Read our latest newsletter. Find out about our Book of the Week. Find out what we — and our cat — have been reading. Join our book group.
21 February 2025
My life is a sort of an orbit, he thought. My life is a repetitive circular thing, or something very closely approximating a circle, not that an orbit needs to be circular, necessarily, but I think mine is. How many times will I pass this same point in the geography of my life, so to call it, how many times will I pass by, caught in the momentum of my orbit, unable to touch what I observe of my life below, changing slowly, or fast, as it does by the influence of various forces that I also cannot touch. But what am I if I am remote from what I have just called my life, he thought, what am I, the orbiting observer, if I am not my life, if I am orbiting above my life as the astronauts or cosmonauts in the space station in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital orbit above the planet Earth, orbiting and observing, enthralled by the attractive wonderful damaged planet below, remote from it but falling always towards it though never getting closer, in an equilibrium of gravity and momentum. An orbit, after all, he thought, is always firstly an act of attention. “Is it necessarily the case that the further you get from something the more perspective you have on it?” Harvey asks in the novel, as the astronauts stand in awe at the systems and patterns below them. “If you could get far enough away from Earth you’d be able finally to understand it.” Are understanding and participation mutually exclusive, he wondered, then, in my life, on this planet, necessarily, or is participation in itself a form of understanding, albeit enabled by an inescapable narrowing of perspective? As I circle in my orbit, far above my life, falling towards the object of my attention but carried away anyway by momentum, there in the equilibrium of my distance, I see there are no borders, no edges, no entities other than a oneness, if that could even be thought of as an entity, no entities other than those that exist in our minds, arbitrary borders, arbitrary edges, arbitrary entities, not seen from above but only by the participants in the struggle that they enable, the struggle that they condemn us to maintain. The moonshot is the opposite of an orbit. We divide ourselves with edges to get things done, to act one thing upon another, to intend and do, to participate or at least be aware of what we think of as our participation to the limited extent that we are somehow aware. This is how we get things done. This also is how harm is done. Up here in my orbit I observe how tiny all that is, I understand to the extent that I am remote, I am in a plotless place, I am in a place where everything is in an indefinite tense, where everything is a submission to a larger system, somewhere that I am hardly me. “As long as you stay in orbit you will be OK,” says the astronaut. “You will not feel crestfallen, not once.” I do not want to return, he thought. I do not want to leave my space of suspension, though “our hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it.”
There’s nothing like a journal to keep you up with the play, reinvigorate your thinking and introduce you to new ideas. Counterfutures is published biannually in Aotearoa, it’s peer reviewed, and has a bunch of good people on its editorial and advisory boards. It’s a multidisciplinary journal of Left research and thought, and includes essays, interviews and reviews. Published here, and about here, it also connects with international colleagues, both scholarly and grassroots. In this issue, editor Neil Vallelly interviews Princeton Professor Wendy Brown. ‘Towards a Counter-Nihilistic Politics’ is a wide-ranging interview that looks at the 2023 protests on American campuses, an analysis of current left politics, specifically in the US but also broadly relevant to other nations; — its reinvention in the face of one might say disenchantment, and a delve into political philosopher Max Weber, as well as Brown’s own work on neoliberalism and nihilism. In ‘Whakapapa of a Prison Riot’ Emma Rākete and Ti Lamusse, unpack the 2020 uprising at Waikeria Prison with an eye-opening and passionate exposition on the riot, prisoner rights, censorship and free speech. Their critique is sharp and powerful drawing on history, injustices of the past and present, and it’s a call to action for change in our criminal justice system — the kind of thinking and discussion that is missing from most media. In ‘Māori Marx, Māori Modernism: Hone Tuwhare’ Dougal McNeill gets under the skin of the poet’s work. Here is Tuwhare’s socialist connections in his words and deeds. Engaging, and adding further depth to this excellent poet’s body of work. And if you are needing to continuously find a way to unpick the complexities of Israel-Palestine, a conversation between Tariq Ali and historian Rashid Khalidi is enlightening and thoughtful. ‘The Neck and the Sword’ is an in-depth interview which gives excellent insight into Palestinian struggles for statehood. Khalidi goes back to the Arab Revolts of the late 1930s, and how it connects to the Nakba of 1947-8. He highlights the impacts of displacement, the war of 1967, the evolution of the PLO and later Hamas. This is a conversation with clarity of thought, facts and analysis, a conversation rooted in a people’s struggle, and above all humanity. While this interview was recorded in mid-2023, it feels even more important now, when booksellers can be arrested for doing their job, and powerful players are intent on a course of action in Gaza and the West Bank which will lead to further disenfranchisement. And these are just a few of the journal’s entries. Get Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa on your radar and on your reading pile!
Contradictions, misunderstandings, oppositions, enigmas, provocations, challenges — these messy troubles are the stuff of life. In Pretty Ugly, Gunn reminds us of her unparalleled acumen in handling ambiguity and complication, which are essential grist to the storyteller's mill. These 13 stories, set in New Zealand and in the UK, are a testament to Gunn's ability to look directly into the troubled human heart and draw out what dwells there. Gunn's is a steady, unflinching gaze. In this collection, Gunn practises 'reading and writing ugly' to pursue the deeper (and frequently uncomfortable) truths that lie under the surface, at the core of both human imagination and human rationality.
