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23 October 2026
A man puts on a uniform and goes to a country he thinks he’ll understand. A place where he thinks he can make a difference, or so he infers in one of his explanations. He goes out of frustration, because of poverty, to escape his responsibilities, due to his own sense of failure — or any number of reasons. He returns ashamed, defeated, wishing for escape, confused, belligerent, damaged, haunted, fortunate to be alive. In a new country, his grandson Arjun asks him about the past, about the war, for a school project. He promises to write something to capture his time as a peacekeeper. The Sri Lankan civil war was a 26-year conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LLTE (Tamil Tigers), from 1983-2009. In 1987, the Indian goverment sent a peacekeeping force. While initially welcomed in some quarters, the IPKF became increasingly unpopular and a ‘peace force’ in name only, before withdrawing in 1990. In U.X.O. the narrator is a grandfather negotiating the past with himself. In an attempt to tell his story, he tells many stories. Gnanalingam cleverly sets these as ‘drafts’ — each story a retelling of a day, a partiuclar event or, conversely, many events. Each draft starts with ‘This is how I went to Sri Lanka.’ The man is a lowly solider, the lowest rank, part of a four-person patrol. They are there to check, watch, and question. They are disliked. The narrator, partly chosen for his origins, he is Indian Tamil, is surprised by the locals’ distrust; the others on his patrol less disturbed by it. Yet we only have the narrator’s view: his re-tellings often putting him in a better light than his fellows. Are his clutch of notes, which he hands over to Arjun’s mother (a Sri Lankan Tamil) a confession, a justification, a denial, or a witnessing? In U.X.O. Gnanalingam cuts to the heart of conflict and war crimes, drawing on UN reports and family history, as well as literature and analytical histories. This is a novel with rich characters, writing that grabs you and doesn’t look away from the violence: its consequences for both victim and perpetrator. Who is accountable for actions commited in the height of madness or callousness? And can one ever absolve oneself from one’s actions, whether that is done as an individual or as part of a group or behalf of the state — where does the repsonsibility lie? This is also a story of a family, of generations, and the consequences of actions and behaviours — of what is said or done in love or anger. It’s a story of dislocation, externally and internally, both physically and culturally. Drawing on literary traditions of narration and philosophical studies of genocide, Gnanalingam not only brings to light the atrocities commited in the name of the more powerful, but delivers it with consideration to form, making this an important and interesting work. Gnanalingam is an excellent writer and I will not be surprised to see this novel on the book awards shortlist in 2027.
‘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?’ —2026 Booker Prize judges’ citation
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
MAY WE FEED THE KING by Rebecca Perry $35
May We Feed the King dances between a historical subject who resists the march of progress and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present, to offer a beguiling meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.
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!).
ON TYRANNY (Graphic edition) by Timothy Snyder and Nora Krug Special price: $36
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. This graphic edition of this important book is given even greater depth and resonance by the illustrations by Nora Krug. Use the code DEMOS for a 25% discount (usually $48). Only a few copies left at the special price!
END TIMES FASCISM by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor $40
”Their analysis of contemporary fascism is grounded and convincing - and I love the explosion of language that comes from their conversations, their passion, and their insistence that we make a vibrant common life on earth that reverses climate catastrophe and affirms social and economic equality." —Judith Butler
THE VIVISECTORS by Missouri Williams $35
"The final chapter of Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors is titled ‘The Future Sublime’ and I think this is it: a lush, verdant, light-saturated take on bad nature, contaminated politics and rotten institutions that is both awesome and terrifying. Singularly strange, ambitious and brilliant." —Kate Briggs, Goldsmiths Prize judge
A selection of books from our shelves to mark Labour Day. Click through to find out more:
When I refer to myself as We, I mean both I and Me. Me is not introspective at all and exists, really, only in the eyes of others. I is invisible to others but always watching, including watching Me, or, rather, watching the effect of Me on others. Whether these others are more like Me or more like I is a matter purely for speculation; they may well be their own form of We, but this I cannot know. I would like to have an effect on how these others perceive Me. I would like them to like Me, I suppose, so I and Me must be connected in some way, but probably no more than a practical way. Possibly I need Me more than Me needs I. Me might get on just fine without I, for all I know. Separated from I, Me is an object made of what surrounds Me in the world (so to call it): Me is a kind of Mirror, showing the world what the world presents to be seen. I is the only certain subject but, as this is too lonely to believe, it suits I to believe that the world is full of subjectivity, even if it isn’t, even if I is the only subject. We gets