read next.
9 October 2026
So, what makes you want to write a review of David Shields’s book, The Very Last Interview?
Then why are you writing one?
Every week? Whose idea was that?
Surely at your age, you shouldn’t be so bound by obligation or by expectation, or whatever you call it?
Yes, but do you really care what these readers might think, and do you even believe that there are such people? Aren’t you being altogether a bit precious?
Do you really think that this helps to pay the mortgage, I mean that this makes a direct and measurable contribution towards paying your mortgage? Or even an indirect and unmeasurable but still valuable contribution towards paying your mortgage?
Well, what else would you be doing?
Surely you’re joking?
Okay, we’ve got a bit off the track there. I will reframe my first question. What makes you think that you are able to write a review of David Shields’s new book?
Don’t you think your humility is a bit mannered?
The Very Last Interview is a book consisting entirely of questions that interviewers have asked David Shields over the years, omitting his answers, assuming he will have answered probably at least most of the questions, and your review, if we can call it that, of this book also consists of a series of questions ostensibly directed at you but without your answers, if indeed there were answers, which is less certain in your case than in the case of David Shields. Is this, on your part, a deliberate choice of approach, and, if so, is it justifiable?
Do you really believe that a review written in imitation of, or in the style of, the work under review inherently reveals something about that work, even if the review is badly written, or should your approach rather be attributed to laziness, stylistic insecurity, or creative bankruptcy?
Has it ever occurred to you that the supposedly more enjoyable qualities of your writing are actually nothing more than literary tics or affectations, and, furthermore, that it might be these very literary tics and affectations that prevent you from writing anything of real literary worth?
Do you think that, by removing his input into the original interviews but retaining the questions, David Shields is attempting to remove himself from his own existence, or merely to show that our identities are always imposed from outside us rather than from inside, or that we exist as persons only to the extent that we are seen by others? Is this, in fact, all the same thing?
What do you mean by that statement, ‘We are defined by the limits we present to the observations of others’?
What do you mean by that statement ‘There is no such thing as writing, only editing,’ and how does that relate to Shields’s work?
Do you think that David Shields, in this book as in the much-discussed 2010 Reality Hunger, sees the individual as an illusion, a miserable fragment of what is actually a ‘hive mind’ or collective consciousness, and that ‘creativity’, so to call it, is another illusion predicated on this illusion of individuality?
You don’t? What, then?
What do you think David Shields would have answered, when asked, as he was, seemingly in this book, “But what is the role of the imagination in this ‘post-literature literature’ that you envision?” and how might this differ from the answer you might give if asked the same question?
Shields was asked if he had written anything that couldn’t be interpreted as ‘crypto-autobiography’, but don’t you think the salient question is whether it is even possible to write anything that couldn’t be interpreted as crypto-autobiography?
Is a perfectly delineated absence, such as David Shields approximates in The Very Last Interview, in fact the most perfect portrait of a person, even the best possible definition of a person, as far as this is possible at all?
But do you actually have a personal opinion on this?
Do you think then that you, like Shields, like us all perhaps, are, in essence, a ghost?