”Fiercely conflicting energies are in play in these sparkling stories, as Kirsty Gunn at once lavishly evokes and savagely destroys the worlds of propriety and respectable community.” —Tim Parks
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Read our latest newsletter
14 February 2025
How dangerous is a sad man? Sister Perpetue is on the night shift. She is under strict instructions to watch the patient (or is he a prisoner, shackled to the bed?) — to never let her eyes or mind wander. Yet when he talks, she listens and is caught up in his tale. His horrific story. For is he merely unfortunate, or is he a monster? In The Glutton, A.K. Blakemore turns from witches (her previous award-winning novel captured the puritanical fervour of England, 1643) to the infamy of The Great Tarare — ‘The Glutton of Lyon’. A man so perverse, so tortured by his insatiable hunger, that he will eat anything. The Glutton is a glorious novel. Glorious in its writing; Blakemore paints with her words a world alive with visceral undertakings, both beautiful and appalling. Glorious in its depiction of depravity and desire; the futile attempts to capture love or meaning in a maelstrom of corruption and ignorance. Glorious in its observations of time; this turbulent history of dissatisfaction, desperation, and rebellion. The revolution calls all men to its reckoning, and a boy-man like Tarare turns the heads of more powerful men — men that will command him to perform and then spit him out like gristle that irritates the tooth. And then there are his fellows who will not claim him — who prefer him a spectacle. For what are they, but curious? Hardened and bored by the grind of their days and the poverty of their hearth and heart. In all this, can Tarare be anything other than the monstrous man with his jaws wide open, his throat slack as he ingests mountains of offal, eats small animals alive, and takes in copious buttons, belts, and other fancies as the crowd demands? Grotesque, exhilarating, and strangely beautiful, Blakemore’s The Glutton is a delectable dish. Gobble it up!
“I write: I write because we lived together, because I was once amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.” Both of Perec’s parents were killed in the 1939-1945 war, his father early on as a French soldier, and, soon after, his mother sent to a death camp. Their young son was smuggled out of Paris and spent the war years in a series of children’s homes and safe villages. “My childhood belongs to those things which I know I don’t know much about,” he writes. W alternates two narratives, the first an attempt by Perec to set down the memories of his childhood and to examine these not only for their accuracy but in order to learn the way in which memory works. Often factual footnotes work in counterpoint to the ‘remembered’ narrative, underscoring the limitations of the experiences that formed it. Right from birth the pull of the Holocaust is felt upon Perec’s personal biography, and his story is being shaped by this force, sucking at it, sucking his family and all stability away. Sometimes he attaches to himself experiences of which he was merely a witness, the memories transformed by remembering and by remembering the remembering, and so forth, and by the infection of memories by extraneous imaginative details. “Excess detail is all that is needed to ruin a memory.” The absences around which these memories circulate fill the narrative with suppressed emotion. The other narrative begins as a sort of mystery novel in Part One, telling how one Gaspard Winckler is engaged by a mysterious stranger to track down the fate of the boy whose name he had unknowingly assumed and who had gone missing with his parents in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego where they had gone in search of an experience that would relieve the boy’s mutism. In Part 2, the tone changes to that of an encyclopedia and we begin to learn of the customs, laws and practices of the land of W, isolated in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego, a society organised exclusively around the principles of sport, “a nation of athletes where Sport and life unite in a single magnificent effort.” Perec tells us that ‘W’ was invented by him as a child as a focus for his imagination and mathematical abilities during a time when his actual world and his imaginative world were far apart, his mind filled with “human figures unrelated to the ground which was supposed to support them, disengaged wheels rotating in the void” as he longed for an ordinary life “like in the storybooks”. Life and sport on W are governed by a very complex system of competition, ‘villages’ and Games, “the sole aim to heighten competitiveness or, to put it another way, to glorify victory.” It is not long before we begin to be uncomfortable with some of the laws and customs of W, for instance, just as winners are lauded, so are losers punished, and all individual proper names are banned on W, with athletes being nameless (apart from an alphanumeric serial number) unless their winnings entitle them to bear, for a time, the name of one of the first champions of their event, for “an athlete is no more and no less than his victories.” Perec intimates that there is no dividing line between a rationally organised society valuing competition, and fascism — the first eliding into the second as a necessary result of its own values brought to their logical conclusions. “The more the winners are lauded, the more the losers are punished.” The athletes are motivated to peak performance by systematic injustice: “The Law is implacable but the Law is unpredictable.” Mating makes a sport of rape, and aging Veterans who can no longer compete and do not find positions as menial ‘officials’ are cast out and forced to “tear at corpses with their teeth” to stay alive. Perec’s childhood fantasy reveals the horrors his memoir is unable to face directly. We learn that the athletes wear striped uniforms, that some compete tarred and feathered or are forced to jump into manure by “judges with whips and cudgels.” We learn that the athletes are little more than skin and bone, and that their performances are consequently less than impressive. As the two strands of the book come together at the end, Perec tells of reading of the Nazi punishment camps where the torture of the inmates was termed ‘sport’ by their tormentors. The account of W ends with the speculation that at some time in the future someone will come through the walls that isolate the sporting nation and find nothing but “piles of gold teeth, rings and spectacles, thousands and thousands of clothes in heaps, dusty card indexes, and stocks of poor-quality soap.”
Question 7 is a masterful exploration of love, history, and the interconnectedness of human lives. Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, the book navigates the choices we make about love and the profound chain reactions that follow. This hypnotic work is both a love song to Flanagan's island home and a tribute to his parents. Exploring the idea that reality is never shaped by realists and that our lives often emerge from the stories of others and the narratives we create about ourselves.
Question 7 defies labels. It’s a memoir, a family history, a sweeping view of salient events, and, when paired with philosophical reflections, inventive imaginings, and a brilliant writer’s questing curiosity, the result is profoundly moving and in the words of Colm Toibin, Mark Haddon and The Observer— a masterpiece!