things done: I and Me work sometimes at least quite well together, but if I want to really understand the grammar of things getting done I must separate I from Me, at least as a thinking excercise. I must split the subject from the object. I must separate I from Me, a task for which I will need words, if it is not the case that all words perform this separation anyway by virtue of their nature. But really I am interested only in the grammar of this separation. The lexis of whatever I might write is fairly unimportant; words might be substituted for other words at any time without changing the form or the meaning of the form. Words are of the world they represent, but grammar is a form of understanding. Me might have the words but I supply the grammar. Consciousness is merely grammar, after all. If I were to write about Me, I would call this an autobiography as a joke. I would call it Life of M(e). I could substitute pretty much any set of details for the character of Me because these details are not important other than what the manner of their presentation might reveal. I could just make it up; Me is a good sport. But I might as well use the biographical details of a famous film actor, because these mean nothing and they belong to everyone, and they might make it clear that I am writing about Me and not I. Or perhaps that is not clear. I am interested only in mechanics, not in what passes through the machine. I am only interested in awareness, not in that of which I am aware. An actor is always playing a part, even when they are not playing a part, and every Me is an actor. Who is Me without the script they’re soaking in? Just like any object, Me is tossed about by the medium that holds Me in place, the medium that really is one substance with Me, except to the extent that I might think otherwise, as a game. I would like to think that I can have some effect upon Me, or on how the others might see Me, but really I’m not sure. The more I think about this, the less I think that I have an effect, or the less the effect that I think I have. I can’t say that this isn’t a problem. Me may not need I but I am somehow bound to Me, whether I can have an effect on Me or not. When I write, though, I slip my leash. When I write there is no Me and I can for a while be free, free at least of Me. As Rachel Cusk writes in her novel Life of M, which I have not been able to read without reading it as a laboratory of exactly all this stuff, whether she was thinking it or not, “Being a creator was like being a dog that runs away from its violent master. For a while it runs free, it runs in search of something, but in the end there is nowhere else for it to go but back home.”
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 Beaded Curtain by Lloyd Jones $40
Part autobiography, part memoir, part quest, lauded writer Lloyd Jones's The Beaded Curtain is a trenchant exploration of the artist as witness. The text gets about from Jones's Lower Hutt childhood and youthful wanderings across the USA to formative experiences such as seeing clothes from Hiroshima and his encounters with the Jewish Memorial in Berlin. From the hills of the Wairarapa to Hiroshima and Waiheke Island, he looks at examples of mavericks, in his own family and in those of poets and conscientious objectors. He is, throughout, daringly innovative, the text folding one event inside another. With language so precise and at times so coruscating that it may have been cut from stone, and with a candour and humanity that draws the reader deep into Jones's preoccupations and memories, The Beaded Curtain challenges, rails and mourns as he grapples with the past. [Paperback with French flaps]
‘A beaded curtain shifts and clatters in the doorway of Lloyd Jones’ mind, filtering early life, explorations, hauntings, and the terrible violences — domestic and global — that we too quickly turn from. This compelling narrative testifies to a writer’s vital work: paying attention and asking we do the same.’ — Kate De Goldi
>>Left on the page.
Practice by Rosalind Brown $28
In a small room in an Oxford college, at the worn-out end of January, Annabel works on an essay about Shakespeare. She has a carefully considered plan for her day, but as the essay's deadline looms, so too does the urge to procrastinate and the insistent presence of other people. Elaborate erotic fantasies, telephone calls from her boyfriend, family and friends who demand her attention, and darker crises, obliquely glimpsed — all these distractions threaten to disturb the much-cherished quiet in Annabel's mind. Nicely written. [Paperback]
”From the narrowest and most confined of premises, Rosalind Brown has conjured a novel as big as a world. Reading this book is a strange and shimmering joy; a glimpse of a miracle.” —Jon McGregor
”I had a lot of fun with Practice by Rosalind Brown. I think only she and Proust can get me into the space where I'm happy to read about someone walking across a room for all these pages. You're reading about reading; you have to be really good to do that in a compelling way.” —Helen Oyeyemi
”A novel spectacularly committed to a young woman's intellectual and bodily appetites, written in exact and tender prose.” —Sarah Moss
”A fascinating, beautifully wrought theatre of the mind that reminded me by turns of Virginia Woolf and Nicholson Baker.” —Olivia Laing
”A day in the life of an introspective and erudite student, Practice makes clear the gulf between an interior life and the one that is presented to the world. Rosalind Brown has a rare ability to record — with great humour, originality and near-hallucinogenic precision — the significance, or not, of each tumbling moment and thought.” —Jennifer Higgie
>>Language on the page.
>>Thick with its own threads.