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, classicist and translator who has just been named the 2026 Nobel Laureate in Literature. In Wrong Norma, variously described as prose poems or prose pieces, she confronts writing and ideas. She allows thoughts to take the lead, to follow the other, in sometimes bewildering, sometimes illogical ways to paces where juxtapositions and contradictions segue into each other with a wonderful ‘wrongness’. And what is the idea of wrong? Her description of this project (as most of her published works are: she makes a handmade book, which is then produced as a facsimile by her publisher) is elusive and offers a brief explanation: “...a collection of wrings about different things..” And this collection is wide-ranging in subject matter, from swimming to snow, Joseph Conrad and Emily Dickinson, riffs on Socrates and violence, observations on poverty and displacement, a piece of writing by the Sky, in fact a week-long journal, my favourite being a conversation on Wednesday with Godot, and an image essay reimagining the meeting of the German philosopher Heidigger and the Jewish writing Paul Celan in 1966. Re-reading any one of these prose pieces is submerging. (The idea of suubmerging also links strongly to the first piece on swimming, so desire to be in water, out of air). They are endlessly curious, striving forward, to what one is never completely sure, and this makes them compelling. You return to discover something new and surprising each time, and it makes you ask questions rather than look for answers. In this work, Anne Carson seems to be asking questions and there are these wonderful scrap paper interludes between each piece. Some with merely a faintly typed comment or questions. Others that are dialogue, questions and answers, the questions often repeated, the answers varied — are they questions put to a host of visitors or characters or the author talking to herself? These repetitive questions include: “ Do you like the films of Eric Rohmer?”, followed by “Do you like jam?”, as if asking these simultaneously is a given. The other question that pops up repeatedly is “ What is yor philosophy of time?” With answers variously being: “I’m quite sure we’ll surrender” to “ how it’s sweet and how it’s moving” and “ a shallow closet with narrow bench and a rope to pull you up”. Are the recipients answering this question or even hearing it? Or are we always in conversation at cross purposes? Many of the text peices are reflecting on the process of writing. What is language, and how does it work? When translation is evoked, what happens to the text, whether this is translating yourself or others? Perspective and observation can be wrong and this wrongness leads to discoveries. Anne Carson calls these pieces wrong and enjoys herself. These is intelligent and playful writing. There is much here to amuse, as well as provoke thinking. But who or what is Norma? There is a reference in one piece to Norma Desmond, a character played in a film by Gloria Swanson, but I wondered if here the translator in Carson comes to the fore. Norma in latin can mean rule or pattern; in Greek, examiner. In an interview with Paris Review, Carson describes writing like seeing and following a fox. “I think about it as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it’s interesting. It’s more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It’s just following a track.”
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
THE VALLEY OF UNLIKELY ACQUAINTANCES by Terri Te Tau $38
“This is a real deal Māori sci-fi thriller dripping in small-town charisma, rongoā, and twists. Terri Te Tau somehow manages to prove, with eye-watering brains and a bit of Indigenous futurism, that the highest technology in the cosmos truly is our whakapapa.” —Coco Solid
BEDFORD STREET by Ross Murray $35
”Bedford Street is not just a moving and beautifully presented graphic novel but, as with Rufus Marigold, it invites us to think about relationships, how we conduct ourselves, caring and being responsible.” —Graham Reid, Elsewhere
SIMPLE TOO by Yotam Ottolenghi $75
135 new recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. Every dish has simplicity at its core and can be made in under 30 minutes, cooked in one pot, or prepped ahead. Whatever your barriers to cooking, this book brings you into the kitchen with a promise that even the simplest of meals can be full of flavour and joy.
THE STARVING BRIDE by Catherine Chidgey $38
Catherine Chidgey’s much-anticipated new novel in set in a near future where suffering is presented as an amausement to distract the populace from mounting disasters, and personal appearance has replaced ethics as a guiding force for action (just like our own times on both counts, actually!).
DIRTY WORK by Nicky Hager $35
An exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right, to use race politics to create division, and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. "I do not care and New Zealanders do not care about this topic." —Christopher Luxon
Over forty years, Anne Carson’s work has spanned poetry, essay, Classical translation, and literary experiment, tautening the threads between the ancient and the modern, between introspection and observation, between audacity and sensitivity, between the personal and the shared, energising the entire length of each of the lines between these poles. Today she was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature. Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning.”
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
And How Are Things With You by Mia Farlane $40
Franny is AWOL from her French translation job, her cat-sitting gig is making her anxious, and an obsessive personal project is shooting off in more directions than the London Underground. She needs to leave the UK and return home. But Aotearoa turns out to be less relaxing than she thought it would be, because she keeps running into people she’d rather avoid. Wellington is a nostalgia trip on repeat and the last thing Franny needs is distraction. For her own reasons, she is researching suicide, and the material she’s unearthing is almost overwhelming. Bit by bit Wellington begins to grow on her. She finds herself chatting to a woman over kūmara wedges, getting real with a nonagenarian aunt and attending a ‘die-in’ at a bank to protest global extinction. Meanwhile, Franny books a seat to watch the parliamentary debates for the End of Life Choice bill, and her research takes a startling turn. And How Are Things With You is shot through with the dark humour and dry observations that readers loved in Footnotes to Sex, a novel British broadcaster Bidisha described as ‘Seinfeld meets Dorothy Parker’. [Paperback]
‘A frank, acerbic and darkly comic exploration of a deeply serious taboo.’ — Carl Shuker
‘Farlane’s novel is the perfect companion for an overly interesting age: darkly funny, quietly and steadfastly loving, with a charmingly singular protagonist.’ — A.L. Kennedy
>>Exploring a taboo subject.