“Once I had the idea of writing the book as a chain reaction that begins with Rebecca West kissing HG Wells and leads to 100,000 people dying in Hiroshima, my father living and me being born – once I understood that without that kiss, there would be no bomb and no me – then disparate things that had haunted me for so long fell into place. I thought much about my parents who, in a world they knew to be meaningless, nevertheless asserted an idea of love as their answer to the horrors out of which my island home is torn.”
Find out more:
We will be discussing Question 7 in our online book group, Talking Books, on Tuesday 11 March. >>Join the Discussion
Out of the carton and onto your shelves! Any of these books will provide the substance for an increase in your reading time. Your books can be dispatched by overnight courier, or collected from our door.
Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies $38
The alpacas are nervous. Accusations are flying about a rigged election, a mysterious illness is spreading, the Alpaca News is being censored by higher powers, and skullduggery is threatening the Breeders Showcase. Amidst a mass of self-interested parties, a forthright vet and a diplomatic engineer strive to protect the herds and restore democracy. By turns vital, farcical, heartbreaking and chilling, the much-anticipated alpaca novel by Duncan Sarkies is a wild and tender leap – or, more accurately, pronk – into the heart of alpaca breeding, and a snapshot of a world at a crossroads. [Paperback]
”It’s like Succession, but with alpacas.” —Toby Manhire, The Spinoff
”I cannot think of another New Zealand writer who comes close to Sarkies’ restless intelligence, swift shifts of tone, technical control across several genres and sheer creative inventiveness.” —Fiona Farrell
”Any book about an election, political intrigue and general ratfuckery is going to grab my attention. An allegorical narrative that is most definitely of its time. Sarkies asks important questions, challenging his readers and doing it in an accessible way. I loved it.” —Grant Robertson
Black Sugarcane by Nafanua Purcell Kersel $30
A soft worrier, I’m Nua-No-Myth
speaking in centipede,
with a sweet hiding
in the dark of my cheek.
Restless in form and address, these engaging and generous poems ricochet from light to dark, quiet to loud, calm to violence. We meet a loved twin sister as she dives towards the Sacred Centre, a grandmother who knows everything by heart, a shrugging office clerk, and Nafanua herself, an enigmatic shapeshifter.
At the heart of Black Sugarcane is a sequence of erasure poems arising from the seminal essay 'In Search of Tagaloa' by Tui Atua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi. From the worlds contained in the text, these poems rise as if inevitable. Another sequence responds to the devastating tsunami that stuck between the Samoan islands of Upolu and Tutuila in September 2009. Within the line, within the word and even the letter, these poems speak to creation and translation, destruction and regeneration. [Paperback]
”The poems in Black Sugarcane are laced with panthers and cobras. Nafanua Purcell Kersel yields her machete-pen with ease, humour and aroha, clearing paths, riding waves, carving memory and bending time. Her poetic vision is both minuscule-microscopic and drone-distant, opening space for the va to take shape. She is writing on a branch from the same rakau as Selina Tusitala Marsh and Tusiata Avia.” —Anne-Marie Te Whiu
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) $30
How do we write about the singular experience of parenthood? Written in a 'state of attachment', or 'under the influence' of fatherhood, Childish Literature is an eclectic guide for novice parents, showing how the birth and growth of a child changes not only the present and the future, but also reshapes our perceptions of the past. Shifting from moving dispatches from his son's first year of existence, to a treatise on 'football sadness', to a psychedelic narrative where a man tries, mid-magic mushroom trip, to re-learn the subtle art of crawling, this latest work from Alejandro Zambra shows how children shield adults from despondency, self-absorption and the tyrannies of chronological time. At once a chronicle of fatherhood, a letter to a child and a work of fiction. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Childish Literature shows shows boundless — and bounding — enthusiasm for the chaos and curiosity that his son, Silvestre, has brought into his life. Alejandro Zambra makes being a writer seem like the least solitary, most joyful job in the world — an enthusiasm that makes this his most engaging book yet.” —Jonathan Gibbs, Times Literary Supplement
”What a rare and wonderful experience, to read a writer of such brilliance, wit and style as Alejandro Zambra on the subjects of fatherhood and childhood. I relished every page of this beautiful, surprising book.” —Mark O'Connell
”Zambra is one of my favourite living writers (which makes Megan McDowell one of my favourite translators). Childish Literature is funny, playful, sincere and, for me, as a new father, reassuring, not because of parenthood platitudes (quite the opposite), but for its line of anxious questioning on how one fathers a child without a ‘tradition of fatherhood’. It has clarified some of the depth of love alongside the concerns I have as a new father. Zambra is once again doing the work of great literature, providing (and provoking) old and new ideas around family, education, literature and art. He is childlike and deeply serious about the spaces and times we live in. If you have read this book, let's talk about it!” —Raymond Antrobus
”Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.” —Rivka Galchen
Heroines by Kate Zambreno $30
“I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order―pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature." Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon. In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it―from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism―she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor”, and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivised criticism. [Paperback]
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud by Lee Murray $28
Wellington, 1923: a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman 'falls' from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver. All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese-Pakeha writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit huli jing as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories. Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is an audacious blend of biography, mythology, horror and poetry that transcends genre to illuminate lives in the shadowlands of our history. [Paperback]
Speak / Stop by Noémi Lefebvre (translated from French by Sophie Lewis) $44
Speak / Stop comprises two interrelated texts: a chorus of unidentified voices followed by a work of literary criticism that only Noémi Lefebvre could write — a semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology. Abstracted, irreverent, and full of biting satire, Lefebvre picks apart hypocrisies in our lives and the language of our lives, skewering our literary pieties before delving headfirst into the paradox of self-criticism. Working against conventional notions of genre and form, Speak / Stop is "a madhouse of earthworm sentences" interrogating concerns of class and taste, ease, and inclusion/exclusion that are the foundations of Lefebvre's work. [Paperback]
"Lefebvre stages a sparkling dialogue about class, literature, and longing to escape one's life. Readers of experimental literature are in for a treat." —Publishers Weekly
"Lefebvre's approach is intellectual but unpretentious. Her pugnacious prose is consistently delightful. Using cultural criticism and fiction to further the possibilities of both, this is another rapturous work from Lefebvre, allergic to cliché and lazy thinking alike." —Declan Fry
The Magic Cap by Mireille Messier and Charlotte Parent $35
A delightfully illustrated picture book. Many moons ago, in a tiny, thatched cottage at the edge of the woods, lived two children named Isaura and Arlo with their hedgehog, Crispin. When their beloved pet becomes ill, Isaura suggests that they seek the magical healing power of gnomes. Convinced this will heal it, the children set off into the woods with humble offerings, hoping to attract the gnomes. The trick does not seem to work, however, and gnomes are nowhere to be seen despite the children's good intentions. Isaura and Arlo will have to remain hopeful and wish for a magical solution!