The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia (translated from Italian by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver) $28
In the piazza, a man lies dead. No one will say if they witnessed his killing. This presents a challenge to the investigating officer, a man who earnestly believes in the values of a democratic and modern society. Indeed, his enquiries are soon blocked off by a wall of silence and vested interests; he must work against the community to save it and expose the truth. The narrative moves on two levels: that of the investigator, who reveals a chain of savage crimes; and that of the bystanders and watchers, of those complicit with secret power, whose gossipy, furtive conversations have only one end — to stop the truth coming out. [Paperback]
”The most intelligent detective story I have ever read and the ideal introduction to Sciascia's brilliant but little known oeuvre.” —Thomas Wright
”The best evocation of Sicily I've read, this is one for the crime connoisseurs.” —Leslie Forbes
”The accessibility and beauty of Sciascia's prose suggest he wanted it to be an antidote to the silent complicity and self-deception confronting both him and his heroes. When he wrote about crime, he was also writing about truth, solitude and belonging.” —Observer
”The first novel written in Italy about the mafia. Powerful and remarkable, full of telling details and uncomfortable truths.” —The Times
Juno the Bakery: Crafted in Copenhagen by Emil Glaser, Nina Schmiegelow, and Noah Erhun, with photographs by Petra Kleis $85
Recipes from the world-renowned neighbourhood bakery in Copenhagen. For the first time, Juno the Bakery shares a selection of the recipes that have made the bakery an international attraction in Copenhagen. Whether you are an amateur or an experienced baker, you can now bake buns, bread, and cakes from Juno the Bakery in your own kitchen. The book provides a thorough introduction to their sourdough breads, laminated puff pastry, and their world-renowned cardamom buns with recipes for bread, buns, croissants and cakes made with seasonal ingredients. In the Christmas chapter you can find recipes such as saffron scented Lucia buns, French nougat, and traditional Danish kransekage. Behind Juno the Bakery are Swedish Emil Glaser and his wife Nina Schmiegelow. In 2017 the couple opened the doors to the neighbourhood bakery at Århusgade 48 in Copenhagen. The goal is simple: the best ingredients, gentle preparation, and pure, delicious flavours. Photographer Petra Kleis has documented everything with photos of the bakery and the recipes. Recommended! [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Lining up to go into the bakery.
You Must Live: New poetry from Palestine translated and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, and edited by Jori Graham $32
Composed over the past few years and gathered under desperate conditions, these poems, which appear in the original Arabic alongside English translations, are haunted by the long spectre of occupation, transforming laments for lost family, friends and places into a new vision of home. This is a poetry of witness and profound lyric imagination, attuned to the hidden beauty of the natural landscape, the music of sparrows under crowded skies, the electricity of complex desire, daring to conceive a dazzling future beyond dispossession and military siege. You Must Live is the latest entry into the rich tradition of Palestinian poetry, negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, to provide a glimpse into the full interiority of Palestinian life. [Paperback]
”These poems testify to the resilience of the artists, and the role that poetry still has to give voice and bear witness in times of crisis. Unsurprisingly, there's a taut urgency throughout. There's joy and humour too, even if the latter is pitch black.” —Rishi Dastidar, Guardian
”After years of massive sorrow and staggering dehumanization, this collection represents some of what has been lost — the neighborhoods; the exquisite loving consciousness; the proud and humble society; the triumphant bravery of precious human beings, families like yours and mine, who never stopped speaking and singing. This book should be required reading for every human being, especially those who have contributed to this disaster.” —Naomi Shihab Nye
”Everyone with any humanity in the face of what is happening in Palestine should read this outstanding collection of poetry. These words emerging from among the ruins of Gaza and from the devastation in the West Bank have an electric immediacy, a burning anger, a sadness over what has been lost, and a graphic sense of time and place which, for some of these poets, is a recording of their last moments of life. It is impossible to read these poems and remain unmoved, impossible not to feel awe for their courage, and impossible not to share their mixed anger and sadness. Like the greatest war poetry, more than any picture, any video, any reportage can, the words of these poets convey the full horror of life under siege.” —Rashid Khalidi
”You Must Live gathers testamentary art miraculously composed, in the midst of genocide, by poets who have borne unspeakable losses, the majority of whom are still within the debris fields of Gaza, survivors now on the precipice of famine, yet with pens in hand, in the ancient tradition of al-woquouf ala al-atlal, 'standing in the ruins' of the beloved. These poems are flares in a terrible darkness, here to show us the way back to our humanity.” —Carolyn Forche
The Writer’s Map: An atlas of imaginary lands edited by Huw Lewis-Jones $60