Sovereignty: The case for consitutional transformation by Claire Charters $20
‘The legitimacy of the state is at best questionable and certainly remains legally unsettled.’ Legal scholar Claire Charters (Ngāti Whakaue, Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi and Tainui) confronts the deeply rooted questions surrounding the legitimacy of the New Zealand state and its sovereignty over Māori. Drawing from her infl uential writings and speeches, Charters critiques the judiciary’s historical silence on the state’s claim to sovereignty, revealing the profound implications of this silence for justice in Aotearoa. Through a rigorous examination of legal doctrines and the role of tikanga Māori, she exposes the contradictions in New Zealand’s constitutional narrative and argues for transformative constitutional reform. [Paperback]
>>A problem for legitimacy.
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish history by Benjamin Moser $75
Until relatively recently, anti-Zionism has been an almost exclusively Jewish position, and it continues to be a stongly held position for many Jews. In this revelatory book, Benjamin Moser uncovers a suppressed tradition that has shaped Jewish thought for generations. Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists and politicians — from Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America — Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism's moral and political stakes — often at devastating personal cost, including censorship, exile and death. Their lives form a sweeping, global narrative that dismantles a powerful myth: that anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. Spanning continents and centuries, these voices — people from the right and the left, Reform and Orthodox, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, men and women, gay and straight — differ sharply in belief and background, yet converge on a shared warning about the consequences of a nationalist project built on exclusion. What emerges is not only a rediscovered tradition of Jewish moral thought, but a startling reappraisal of Zionism itself. Moser's work restores the full scale and depth of Jewish ethical imagination, affirming that Judaism is older and larger than any single political project. Lucid, unsparing and deeply humane, Anti-Zionism cements Moser's place as one of our foremost Jewish writers and presents a framework through which this history — and its meanings — will be understood for years to come. [Hardback]
'An important and revelatory contribution.' —William Dalrymple
'A book of extraordinary moral clarity.' —Nathan Thrall
'A lovingly-written historical primer for the free-thinkers of the West today.' —Isabella Hammad
'What I learned in these pages has profoundly changed my understanding of history — the world's, my people's, my family's, and my own.' —Ayelet Waldman
>>The loss that cannot be repaired.
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (translated from Italian by Tim Parks) $35
Set in post-war Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's novel begins simply and innocently enough: `At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell'. But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the offhanded knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the seemingly perfect new girl, Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. [Paperback]
"Dipped in the blue ink of adolescence, Fleur Jaeggy's pen is an engraver's needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness, growing in the splendid isolation of the small Swiss garden of knowledge into full leaf until it obscures every perspective. Extraordinary prose. Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author: the rest of one's life." —Joseph Brodsky
Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro (translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle) $33
In a quiet middle-class neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, the body of a teenage girl is found dismembered and burned. Thirty years later, her family still lives in the aftermath: Lia, the middle sister, enraged and extranged from her past, now a bookshop owner in Spain, but no further from the pain of that early loss; Carmen, frozen in religious fervour and certainty; their father, widowed, alone, and desperate for a connection with his daughters, alive and dead. Piñeiro takes on the institutions that shape our most intimate connections with unsparing clarity. Church, family, sibling rivalry, sex, cowardice, and rage are the forces that might tear a family apart, but will also never let you go. [Paperback with French flaps]
"One of her strongest novels to date." —Irish Times
"Pineiro beautifully blends mystery and true crime tropes with incisive insights into the church's sexual repression and subjugation of women. It's an illuminating page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly
"With her characteristic edge-of-the-seat storytelling, Pineiro exposes not only the monsters we live among, but also the society that produces them." —The Conversation
"Pineiro is not only a masterful novelist but also a tireless feminist activist. This book is an urgent act of witness. Through myth, noir and social realism, it exposes the violence of patriarchy, the cruelty of church and state, and the extraordinary resilience of women who refuse to vanish. Thrilling, witty, enraged and alive." —Morning Star
All Them Dogs by Djamel White $38