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life by Lulu Miller $37
When Lulu Miller’s relationship falls apart, she turns to an unlikely figure for guidance — the 19th-century naturalist, David Starr Jordan. Poring over his diaries, Lulu discovers a man obsessed with nature's hidden order, devoted to studying shimmering scales and sailing the world in search of new species of fish. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake sends more than a thousand of Jordan’s specimens, housed in glass jars, plummeting to the ground, the story of his resilience leads Lulu to believe she has found the antidote to life’s unpredictability. But lurking behind the tale of this great taxonomist lies a darker story waiting to be told: one about the human cost of attempting to define the form of things unknown. An idiosyncratic, personal approach to this fascinating scientific biography, Why Fish Dont Exist is an astonishing tale of newfound love, scientific discovery and how to live well in a world governed by chaos. [Now in paperback]
“I want to live at this book's address: the intersection of history and biology and wonder and failure and sheer human stubbornness. What a sumptuous, surprising, dark delight.” —Carmen Maria Machado
”Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten.” —The New York Times Book Review
”A story told with an open heart, every page of it animated by verve, nuance, and full-throated curiosity.” —Leslie Jamison
”This book will capture your heart, seize your imagination, smash your preconceptions, and rock your world.” —Sy Montgomery
”Moves gracefully between reporting and meditation, big questions and small moments. A magical hybrid of science, portraiture, and memoir-and a delight to read.” —Susan Orlean
Silk: A history in three metamorphoses by Aarathi Prasad $28
Through the scientists who have studied silk, and the biology of the animals from which it has been drawn, Prasad explores the global history, natural history, and future of a unique material that has fascinated the world for millennia. For silk, prized for its lightness, luminosity, and beauty is also one of the strongest biological materials ever known. More than a century ago, it was used to make the first bulletproof vest, and yet science has barely even begun to tap its potential. As the technologies it has inspired - from sutures to pharmaceuticals, replacement body parts to holograms - continue to be developed in laboratories around the world, they are now also beginning to offer a desperately needed, sustainable alternative to the plastics choking our planet. Prasad's Silk is a cultural and biological history from the origins and ancient routes of silk to the biologists who learned the secrets of silk-producing animals, manipulating the habitats and physiologies of moths, spiders and molluscs. Because there is more than one silk, there is more than one story of silk. More than one road, more than one people who discovered it, and wove its threads. [New paperback edition]
”A tour of the anecdotal, the industrial and the gruesome. Readers coming to this globetrotting and species-leaping volume expecting vignette after genteel vignette of 5,000-odd years of Chinese silk manufacture are in for a nasty shock. Here be spiders, and not just spiders, but metre-long Mediterranean clams, and countless moth species spinning their silks everywhere from Singapore to Suriname.” —Financial Times
Birds of the Nelson/Tasman Region, And where to find them by Peter Field $25
This clear and useful illustrated book describes the history, habits and habitats of all the birds known from this region, noting changes in abundance and distribution. The best sites to find the species are described, along with a set of maps to show these locations in detail. [Paperback]
Girl by Ruth Padel $38
Ruth Padel takes a fresh and questioning look at girlhood and its icons. Across a triptych of interlocking sequences, she unravels the millennia of myth woven around girls. A moving retelling of the Christian story transforms the Virgin Mary into a girl in a Primark T-shirt, facing a life shaped by divine will. Unearthed from the Cretan labyrinth, a prehistoric Snake Goddess is reshaped at the hands of a male archaeologist. Between these evocative figures, myth turns personal. Delicately crafted lyrics, sometimes taking adventurous shapes, explore snapshots from the poet's own life blended with archetypes from India, European fairy tale, ancient Greece and Urban Dictionary- girl as soul, girl as creative energy, girl as the sacred power of nature, vulnerable but unstoppable. [Paperback]
”One of our most gifted poets turns her gaze to the terrain of girlhood: Padel taps into that unique and beautiful time where all the mystery, wonder and mythmaking fold into each other. This is tender and exquisite poetry” —Mona Arshi
”In these searching, restless poems, Ruth Padel excavates the violence, beauty and danger of girlhood, asking again and again ‘Who makes you girl? When does it stop?’ Formally inventive and with a dazzling control of the lyric line, Padel uses the poem as time travelling machine, examining the acts of resistance that connect girls to the women they will become.” —Kim Moore
The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming our humanity in a digital world by Christine Rosen $40
Human experiences are disappearing. Social media, gaming and dating apps have usurped in-person interaction; handwriting is no longer prioritised in schools; and emotion is sooner expressed through likes and emojis than face-to-face conversations. With headphones in and eyes trained on our phones, even boredom has been obliterated. But, as Christine Rosen expertly shows, when we embrace this mediated life and conform to the demands of the machine, we risk becoming disconnected and machine-like ourselves. There is another way. For too long, under the influence of corporate giants and tech enthusiasts, we've accepted the idea that change always means better. But rapidly developing technology isn't neutral - it's ambivalent, and capable of enormous harm. To improve our well-being, help future generations flourish and recover our shared humanity, we must become more critical, mindful users of technology, and more discerning of how it uses us. From TikTok challenges and algorithms to surveillance devices and conspiracy culture, The Extinction of Experience reveals the human crisis of our digital age - and urges us to return to the real world, while we still can. [Paperback]
”Technology is having pervasive effects on us all, effects which are hard to put into words. Christine Rosen finds the words I've longed for. The Extinction of Experience is an extremely important book, and its message all the more urgent as AI threatens to make everything effortless, frictionless, and disembodied.” —Jonathan Haidt
”A fascinating and timely book about the essential real-world experiences we're watching vanish before our screen-addled eyes. Resisting the lure of nostalgia, but rejecting the glib assumption that more technology is always better, Christine Rosen makes a passionate case for the face-to-face, embodied, analogue, unpredictable, unmediated life, and its centrality to a vibrant and truly meaningful human existence.” —Oliver Burkeman
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
February already. Read our latest newsletter, and find out what you’ll be reading next.