What could be better than opening a new book to find a map of a yet-to-be-discovered world? If you were a child like me, you would have spent as many hours looking at the map and imagining yourself in it as you would have done reading (and re-reading) the book itself. From Milly Molly Mandy’s village — her home, the house that little friend Susan lived in, where they picked berries, the village green where the fete would be — to the land of Narnia through the wardrobe, maps in books were a key that opened a portal to the worlds beyond home, school and the dreariness of the ‘real’ world. Finding a Moomin book in the deaccessioned shelf at the public library was a discovery in itself, but that it included an amazing and delightful world, with a detailed map, was unforgettable. Maps still have that fascination and I never tire of atlases. There’s something about imagining oneself elsewhere. The Writer’s Map is a beautifully illustrated atlas of literary maps, edited by historian Huw Lewis-Jones, with accompanying insightful essays from writers, designers, and illustrators. They talk about the influence of maps on their own work, the importance of map-making in creating plot and place, and the wondrous spaces, emotional and physical, where maps have taken and continue to take them. Philip Pullman, the creator of Northern Lights, opens with an essay entitled 'A Plausible Possible', where he describes creating a map for a book he wrote called The Tin Princess. To create a plausible scenario for his princess, Adelaide, he needed a possible world where the plot could play out. Other authors in the book write about the relationship between map-making and fiction: David Mitchell sketches and draws maps for his books, even though these do not appear in the finished novels. There are examples from his private notebooks showing islands, mountain trails, and fortifications. “Maps of fictitious places are maps of mind. You lose yourself in them and find, if not factual truth, then other kinds.” Brian Selznick, the author/illustrator of several amazing books, remembers his fascination with the anatomy section of his Golden Encyclopedia, with its mapping of the human bodies, and all the pathways of connected systems played out with layered acetate sheets. As a ten-year-old, he had a major operation, one that he recovered slowly from. Drawing was his world and continued to be so. “We all end up drawing the maps to our own futures, though we usually don’t know it at the time.” The book is split into four sections, 'Make Believe', with introductory essays from Huw Lewis-Jones and Brian Sibley; 'Writing Maps', with author contributions; 'Creating Maps', with contributions from illustrators and designers; and Reading Maps. Many of the contributors draw on their childhood memories and their love of books and maps, and how these influenced their own work. References include Treasure Island, Middle-Earth, Narnia, and Moomin Valley. They also outline their journeys as map-makers, storytellers, and creators of imaginary worlds. The Writer’s Map is lavishly illustrated and a pleasure to read. It will have you wanting to delve into an imaginary world immediately or to take up your pencil to draw your very own. Highly recommended for lovers of books and maps. —Stella [New paperback edition with French flaps. Illustrated throughout]
>>Look inside!
On Memoir: An A—Z of life writing by Blake Morrison $37
A gloriously freewheeling exploration of narrative non-fiction, its challenges, ethics and charms, and its power to move and change us. From A.I. to Ethics to Politics to Sex, there is something for every reader and writer in this modern classic. Gleaned from a lifetime as a passionate reader of others’ lives, as well as an unflinchingly honest chronicler of his own, Morrison’s A-Z is a trove of thoughtful literary exploration, amusing observations, and fascinating finds. [Paperback]
'Fiction writing guides are ten-a-penny but useful memoir manuals are rare. This charming compendium from the author and poet Blake Morrison helps to redress the balance, offering up handy (but never stuffy) advice on how best to tackle narrative non-fiction.' —The Times
Lifted by Mady Hager $30
Elora, Librarian of The Sanctuary, faces an impossible choice: allow herself to be trapped and Lifted, or stay and risk dying alone. In a world devastated by climate collapse and haunted by a mysterious alien presence, seventeen-year-old Elora is the last-trained Librarian safeguarding humanity’s remaining knowledge. When a stranger arrives with a message claiming her long-dead father is alive, Elora is forced to question everything she believes. As hope, grief, and duty collide, she must decide whether to leave the safety of her mountain refuge and risk everything for the truth. A blend of science fiction and coming-of-age adventure, Lifted explores survival, legacy, and what it means to be human in a fractured world where one young woman may hold the key to humanity’s future. The story is inspired by Bill Hammond’s ‘The Fall of Icarus’ which is depicted on the cover. [Paperback]
The Uses of Utopia: Travels to the limits of thought by Joan Raymond Wren $65
Utopia is not somewhere you can go. But neither is it an idle fantasy. It runs through history and literature from Plato to Thomas More, Margaret Cavendish to Ursula Le Guin. Utopia, this book shows, was for them a tool for exploring the horizons of thought, asking the unaskable and challenging entrenched assumptions about how society has to be. The Uses of Utopia travels not only to the remote islands, parallel realities and distant planets where this played out, but also the places where those inspired by visions of perfection tried to establish them, from the egalitarian communities built in colonial Mexico to the novelist Etienne Cabet's disastrous attempt to realise socialism on the Mississippi. We see the groundbreaking ideas, about liberty and the law, sex and the sexes, work and wealth, that imagining an ideal society made possible. We hear the voices of radicals of many kinds talking freely to each other — and also to us. Here, in our imperfect world, how will you use utopia? [Hardback]
”A fascinating intellectual history.” —Guardian
>>Vanishing into the great flow of society.