Things are different since Tony Ward landed back in town. The West Dublin gangland has changed. His old mentor is dead, and his best pal Kenny Boyle is on the straight and narrow. After five years keeping quiet across the way, Tony is keen to reinstate himself, and when the opportunity arises to work side by side with Darren 'Flute' Walsh, a top enforcer of notorious crime boss Angus Lavelle, it feels like a no brainer. Biting off more than he can chew has never bothered Tony Ward, but Flute Walsh is not the meek, quiet boy Tony remembers from school. Brooding, stoic and unpredictably dangerous, Tony finds himself drawn to his new associate in more ways than one. With retribution from his past actions always close in the rear view, the protection offered by Flute's standing in the gang is crucial. But how safe is Tony really, when a mutual attraction starts to complicate matters? [Paperback]
”In the best Irish style, Djamel White uses a local voice to blast through language and make it new. His hero, Tony Ward, is a bittersweet confection of self-defeating swagger. A stylish, adroit and gritty debut.” —Anne Enright
”All Them Dogs is a book you inhale, devour, grapple with, and reel from more than read. A coming-of-age novel for an age that comes breathing down the back of your neck. The kind of book where everything is on the edge of a knife and where love, like death, is either a kiss or a bullet away.” —Marlon James
”A moving, fast-paced novel about masculinity, violence and vulnerability, set in parts of Dublin that rarely appear in literature and written in prose at once glittering and tender.” —Sarah Moss
Radical Attention by Julia Bell $40
In recent years tech companies have turned attention into a commodity, a resource to be mined and sold.The terms of the deal appear simple: in exchange for our attention we receive information, entertainment,and convenience. But what are the hidden costs? And what happens to our inner lives when we lose the ability to decide how we wish to pay attention?In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell examines big tech's wide- ranging and extractive assault on human attention, while asking how we might reclaim it. Selected by Ali Smith as one of the five most important books to navigate the next twenty years, this new edition features a new foreword by radical economist Grace Blakeley and an afterword by the author. [Paperback]
”Dazzling, angry, lucid, and shining with insight. Julia Bell has written a book that feels like a dynamite stick.” —Marina Benjamin
>>Redirecting our focus.
Negative Essays: On death, love, and depressive realism by Julie Reshe $60
While belonging to the tradition of philosophical pessimism and negative philosophy, these essays approach love, rather than mortality, as what most deeply wounds being. Love knows the darkest truth that death only conceals. Across thirteen essays, Julie Reshe develops a negative philosophy of our involvement with others, moving through depressive realism, the death drive, feminist Satanism, trauma, suicide, motherhood, narcissism, entropy, autism, disability, and aging. Essays include ‘Humor and Depressive Realism’, ‘Therapeutic Society’, ‘Toxic Positivity’, ‘Critical Psychology’, ‘Feminist Satanism’, 'Trauma as Initiation’, ‘Depression as Compassion’, ‘Suicide That Is Not One's Own’, and ‘The Negative Body’. [Paperback]
”Negative Essays is a brave, unsettling, and deeply moving book. Julie Reshe refuses every easy consolation and every therapeutic injunction to transform suffering into recovery. Through death, depression, humor, love, motherhood, disability, and aging, she develops a radically relational account of existence: we do not suffer alone, because we never exist alone. Negativity is not the opposite of love but its most intimate condition-the wound through which we are exposed to one another. At once philosophically incisive and painfully personal, these essays bring thought as close as possible to what thought usually keeps at a distance. A remarkable and necessary book.” —Catherine Malabou
”Julie Reshe is the philosopher of the negative. In addition to her radical reading of the death drive, Reshe here develops a negative philosophy that undermines previous forms of pessimism by locating negativity in our essential involvement with others, not in isolation. It is precisely this involvement with others that is the source of the worst of our wounds rather than any existential loneliness. Reshe radically redefines negativity and the idea of community by turning all expectations about both on their heads. It's a startling book not to be missed by anyone who's ever felt destroyed by someone else.” —Todd McGowan
”I pride myself on knowing Hegel's ‘night of the world’ that pure abyss of negativity that constitutes the subject. And yet Negative Essays is like a map that marks the location of the candle I secretly lit in the basement, the cupboard light that glows through the cracks of a closed door, the torch I've hidden under the duvet. These essays are so uncompromising that they rob the reader of that last defence against the suffering of being: reflection upon it. While the work is philosophically rich, the words have such an existential intensity that you cannot help but feel the burn of the black sun they describe. There is no escape into fantasy here. No therapeutic cure, political utopia or religious salvation. So, with all that in mind, why would I ever put myself through the hell of reading these essays? Because of the sheer enjoyment each one produces.” —Peter Rollins
>>Nonseparation.