7 February 2025
There are still plenty of gems in our fiction sale. It’s a great opportunity to discover a new author, to delve into a different genre, and improve your reading addiction. If you haven’t read Nell Zink, you can choose: Doxology or Nicotine. Both are excellent. If you like music the former, but for me the latter is still my favourite. Zink’s writing, with its overtones and undertones (plenty of sly digs at cultural norms and hilarious metaphors about relationships), is clever and exhilarating. In Nicotine she explores family and relationships in her own surprising way. Enter Penny, the unemployed business school graduate, daughter of Norm, the Jewish shaman who is famous for his healing clinics and extreme spiritualism, and Amalia, a Kogi, the young second wife rescued from the poverty of South America, who has become a very successful corporate banker. With parents like this, you know from the beginning that Penny carries some baggage. When her aged father dies, Penny is distraught and is left with more questions than answers about her family. Needing distraction, her family decides that she needs something to do. They send her to rescue her grandparents’ long-abandoned home in a dodgy suburb of New Jersey. We enter Nicotine; — the home of squatter activists whose common cause is the right to smoke. Penny is intrigued by the squatters and attracted to Rob, the very good-looking bicycle mechanic. Rather than throw them out of the house, she becomes part of the group, developing relationships with the home dwellers that will change not only her life, but theirs too. Penny, despite her seeming uselessness, becomes the catalyst for change for all, with many hilarious machinations and sly digs at social conformity on all sides along the way. Zink puts her characters through the paces, never letting up on them, (nor giving up), and plays with societal concepts of capitalism, pragmatism and spirituality. Zink is a ‘naughty’ writer — toying with her reader and her characters, constantly making fun of both in a very appealing and clever way. If you like to look at life a bit sideways then you’ll enjoy her style, playfulness and reflections on people — their gullibility, as well as their backbone.
Could he even write a review of a book he had read about someone writing about sentences that he in turn had read which were written by yet other people, some of whom, or, rather, some of which, he himself had read directly, if that is the word, that is to say not just in the book about sentences in which these sentences also appear and which he has also read? The question mark, when it finally arrived, seemed somehow out of place, so far did it trail the part of the sentence he had just written in which the matter of the question appeared early, all those clauses shoving the question mark to an awkward distance, already the thought that the sentence described was changing direction, as thoughts do, but the sentence was still obliged to display the mark that would make the first part of the sentence, and indeed the whole sentence thereby into a question, there was a debt to be paid after all, he was lucky to get off without interest. The separation of the question mark from the quested matter was not the only reservation he had about the sentence he had just written, he had other reservations, both about its structure and its content, in other words both about its grammar and its import, if that is the right word. One reservation was that he had chosen to write the sentence in the third person, a habit he had acquired, or an affectation that he had adopted, that depersonalised his reviews and made them easier to write and, he hoped, more enjoyable to read, certainly, he thought, less embarrassing for himself to read, or should that be re-read, not that he was particularly inclined to do such a thing. These reviews were also written in the past tense, for goodness sake. Could he write in the first person and in the present tense, he wondered, or was that a mode he contrarily reserved for fiction? Can I even write a review of a book I have read, he wrote as an experiment, about someone writing about sentences that he has read which were written by yet other people, some of whom, or, rather, some of which, I have read directly, if that is the word, that is to say not just in the book about sentences in which these sentences also appear and which I have also read?, he wrote, though I must say, he thought, that question mark is more problematic than ever. Also, would it not be ludicrous, he thought, to even attempt to write a review about a book about fine sentences, or exceptional sentences, or exemplary sentences or whatever, from William Shakespeare to Anne Boyer, including sentences from several of my favourite writers, though not perhaps the sentences of theirs that I would choose if I had been choosing, he thought, when my own sentences churn on, when in my own repertoire I have only commas and full stops, a continuation mark and a stopping mark, when those two marks for him are already too much for him to handle, accustomed as he had once made himself to the austerity of the full stop alone, you could write a whole book using only full stops, he thought, or he had once thought. He had wandered, and tried to return to the task in hand, or the book in hand, or to the thought in head, so to speak. Because the book was about sentences he found himself unable to write any sentences about it. If he wrote a review, he thought, he had no doubt that at least some of the readers of that review, if not all of the readers of that review, if there were any such readers, which seemed unlikely, would find his sentences fell short of their subject, or if they did not fall short they would quaver under their scrutiny, weaken and collapse, which is another sort of falling. His sentences would rather point than be pointed at. Thinking of writing would have to suffice. I would like to write, he thought of writing, that this book, Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon, is the sort of book that anyone interested in reading better, or, indeed, in writing better, which goes without saying, as writing is a subset of reading, if that goes without saying, though not everyone’s subset, he thought, and would have said had he been saying instead of thinking and writing, or, rather thinking and thinking of writing, Brian Dillon is good company in working out how text works when it works well, but, although he thought of writing this, as he had said, see, he does say though he said he was not saying, he did not write this as, by this time, his comma-infested sentences were almost unable to move in any direction even if not in a straight line, bring on the full stops, he thought.
"Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping.” —Jean-François Lyotard
Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. The collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create. 'Prairie' is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest, replete with wildflowers, ominous rivers, fireflies, cattle lowing and ghostly apparitions; 'Dresses' ponders the relationship between literature and clothing, and is entirely constructed out of quotes from other works; 'Art' is an imaginative illustrated essay which explores the relationship between fiction and visual art; and 'Other' offers an assemblage of irregular stories and essays that are hilarious or heartbreaking by turns. Out of these varied materials, Dutton builds a haunting landscape of wildflowers, megadams, black holes, violence, fear, virtual reality, abiding strangeness and indefinable beauty.
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
These books are ready to join your reading stack. Click through to secure your copies. Books can be sent to you by overnight courier, or collected from our door.
Books of Mana: 180 Māori-authored books of significance edited by Jacinta Ruru, Angela Wanhalla and Jeanette Wikaira $65
Books of Mana celebrates the rich tradition of Māori authorship in Aotearoa New Zealand. It reveals the central place of over 200 years of print literacy within te ao Māori and vividly conveys how books are understood as taonga tuku iho – treasured items handed down through generations. In this beautifully illustrated collection of essays, some of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most renowned Māori thinkers join the editors in a wide-ranging kōrero about the influence and empowerment of Māori writing. Books of Mana builds on the work of editors Jacinta Ruru, Angela Wanhalla and Jeanette Wikaira, who curated Te Takarangi, a selected list of Māori-authored non-fiction books published since 1815. Launched in 2018, the Te Takarangi list now comprises 180 titles, each representing an important touchstone in an extensive landscape of Māori literature. Books of Mana explores the ways these books have enriched lives and helped to foster understanding of Māori experience, both at home in Aotearoa and internationally. What emerges from the essays collected within these covers is a clear vision of the importance of writing as activism and a profound sense that these Māori-authored non-fiction books, and the knowledge they contain, are taonga. [Hardback]
Golden Enterprise: New Zealand Chinese merchants, 1860s—1970s by Phoebe H. Li $80
Golden Enterprise offers a compelling re-examination of New Zealand Chinese history from the 1860s to the 1970s, focusing on the pivotal role of Cantonese merchants. These early entrepreneurs not only facilitated Chinese immigration but also shaped the identity of Chinese New Zealanders within the broader context of New Zealand’s shifting relationships with China, Britain, and the wider world. Drawing on extensive archival research in both Chinese and English sources, Phoebe H. Li illuminates the merchants’ transnational business and social networks, providing fresh perspectives on Chinese migration to the South Pacific. Well illustrated. [Hardback]
Aerth by Deborah Tompkins $36
Magnus lives on Aerth, which is currently moving into an Ice Age, with a strange virus limiting the population. When the planet Urth is discovered, he vows to become an astronaut and travel there, but on arriving he finds it hot, crowded, corrupt and violent, despite it being initially welcoming. Slowly Magnus realises he will not find what he's looking for, but there seems no way back. Aerth is a story about migration, climate, conspiracy theories and interplanetary homelessness. [Paperback with French flaps]
”What planet are we on? Can we leave? Does it mean we can never go home again if we do? What does a phrase like worlds apart really mean? Deep-forged, witty and resonant, this dimensionally stunning novella deals with dystopia and hope in a way that reveals them as profoundly related. A work of real energy and narrative grip, brilliantly earthy and airy at once, it blasts open a reader's past/future consciousness and taps into literary antecedents as disparate as Hardy and Atwood. Funny, terrifying, humane, this is a thrilling journey in a story the size of a planet — no, the size of several, all of them altogether strange and uncannily familiar.” —Ali Smith
Equality: What it means and why it matters by Thomas Piketty and Michael J. Sandel $29
In this compelling dialogue, two of the world’s most influential thinkers reflect on the value of equality and debate what citizens and governments should do to narrow the gaps that separate us. Ranging across economics, philosophy, history, and current affairs, Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel consider how far we have come in achieving greater equality. At the same time, they confront head-on the extreme divides that remain in wealth, income, power, and status nationally and globally. What can be done at a time of deep political instability and environmental crisis? Piketty and Sandel agree on much: more inclusive investment in health and education, higher progressive taxation, curbing the political power of the rich and the overreach of markets. But how far and how fast can we push? Should we prioritise material or social change? What are the prospects for any change at all with nationalist forces resurgent? How should the left relate to values like patriotism and local solidarity where they collide with the challenges of mass migration and global climate change? To see Piketty and Sandel grapple with these and other problems is to glimpse new possibilities for change and justice but also the stubborn truth that progress towards greater equality never comes quickly or without deep social conflict and political struggle. [Hardback]
Lexicon of Affinities by Ida Vitale (translated from Spanish by Sean Manning) $39
With entries as varied as 'elbow', 'Ophelia', 'progress', the painter Giorgio Morandi, 'chess', 'Eulalia' (a friend of the author's aunt), and 'unicorn', Ida Vitale constructs a dictionary of her long and passionately engaged artistic life. Taking the reader by the arm, she invites us to become her confidant, sharing her remarkable 20th century as a member of a storied generation of Latin American writers, of whom she is the last remaining alive. It's a compendium of friendship, travel, reading, and the endless opportunities she found for 'the joyful possibility of creation.' Like every dictionary, Lexicon of Affinities seeks to impose order on chaos, even if in its exuberant, whimsical profusion it lays bare the unstable character of the cosmos. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Vitale's prose is drop dead gorgeous." —Jeremy Garber