Culpability by Bruce Holsinger $38
When the Cassidy-Shaws' autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, killing an elderly couple, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbours a secret, implicating them all in the tragic accident. During a weeklong recovery vacation in the final days of summer, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardises Charlie's future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei's odd behavior tugs at Noah's suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident — suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet's teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI. Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and provocative. [Paperback]
"Reminiscent of the work of Richard Powers and Don DeLillo, Culpability is a compelling narrative about the perils of the digital age.” —Mary Morris
>>Desperate efficiency.
Paradises Lost by Ursula K. Le Guin $24
'Our job is to travel. A different job from arrival.' What happens when you spend your whole life—entire generations—traveling toward a goal until the endpoint becomes unattainable? As voyagers on the starship Discovery are born and live their lives on a trip to colonise a distant planet, their metal-encased world becomes more tangible to them than Earth, which they have never seen. Hsing and Luis, members of the fifth generation born during the voyage, know that the ship's ultimate destination lies in the hands of future generations, but the followers of Bliss—a religion emerging from their cocoon in space—believe that they should remain inside their spaceship heaven for eternity. They confront the followers of Bliss, and plots arise on both sides: those who want to land on the planet and those who want to travel through heaven forever, in Bliss. When the voyage is unexpectedly shortened, conflict becomes crisis. [Paperback]
‘All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.’ —Walter Benjamin
Novel, n. Something new (OED)
The Goldsmiths Prize recognises fiction that extends the possibilities of the novel form.
Read what the judges had to say about each book, then click through to find out more and to secure your copies (or just send us an email!). We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
The Rouse by China Miéville $45
“The Rouse is a monumental work that combines a sprawling history of Britain’s postcolonial entanglements in the latter half of the twentieth century with speculation about what lies ‘beyond the veil’ of death. China Miéville sets himself the daunting task of describing phenomena that are indescribable, stretching language to its limits and pushing formal and genre boundaries. In a time when much fiction is careful to colour inside the lines, this enormous, exuberant, overflowing book is a reminder that the novel is capable of containing multitudes.” —Hari Kunzru, Goldsmiths Prize judge
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
“What the cultural historian Saidiya Hartman has called ‘the violence of the archive’ is both a kind of silence — what is not recorded — and a kind of distortion. People, particularly marginal people, appear hazily, if at all, in records made in order to discipline or organize them. In Said the Dead, Doireann Ní Ghríofa recovers the forgotten stories of women incarcerated in a Cork asylum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reaching backwards into the past, she orchestrates a polyphony of voices, reminding us that fiction has an ethical purpose as well as an aesthetic one.” —Hari Kunzru, Goldsmiths Prize judge
The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams $35
"The final chapter of Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors is titled ‘The Future Sublime’ and I think this is it: a lush, verdant, light-saturated take on bad nature, contaminated politics and rotten institutions that is both awesome and terrifying. Switching between Agathe’s merciless narration and a wild chorus of gardeners and spores, The Vivisectors ends by cutting itself open to reveal the tender nervous system that was quivering beneath Williams’s extraordinary prose all along. Singularly strange, ambitious and brilliant." —Kate Briggs, Goldsmiths Prize judge
Dooneen by Keith Ridgway $33
"Keith Ridgway’s Dooneen invents its own narrative logic, starting with an exit. Mew steps through the bushes in London and out into an altered Dublin bright with panic, violence, protest, unlikely camaraderies and strange new animations. Mew’s letters to his lover Mootie, pleated with stories and songs, are vivid dispatches from a city under siege in all its weird chaos and frightening, detailed closeness. But sentence by exquisite, bewildered sentence, Dooneen is also a narrative of separation. ‘It is never only one person who feels anything is it, Mootie?’ Daring to write with sincerity, with sweetness, with a profound love for a person as well as the world and a future that has already foreclosed, Ridgway’s Dooneen is a rare experiment in tone. It couldn’t feel more generative, more novel, or more necessary." —Kate Briggs, Goldsmiths Prize judge