Patron Saints of Roadkill, And other stories by Susanna Elliffe $38
A ghost moves into a woman's apartment and begins to cough up teeth. A town keeps building as the sea prepares to take it back. A daughter inherits hunger like an heirloom. In this collection of short stories set along a shifting coastline, the boundaries between body and memory, human and nonhuman, landscape and ocean begin to slip and strain. Houses tilt, animals and ghosts press in, and what is carried — grief, desire, damage — refuses to stay contained. Patron Saints of Roadkill is a darkly tender collection, revealing a world where the familiar is made strange and the strange is given its rightful place in the landscape of things. [Paperback]
>>Unease.
Sebze: Vegetarian recipes from my Turkish kitchen by Özlem Warren $65
A collection of 90 vegetarian and vegan recipes celebrating Türkiye and its food. Inspired by thousands of years of rich and diverse culinary heritage, Sebze champions dishes such as Stuffed Flatbreads, Menemen, Baked Fig and Feta, and Baklava, with recipes that are easy, accessible, seasonal, and sustainable — not to mention delicious. A passionate and skilled advocate for her national cuisine, Özlem Warren will show you how to make meals that you want to — and can — cook, making Sebze the perfect introduction to Turkish food for the home cook. [Hardback]
"An absolute feast of Turkish home cooking" —Diana Henry
"I absolutely love getting lost in this book. Wonderful recipe after wonderful recipe. You are in excellent hands with Özlem as your guide. The text and stories transport you, while simultaneously making you extremely hungry, for food and discovery alike." —Joe Woodhouse
"Sebze is a celebration of some of Turkey's most celebrated and most loved vegetable recipes and there is nobody better equipped to share them with us than Özlem." —Sabrina Ghayour
>>Look inside!
>>Ozlem’s Turkish table.
Palestine: A short history by Rashid Khalidi $38
'Come for a walk with me, if you would, along the streets of Jerusalem. My family has walked these streets for more than a thousand years.' With this invitation, Khalidi offers a powerful introduction to Palestinian history through a century of conflict and resistance. Blending research with his own family memories, Khalidi traces Palestine's story from the British occupation to Israel's ongoing colonial war. Explaining the history behind the world's most visible — and misunderstood — conflict, Khalidi explores why Israel has long fought against Palestine. Engaging and accessible, this book offers everyone a clear and concise account of a century of struggle — and the future of the Palestinian state. Adapted from The Hundred Years War on Palestine for a new generation of readers. [Paperback]
'Informed and passionate. Khalidi's is an elegy for the Palestinians.' —Guardian
'Rigorous and lucid. Rashid Khalidi, the intellectual heir to Edward Said, has written one of the great books on the Israeli-Palestinian question.' —Financial Times
'This act of retelling is itself a form of resistance' —The Nation
'The best book to appear on the struggle for Palestine.' —Avi Shlaim
>>The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
Read what the judges have to say about each of the books shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, then click through for your copies.
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
‘Two beachcombers meet and exchange words at the intertidal; we are in Kent, and it is the near-future, but one that recognises itself to be in the middle of a catastrophe. The sky is glitching, and something strange, formless and growing is soon to come out of the sea, to imitate our speech, forms, and customs. Our left-behind inhabitants scavenge where and what they can, provisional alliances are made and broken, shocking violence occurs, and no one can agree on exactly what has happened. A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering and oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.’
The Disappearers by Marlon James
‘The Disappearers is among Marlon James’s most ambitious and history-making works, a novel that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy. Beginning in late 1980s Kingston, it follows eight male actors rehearsing what is billed as Jamaica’s first openly gay play. When the men become victims of brutal homophobic violence, the novel shifts register: in the years that follow, one survivor sets out to investigate the fates of the others, and what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning. James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange. The Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.’
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
‘How does an aspiring actor survive in contemporary London, where monthly living costs can rise well over a thousand pounds? The obvious solution – be born rich – has eluded Black Bag’s protagonist, a 37-year-old man who cobbles together an artistically and financially unsatisfying life performing in productions that stretch and undermine the meaning of theatre. That is until he gets a job showing up to student psychology lectures dressed in a black bag. Luke Kennard’s of-the-moment satire considers anonymity and disgust, the online rackets of cryptocurrency and energy drinks, and what it means to find love in our unstable times. There’ll be a lot of discussion about what the novel has to say about the state of modern masculinity (fractious; confused) – we also admired its sharply crafted sentences, memorable sex scenes, and humour.’