"Extraordinary. Giving due attention to Vitale's prose will bring you reassurance and optimism." —Lunate
"A vibrant and playful memoir-in-dictionary-form. A joyous celebration of a life well lived, with entries that range from the simple to the titanic." —Literary Hub
"Indispensable. Vitale's language has a precision that reminds us that memory exists: that today precision is an act of distinction and recognition." —Letras Libre
Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $42
The National Book Award winner’s breathtaking new novel about neo-Nazis, particle physics, and Johann Sebastian Bach. The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler's adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the area. Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai's novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face. [Paperback]
"Krasznahorkai's work offers, to a degree rare in contemporary life, one of the central pleasures of fiction: an encounter with the otherness of other people. He's a universalist cut loose from the shibboleths of humanism." —Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times
"The best new novel I have read this year is written in a single sentence that sprawls over 400 pages. Herscht 07769 by the Hungarian genius Laszlo Krasznahorkai is an urgent depiction of our global social and political crises, rendering our impotent slide into authoritarianism with compassionate clarity. It is also a book whose timeliness derives precisely from the way its unusual style disrupts the ordinary literary mechanics of time. A masterful study in what it means to keep trudging through a world that is always ending but will not end." —Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post
Q&A by Adrian Tomine $30
Adrian Tomine began his professional career at the age of sixteen, and in the decades since, has made a name for himself as a bestselling graphic novelist, screenwriter, and New Yorker cover artist. Now, for the first time, he's taking questions. Part personal history, part masterclass (illustrated throughout with photos, outtakes, and step-by-step process images), Q&A is an unprecedented look into Tomine's working methods and a trove of insight, guidance, and advice for aspiring and practising creatives alike. [Paperback]
”Adrian Tomine has more ideas in twenty panels than novelists have in a lifetime.” —Zadie Smith
Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A family story from Gaza by Samah Sabawi $40
The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland. Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands. Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia. [Paperback]
Young Hag by Isabel Greenberg $45
Once there was magic in Britain. There were dragons and wizards and green knights and kings who pulled swords out of stones. But now, the doors to the Otherworld have closed. Young Hag has grown up believing her mother and grandmother are the last witches in the land. But when tragedy strikes, she turns her back on these tales. Where is their magic when they really need it? Then one day they find a changeling in the woods. Confronted with real magic at last, Young Hag has no choice but to believe. She sets off on the greatest quest of her life; but can Young Hag bring the magic back? Or will she become a footnote in the tale of famous kings and wizards? From the acclaimed creator of Glass Town and The One Hundred Nights of Hero comes a dazzlingly imaginative escape into the world of myth. Young Hag ingeniously reinvents the women in Arthurian legend, transforming the tales of old into a heart-warming coming-of-age story. [Paperback]
Hum by Helen Phillips $37
In a hot and gritty city populated by super-intelligent robots called 'Hums', May seeks some reprieve from recent hardships and from her family's addiction to their devices. She splurges on a weekend away at the Botanical Garden — a rare, green refuge in the heart of the city, where forests, streams and animals flourish. But when it becomes clear that the Garden is not the idyll she hoped it would be, and her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a Hum of uncertain motives in order to restore the life of her family. Gripping and unflinching, Hum is about our most cherished human relationships in a world compromised by climate change and dizzying technological revolution, a world with both dystopian and utopian possibilities. [Paperback]
”What's more intoxicating than a Helen Phillips novel? Her books have blown open the doors of what's possible with the art of storytelling — and her latest, Hum, is her best work yet: one that captures, with fire and grace, our future and what it means to love, to persist, and to be human. This is a hold-your-breath book. Buckle up and get ready to deeply feel the joy — the thrill, the magic — of reading.” —Paul Yoon
”An indelible family portrait and a narrative tour de force, Hum generates almost unbearable tension and unease from start to end. Stunning, strangely beautiful, and written from a place of deep compassion but also with a clear and analytical eye. Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future. I loved it.” —Jeff VanderMeer
Code Dependent: Living in the shadow of A.I. by Madhumita Murgia $40
What does it mean to be human in a world that is rapidly changing thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, of automated decision-making that both draws on and influences our behaviour? Through the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Madhumita Murgia, AI Editor at the FT, exposes how A.I. can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency - and shatter our illusion of free will. AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small. In this compelling work, Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity. [Paperback]
”Code Dependent is the intimate investigation of AI that we've been waiting for, and it arrives not a moment too soon.” —Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Clive and His Hats by Jessica Spanyol $18
Meet Clive — and his imagination! Clive loves his collection of hats, and each one suggests a different adventure. He enjoys playing with them, and sharing them with his friends. A gentle, affectionate book, celebrating diversity and challenging gender stereotypes. [Board book]
Also lovely: Clive and His Babies.