Attention-Seeking Behaviour by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo $45
"When a liar says they are lying, what should you believe? Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s remarkably accomplished debut makes lying and lie-detection the very subject of the novel, expounded as well as exemplified. The manipulative narrator of Attention-Seeking Behaviour brings brio worthy of a Muriel Spark heroine to telling us what she thinks we should know about her promiscuous, deceitful life in London now." —David Sexton, Goldsmiths Prize judge
What Am I, a Deer? by Polly Barton $38
“Sometimes the frontier for innovation in the novel is an interior one. In Polly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer? a young woman goes to work for a German videogames company, and develops a deep romantic fixation on a man she sees every morning on her tram ride to work. That’s pretty much it, in terms of external action, but the book performs an extraordinary, lucid tracing of the very fabric and texture of her thinking, finding a flowing and intricate and almost obsessional language for consciousness that picks up but then extends the great modernist experiments in charting minds in motion.” —Goldsmiths Prize judges’ citation
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 Rouse by China Miéville $45
Maur's life has been shaped by an unbearable loss. But in the aftermath of what is an apparently ordinary tragedy, deeper, stranger questions arise. Their answers may lie within the dark heart and darker history of an old soldier who shares Maur's obsessions — and is violently pursued by the same unknown, unquiet forces. So begins a book unlike any other: at once a sprawling saga of a bloody century, and the intimate story of two lives, their loves, regrets and secrets - and a terrifying journey into infinite mystery. [Paperback]
“The Rouse is a monumental work that combines a sprawling history of Britain’s postcolonial entanglements in the latter half of the twentieth century with speculation about what lies ‘beyond the veil’ of death. China Miéville sets himself the daunting task of describing phenomena that are indescribable, stretching language to its limits and pushing formal and genre boundaries. In a time when much fiction is careful to colour inside the lines, this enormous, exuberant, overflowing book is a reminder that the novel is capable of containing multitudes.” —Hari Kunzru, 2026 Goldsmiths Prize judge’s citation
”Mieville's command of his prose is phenomenal. There is a real sense of life throughout as he seamlessly slips between styles. This is a world that you can truly swim in, and few authors can achieve that” —The Times
”What Mieville has crafted in The Rouse is an intimate epic, a controlled sprawl of history and emotional resonance. I felt it in my bones, the undeniable power of a jagged masterpiece.” —The New York Times
”The Rouse is affecting, intelligent and, in more than one place, very, very frightening. ‘Life,’ as Mieville writes, ‘is just a prologue to a ghost story.’ This is a novel destined for a rich afterlife.” —The Guardian
”The Rouse is a book of the dead and the superpositioned living. A lament configuration that grieves and is aghast. It is monumental and exhaustive yet concise. You never want it to end: you want it never to end.” —Boston Review
”I cannot say how much I love this book both for its humanity and its originality. The Rouse is a classic of modern weird literature, and goes beyond genre to put Mieville in the forefront of modern British novelists.” —Michael Moorcock
”At once the most poetic horror and the most fearsome historical novel in contemporary letters. There is simply no equivalent to Mieville's achievement.” —Jordy Rosenberg
>>”Completely defining.”
>>Gains and losses.
>>Other books short-listed for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize.
Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $28
An adolescent girl narrates her day in an existential masterpiece that plumbs the depths of what it means to be a forming person in a fomenting society. A woman writes a farewell note to her husband, an artist who has driven her away with his counterfeit profundity and naked ambition. A plain young woman steals a bathing suit for a handsome friend, only to find herself ostracised by her neighbours for her boy-crazed behaviour — and her refusal to be shamed. These six stories by Osamu Dazai are among his finest. Written during the Second World War, into a period of intense nationalism, they unpick the concept of the patriotic, productive or moral self. Including the novella 'Schoolgirl', which rocketed Dazai to fame on initial publication in 1939, this collection, newly translated by Polly Barton, is a perfect introduction to Dazai's work. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Leaning into self-loathing.
Tongue by Kathryn Crowcroft $38
’The more I learnt about the tongue the less certain I became about what the organ was for, which made me doubtful about what it really was.’ A young researcher works in a university archive, intent on unveiling the history of the human tongue, its strange metaphors and hidden uses. The archival materials conjure memories of her own past, transporting her home, half a world away, into the silence lodged between herself and her mother. Alongside the academic work, she begins a second manuscript through which a personal reckoning takes place. Between library stacks and text messages, she confronts her own struggle to articulate the unspoken legacy that has shaped her past. Framed through her research into the tongue and its untold cultural significance, Kathryn Crowcroft's debut explores how the organ has been cast as both sacred and sinful across centuries. Tongue takes the shape of a nodal essay, composed of discrete cells that mirror the form of the organ itself: porous, muscular, bifurcated. Written in the shadow of gendered violence, and attuned to the ways in which we speak and avoid speaking, the book offers a fierce, sensitive and unique articulation of the truths we learn to lie for. Tongue creates a radical space for silence to resonate and an exploration of how a voice might piece together what has been severed. [Paperback]
'Muscular, reverent and beautifully researched, Tongue is a delicate archive of our past and present mysteries.' —Jessica Au
>>How the book came about.
In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak $38
During a time of great turmoil, Gustave Flaubert created literature's most scandalous heroine: Madame Bovary. He then poisoned her with arsenic. But what if, 175 years later, Emma — and the women that history overlooked — could seize the quill from his hands and tell a different story? In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a reinvention of an iconic male writer, told through the eyes of the women — real and fictional — who shaped him: a devoted nursemaid, an Egyptian dancer, and a passionate, jealous lover who refuses to be forgotten. Through their voices, Shafak creates both an intimate portrait of a great artist and an epic meditation on storytelling itself: who gets remembered, who gets erased, and how can literature endure through political upheaval, war and injustice? When the world feels broken, how do we find the hope to carry on? Shafak takes readers on a journey through time and space, from Flaubert's unusual childhood in a house that was part home, part hospital, part morgue, to nineteenth-century Paris during the Revolution, and onwards to Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine and Beirut. [Paperback]
Unquiet Landscape: Places and ideas in twentieth-century British painting by Chrisopher Neve $28
How is it that artists, by thinking in paint, have come to regard the landscape as representing states of mind? 'Painting', says Neve, 'is a process of finding out, and landscape can be its thesis.' What he is writing is not precisely art history: it is about pictures, about landscape and about thought. Over the years, he was able to have discussions with many of the thirty or so artists he focuses on, the inspiration for the book having come from his talks with Ben Nicholson; and he has immersed himself in their work, their countryside, their ideas. Because he is a painter himself, and an expert on 20th-century art, Neve is well equipped for such a journey. Few writers have conveyed more vividly the mixture of motives, emotions, unconscious forces and contradictions which culminate in the creative act of painting. Each of the thirteen chapters has a theme and explores its significance for one or more of the artists. The problem of time, for instance, is considered in relation to Paul Nash, God in relation to David Jones, music to Ivon Hitchens, hysteria to Edward Burra, abstraction to Ben Nicholson, 'the spirit in the mass' to David Bomberg. There are also chapters about painters' ideas on specific types of country: about Eric Ravilious and the chalk landscape, Joan Eardley and the sea, and Cedric Morris and the garden. [Paperback]
'Fierce, witty, wise, elegiac, supremely indifferent to fashion and confident in the long view, this is among the best books written about landscape.' —Financial Times
'A minor modern classic, to my mind, uniting art history and landscape thought by means of dazzling, dancing, unsettling sentences. I'm delighted it's back in print in a new edition.' —Robert Macfarlane
>>Also highly recommended: Immortal Thoughts.
We Were Forbidden by Jacqueline Harpman (translated from French by Ros Schwartz) $24
Three novellas from the author of I Who Have Never Known Men, translated into English foe the first time.
In the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman wanders the forest. She and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their eternal march through its strange depths.
Attending a rigid French school in 1940s Casablanca, a teenage girl is barred from ever questioning the dogma she is taught to believe — her punishment for doing so will be as swift as it is shocking.
Locked in a loveless marriage in the Belgian bourgeoisie, a young woman satisfies her husband's desires, twice weekly, as required. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.
These novellas — the first works by Jacqueline Harpman to arrive in English in decades — reveal her stylistic range and demonstrate once more her penetrating psychological insight. Here we find the origins of a singular, relentless voice. [Paperback]
”Renewed interest in Harpman's oeuvre isn't just warranted: In works like this, she reveals herself to be one of the major writers of the 20th century, comparable to Gogol and Kafka but with a style and outlook entirely her own.” —Kirkus Reviews
”In Harpman's desperate, ornery, and alien universes, her avatars write their memoirs for no one at all. It is a desolate prospect, but also a triumph.” —Jessi Jezewska Stevens
White Rabbits / Down Below by Leonora Carrington $28
In 1940, Leonora Carrington — a twenty-two-year-old British-born Surrealist artist — was persuaded to flee France and the advancing German army for Spain. Already suffering from a psychotic break occasioned by the arrest of her lover by the Nazi authorities, she was soon confined to a mental institution, where she was subjected to sadistic treatment under the guise of medical care. In her memoir, Down Below, she describes her experiences with an anthropologist's precision and an artist's sense of the fantastic. This volume also includes a selection of Carrington's best stories from across her lifetime, functioning as companion pieces to her surrealist-inflected non-fiction. They include 'The Debutante', in which a young woman, wishing to avoid a ball in her honour, swaps places with a hyena; 'White Rabbits', which sees a friendly neighbour come by to ask for spare decomposing meat; and 'My Flannel Knickers', in which a woman has sainthood forced upon her. [Paperback]
”Carrington's stories are optimistic and nihilistic, beautiful and grotesque, tender and cruel. Her stories make brambles out of my brain.” —Sheila Heti
”I remember reading Down Below on a park bench in summer of 2020 and thinking: this is what is happening to me. Also, it contains the closest approximation you can get to a diagram of God's perineum.” —Patricia Lockwood
The Wolf Suit by Sid Sharp $40
Bellwether Riggwelter is, once again, out of blackberries. This time, rather than tiptoe through a forest full of predators, he comes up with a new plan. He will keep himself safe by blending in — he will sew a Wolf Suit! The disguise works perfectly . . . sort of. Bellwether realises he can't enjoy the forest in a bulky suit, and he may not be the only creature in the forest who feels that way. Perhaps not everyone is as wolfish as they appear. With humour, darkness, and insight, Sid Sharp turns the idiom ‘wolf in sheep's clothing’ on its head. This award-winning hilarious and touching graphic novel debut about the pressures of conformity and conquering fear by finding community is the perfect contemporary folktale to press into the hands of anyone who has felt they need to pretend to be someone else. completely delightful. [Hardback]
"The gorgeous black and dark blue backgrounds, thick with night, make the opening of the curtain, and the sunlight that spills onto the last page, feel like another undressed window through which we can better see the self." —The New York Times
>>Look inside!
Women Textile Designers edited by by Victoria Bradley and Elizabeth Currie $90
This beautiful and informative book features printed, woven and embroidered fabrics created for public spaces, furnishings, fashion and theater by some of the world's most accomplished designers. Illustrated with a wealth of weaves, prints, textures and patterns, it includes works by Arts and Crafts pioneer May Morris, Bauhaus designers Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers, mid-century designers Lucienne Day and Althea McNish, contemporary pioneers, such as Birgitta Hahn and Reiko Sudo, and many more. Chapters charting the transformation of the textile industry over the twentieth century — including women's increased access to design education and their roles as entrepreneurs and leaders — are accompanied by in-depth illustrated profiles of key designers. The book examines the creation of new products and technologies, alongside changing consumer patterns and the shifting functions of modern textiles in domestic interiors, public spaces and transportation. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
Simple Pleasures by Julia Busuttil Nishimura $49
Eating well at home is one of life's true pleasures, and it's easier than you think. With Julia's guidance, a well-stocked pantry and some good seasonal produce are all you need to create simple and flavourful dishes you'll want to cook on repeat. With an emphasis on ease and enjoyment, Julia shows you how to turn household staples into something truly special. Weeknight dinner favourites include a punchy ginger and coriander one-pan chicken, lemony tomato and bean broth, and pasta with caramelised fennel and sausage, while side dishes like fennel gratin and a delightful nectarine, cucumber and feta salad are stars in their own right. With sweet and savoury bakes such as potato, onion and gruyère tart and coconut and lemon cake with passionfruit icing, plus a whole chapter of desserts including Julia's classic chocolate mousse, Simple Pleasures is the perfect book for the modern home cook. [Large-format paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>All her books are excellent!
Abandoning a Cat: A personal story by Haruki Murakami (translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel), designed by Suzanne Dean $38
'Even now, I can relive the shared puzzlement of that summer day when we rode together on his bike to the beach at Koroen to abandon a striped cat, a cat that totally got the better of us.' A moving reflection on the author's father — plus a cat! Originally published in the New Yorker in 2019, and now presented in a full, unabridged form, Abandoning a Cat is a poignant, self-reflective work by Haruki Murakami. Here he writes about his father, the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him into the second world war. Murakami's father wrote accomplished haiku and eventually became a teacher. As Haruki grew older and became an adult and then a writer, he and his father found they had little in common. They were later estranged for twenty years, only reconciling on his father's deathbed. This haunting personal essay is a reflection on what it means to be a father and what it means to be a son — on what it means to be loved and to be abandoned — and also on a particular moment of Japanese history, through the aftermath of the second world war on into the present. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
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Save democracy and save 25%
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.”