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
‘Perry combines the story of a reserved museum curator who recreates historical banquets, using a careful array of fake pies and pomegranates – with the story of a medieval king, reluctant to occupy the throne (and possibly unfit for it anyway). It’s a wonderfully enticing, and eye-opening, combination of themes, woven together with an extraordinary delicacy of touch. You can’t read May We Feed the King without reflecting on the fragile boundary between the present and the past. What’s the difference between historical fiction and historical fact? Can history ever be a safe place we can go to escape the present?’
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
‘Set in the contemporary United States, Strout’s novel focuses on Artie Dam, a 50-something high-school history teacher in a small coastal town with decent friends and wholesome hobbies. The Things We Never Say quietly unpicks all that, to show that the ordinary is not quite as ordinary as it might seem. Strout’s prose is about as far from a rant as you could imagine, brilliantly understated and all the more powerful for that. It’s a devastating look at the dangerous cracks in family life and in the contemporary world at large.’
John of John by Douglas Stuart
‘A 22-year-old arts student reluctantly returns from Edinburgh to his home on the Isle of Harris in Douglas Stuart’s third novel. We loved the rich, textural detail of the story, which is set in the 90s and examines young Cal’s fraught relationship with his domineering father. There’s a vivid sense of time and place, as the island becomes the site of bristling tensions between secret lovers, feuding families, and a stand-off between tradition and modernity. This excavation of family, violence, and shame is woven through with beautiful imagistic detail, and – unexpectedly but wonderfully – shades of hope.’
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
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2 October 2026
Is it possible to be terrified as you read a novel? You know you can close the book, that it is merely words. Tīhema Baker lets you in easy. The door is opened wide to the domestic scene of father, mother and child. The baby, Wī, not sleeping, the parents Āniwa and Hōhepa sleep deprived. Nothing unusual here, aside from Hepa’s vivid dreaming. Everyone is feeling trapped, the grind of life with a small child, a first child and all the changes this entails. None more so than Hōhepa: bereft at moving from the public service of Wellington central to up the coast at the city council, a little at sea with fatherhood, and isolated from his past social circles, as well as his tūrangawaewae. Add to that the pressure of never enough money, and Hepa’s desire to be a good father and partner – to be a good role model to his son, to both protect and provide, and be sensitive to the needs of his family, while juggling work, protesters outside the office, racism at work and in the news, and a sense of panic at all the evils that could befall his son. If you have read Turncoat, you’ll recognise a few familiar themes – concerns over the degradation of te Tiriti, institutional racism, Pākehā ignorance — and Baker’s ability to slice humour into his books without degrading the serious and confronting aspects of his novels. Unlike Turncoat, and Baker’s young adult novels, there is no sci-fi here. This is a contemporary setting, well bogged down in the quotidian life of a middle class Māori father. But this is Tīhema Baker writing, so expect the unexpected. There’s another entity, one that comes in dreams, who like One Day a Taniwha seems relatively benign at first. The pāua-shelled eyes appear to look with curiousity from the face of the lizard; it is silent, appearing in Hepa’s dreams at first as a bystander, a witness. Yet Hepa is right to be wary of this visitor. Talking to Uncle Bush, he finds out you can travel in your dreams, some believe to actual places and people. The dreams become more vivid, the taniwha less benign, the pāua shell eyes teasing and bullying, the creature shapeshifting, its voice inside Hepa’s head goading him, to the point where Hepa’s is looking for a way to have dreamless sleep. As Hōhepa’s lack of sleep and the pressure he puts himself under pushes him to the edge, the darkest emotions and actions take place in his dreams. There is a violence there that is difficult to read without being shaken; it is a violence of frustration, the violence of colonisation and its ongoing consequences, and a battle of ideas about masculinity. The edges are fraying, unravelling at pace, and when dreams and reality merge, the consequeces are frightening. In One Day a Taniwha, Tīhema Baker examines fatherhood, masculinity, and male Māori mental health. Deceptively playful at first, this crescendo of a novel, is a powerful piece of writing.
For some reason it had become a habit for him to write his reviews of books in the style of the books themselves, or as near a style as he could manage, a habit or an affectation, he wasn’t sure which, but this habit or affectation, if it was indeed a habit or an affectation, did have a serious intent, and was therefore not really a habit although it still could be an affectation, in that he somehow seemed to believe that a review written in the style of the subject of the review might reveal to him, and possibility to the readers of the review if there chanced to be any readers of the review, if such things could be left to chance, really such things were always left to chance, what was he saying, he seemed to believe that a review written in the style of the subject of the review might reveal something otherwise unnoticed or essential or incidental about the book in question, perhaps he was attempting to remove himself from a position of agency or of responsibility for the review by enticing, if that is the word, the book to write a review of itself. Form generates content, he shouted, frightening the cat, I want to write like a machine, I want to tinker with form until it purrs like a literary motor, then I will be able to put anything at all into the hopper, switch it on, and out comes literature. The cat was quick to resettle, she was used to this kind of excitement. If I were to write a review of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus in the form of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus I would also be writing it in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he thought, I would be writing it in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus because Signe Gjessing has written her book in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in order, he thought, to see what kind of poetry could be generated by such a form, in order to use form as a machine for the generation of text, in order, he thought, to test the limits of language, to see what it is and is not good for, just like Wittgenstein, or just like Wittgenstein thought he was doing at the time he wrote that book. If Wittgenstein made no distinction between form and content, the same must be true of poetry, he thought. If for Wittgenstein the limits of knowledge are the limits of language, what are we to say of poetry, always straining as it does, or as it should, he thought or thought that perhaps he thought, into the unsayable? If Wittgenstein sought the limit of what can be said, through progressing out linguistically from the obvious towards that limit, pushing at it and establishing it, he thought, he entails that beyond that limit there exists not nothing but rather that about which nothing can be said. What cannot be said is signified by the complete exhaustion of that which can be said. Gjessing also is obsessed with the limit with which Wittgenstein was at the time he wrote his book obsessed, but she stands at that limit as if from the habitat beyond, both Wittgenstein and Gjessing are concerned to discover the nature of the limit inherent in language, if there is such a limit and such a limit is inherent, but Gjessing wants, he thought, to destroy that limit or even to show that the destruction of the limit inherent in language is itself inherent in language. He had written in his bad handwriting in his notebook that Gjessing had written in the introduction to her book that “The poem is a modification of the universal — as though the sayable were an incapacity of the unsayable,” and, he thought, Gjessing is running Wittgenstien’s machine in reverse to see what poetry comes out. If the world is comprised not of things but of states of affairs which are the grammatical relations between things, there is no reason to think that that which is not the case is not governed by or, he thought, even generated by this universal grammar. Texts are comprised not of words but of grammar, he shouted, but the cat was long gone. Well, he thought, if I was going to write my review of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus in the form of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, I should have started earlier, I should have started, as does Gjessing, as does Wittgenstein to whose text Gjessing’s text is a response and a rejoinder, with a number of numbered statements on the first level to which another number of statements numbered to the first decimal respond or are implied and to which another number of statements numbered to the second decimal respond or are implied and so on until perhaps the fourth decimal or what we could call the fifth level, I’m not exactly sure if this is clear, a shining rack of cogs used in Wittgenstein’s case to generate philosophy, if he believed at that time there even was such a thing, and in Gjessing’s case to generate poetry, or whatever we might choose to call it, if I had written my review like this, he thought, what would I have written? Perhaps if I can devise such a grammatical machine to write reviews, a machine I can just turn upon any text, I can perhaps be relieved of certain of my duties, except perhaps to now and again apply a little oil, and perhaps get sometimes earlier to bed.
In this thoughtful science-fiction thriller emerging from te ao Māori, a research scientist and her friend struggle to hold their community together after the discovery of human remains in a local cave reveals a devastating history dating back to the 1800s that threatens to undermine their restoration of a Wairarapa forest. A very effective and enjoyable blend of time travel, environmentalism, local humour, whakapapa, rongoā, and immediacy.
>>Find out more.
>>Speaking to our current moment.
>>A new chapter.
>>Not ticking a box.
>>Read an extract.
>>The artwork on the cover.
>>Solid, but fluid.
>>Books from Spoor Books.