Mr Moon Wakes Up by Jemima Sharpe $20
Mr Moon always sleeps. He naps during hide-and-seek, passes out on puzzles and dozes during adventure stories. But what would happen if Mr Moon ever woke up? Would he lead us to hidden, dream-like worlds, filled with fantastic friends and exciting games? And if he did, would we remember in the morning? Beautifully illustrated. [Paperback]
Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we’ve been reading and recommending. Choose from the latest arrivals and from our annual fiction sale. Find out about some special offers.
31 January 2025
He had always found the countryside horrible, but this, he now realised, was not due to anything inherent in the landscape, so to call it, but due to the rurality that has been imposed everywhere upon the landscape, a rurality fundamentally at odds with the landscape, smothering it, a rurality in some places intolerably dense and in other places miserably attenuated yet everywhere resulting in what he experienced, driving through it, as a terrible claustrophobia. The road, and how he clung to it, provided the only chance of escape from the rurality pressing down upon him, and yet it was the road that brought them, with every bend, deeper and deeper into the countryside. As he drove, he thought of the book that he was reading, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton, there on the back seat, just in case, though circumstances were unlikely to allow any reading on this journey, or at least he hoped not, certainly not when he was driving, although he had been known to read a book when riding a bicycle, foolishly, where was he, the book, and how the feeling of unease inherent in the stories in the ‘Prairie’ section, especially what he now remembered as the feeling of unease when the narrator is driving through the prairie, though what even is a prairie, he wondered, is any of the landscape we have been driving through today anything like a prairie, the feeling of unease perhaps arises from the unresolved transitional state that the narrator finds herself in, in the prairie or driving through the prairie, whatever that is, either by herself or with other people, members of her family perhaps, or other people, somehow sharing a small capsule of hyperawareness moving through an indeterminate and possibly oppressive landscape, just as in all car journeys and in all stories, borne on detail by detail through what otherwise could have been a long view, though a long view is nothing but impressionistic at best, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with impressionistic. The road is what matters. In Dutton’s stories, he thought, all manner of often small but generally disquieting uncertainties and disruptions, if uncertainties and disruptions could be anything but disquieting, are introduced into the text or into the narrator’s mind, if there is any difference between the text and the narrator’s mind, and move their weight upon it in causing bends and dips that the narrator must steer herself around or through. In a classic story, as Chekhov iterated, any detail introduced must eventually be discharged, the gun seen early will be fired later, which, he thought, is fundamentally a lie, life is not like that really, and neither are Dutton’s stories. The firing of Chekhov’s gun, he thought, provides relief from the expectation that the gun will at some point be fired, literature is fundamentally reassuring in this way though it has no reason and no right to be. Is that why we read? He had wondered. Dutton’s stories have no such reassurances of shape and no catharses. Details bulge into hyperawareness and the narrator must intensify her awareness of them and steer her anxiety around them and between them, and the cumulation of undischarged and perhaps undischargeable details in the stories result in angst, just like in real life, or so he has found and in fact, if he admitted it to himself, has recently increasingly found, or so it seemed to him, grasping the steering wheel and turning it this way and that as he drove them through this increasingly intolerable rurality. He was now overaware of every turn of the steering wheel, of every acceleration and deceleration, of the way that every slight move he made of his body was translated into or was dictated by the movement of the vehicle upon the infinite turns and inclines of the road, each turn and incline composed as it was of an infinitude of subturns and subinclines, each of which required a subresponse from him as he drove upon them, each of which demanded of him that he not make even the slightest error in his driving. Whereas once he used to feel himself or managed to somehow make himself one with the machine, an extension of the vehicle, moving as one being over the terrain, he was now finding himself uncomfortably separate from the vehicle, acting upon it and responding to it consciously, to every minute variation of the terrain consciously, to every bend and every incline, hyperaware, as if he was writing an infinitely detailed story or a set of instructions for achieving an impossibly complex task, the task of guiding them safely through the rurality of this possibly prairie-like non-prairie landscape, keeping the car not only on the road but comfortably so, a task certainly impossible in its totality but, he hoped, perhaps just achievable as a string of details, a string of details for which the accumulating angst was certainly preferable to discharge. Is the vehicle responding differently, very slightly differently to the terrain, to the bends and inclines that comprise the road they are travelling upon, is there something in the steering, he wondered, or in the wheels, or in the response of the engine to the accelerator, he couldn’t isolate anything, everything seemed fine and the wheels had been recently aligned so it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the car, so perhaps the disconnect he was experiencing was between his awareness-and-intention and his body, perhaps he was becoming or even needed to become hyperaware of his own body, perhaps he was inducing in himself by merely thinking about it one of those degenerative conditions in which, before it is too far progressed, every movement necessarily becomes a set of conscious micro-instructions to the body, micro-instructions that make the movement at first possible but ultimately impossible. He had once written a very detailed description of a person walking up some stairs, he had broken down this action into the smallest possible micro-actions, and he himself had walked up some stairs and worked out how to describe these micro-actions in words and it had filled or wasted several pages, and after that he occasionally found himself repeating the exercise, and it had initially just been an exercise, involuntarily for other actions, which was at first intriguing but ultimately very unpleasant, even horrific, the mind is a fragile instrument to which everything becomes a threat. Everything. He drove on.
‘O brave new world, that has such people in't.’
Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.
Briar and Rose are left to fend for themselves when the machine leaves a red line around their house. Their mother is working at the hotel and Leif’s in charge, until he leaves them. There is a house empty, but safe. There are horses, and for Rose a particular horse, Gliff. There are the verifibles and the undesirables. To be one of the latter is dangerous, and eventually the red line will come for you, unless…
Ali Smith weaves myth and story, enjoys language like no other writer, and brings charcaters into your mind, and heart, who won’t leave you. Sharp with urgency and as playful as a dance, Gliff is a piece of genius.
Find out more: