NEW RELEASES (29.5.25)

Ease into the season with new books to get you through. Click through to our website to secure your copies — or just email us or phone us. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

The Abyss by Fernando Callejo (translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert) $40
A memorably caustic autobiographical novel about the demise of a crumbling house in Medellín, Colombia. Fernando, a writer, visits his brother Darío, who is dying of AIDS. Recounting their wild philandering and trying to come to terms with his beloved brother's inevitable death, Fernando rants against the political forces that cause so much suffering. Vallejo is the heir to Céline, Thomas Paine, and Machado de Assis. He hurls vitriolic, savagely funny insults at his country and at his mother who has given birth to him and his many siblings. Within this firestorm of pain, Fernando manages to get across much beauty and truth: that all love is painful and washed in pure sorrow. He loves his sick brother and the family's Santa Anita farm (the lost paradise of his childhood where azaleas bloomed); and he even loves his country, now torn to shreds. Always, in this savage novel about loss — as if in the eye of Vallejo's hurricane of talent — we are in the curiously comforting workings of memory and of the writing process itself, as, recollecting time, it offers immortality. [Paperback]
"Proof that people in Colombia don't read is that Vallejo hasn't been shot yet." —Juan Gabriel Vasquez
"Vallejo inserts the violence battering his country into the very language of his text where words are no mere reflection, they are the violence that startles and overwhelms the reader." —Juan Goytisolo
"Vallejo's novel is about how to care for oneself and others, human and nonhuman beings, when everything seems doomed." —Bruno Franco, Full Stop

 

The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia $36
The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, presenting gender-fluid, trans and androgynous African immigrants, and insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are. Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War. In a gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories, colonial trauma, and the realities of the UK asylum system and its impact on young refugees. Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and his early teens in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied refugee without a word of English and went on to earn an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and a BSc in Economics from UCL. [Paperback]
”The Seers is an incandescent howl of anti-colonial rage and insatiable desire; a powerful and taboo-breaking love letter to a London made of stories, and a scathing indictment of the UK asylum system’s ability to break hearts and bodies to pieces again and again.” —Preti Taneja

 

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes) $40
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life — and the life of Berlin itself — begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, "the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same." Perfection is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late? [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
"Vincenzo Latronico is a writer who sees clearly and conveys it beautifully. In Perfection, he paints a stark picture of the conditions that have created a generation's 'identical struggle for a different life': globalisation, homogenisation, the internet. Though on one level the novel is (pitch-perfectly) 'about' Berlin and the 'creative professional' expatriates who have sought a different life in, and inevitably colonised, the city, the story of Anna and Tom will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to resist the flattening effects of whatever life is now. I can't recommend it highly enough." —Lauren Oyler
"Perfection gave me the gift of being able to hold a long span of time — in a relationship, in a city — and the experience of being young, and the experience of being not so young — all in my head at once. I could hold it there the way you hold a parable or fable, but with all these tiny details, too. It also functioned like a kind of murder mystery: what killed the magic? Was it their values, was it aging, was it... was it...? It's such a beautiful, thoughtful, impeccably crafted book." —Sheila Heti
"Perfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling at its heart. Vincenzo Latronico is the finest of writers." —Lauren Groff

 

The Honditsch Cross: A tale from 1813 by Ingeborg Bachmann (translated from German by Tess Lewis) $40
An early novel from the author of the wholly remarkable Malina, translated into English for the first time. In the final days of the Napoleonic occupation of Austria in 1813, a young theology student, returning from Vienna to his family home in Carinthia, finds the invading troops stationed there, led by a despotic officer who has been exploiting and terrorising his family and friends. He is immediately thrown into the centre of the conflict, torn between defending his homeland, the pull of physical desire, and the pursuit of his theological studies. In this work, Bachmann begins to explore themes that will pre-occupy her for the rest of her writing career: complex notions of nationality and patriotism, the roles and rights of women in patriarchal societies, the meaningless destruction of war and its aftermath, and the bitter moments of disillusionment that lead to intellectual maturity. [Paperback]
”A quietly furious work, bitterly conscious of the ideological threads that tie the blithe nationalism of the 19th century to its 20th century apotheosis. Bachmann’s father was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, and all her work is astoundingly clear-eyed about ambiguities, ambivalences and nostalgic rationalisations of fascism.” —The Berliner
"Equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett." —The New York Times Book Review
"Bachmann's vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet." —The Guardian

Gilgamesh: A new translation of the ancient epic by Sophus Helle $29
Gilgamesh is a Babylonian story about love between men; loss and grief; the confrontation with death; the destruction of nature; insomnia and restlessness; finding peace in one's community; the voice of women; the folly of gods, heroes, and monsters — and more. Translating directly from the Akkadian, Sophus Helle offers a literary translation that reproduces the original epic's poetic effects, including its succinct clarity and enchanting cadence. Millennia after its composition, Gilgamesh continues to speak to us in myriad ways. [Paperback]
"Looks to be the last word on this Babylonian masterpiece." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post
"Lively, earthy, and scrupulous in its scholarship." —Robert Macfarlane, New York Review of Books
"Sophus Helle's Gilgamesh is woven of earthly, muscular language that breathes an epic of gutsy dreams and ancient knowhow. In Helle's rendition, this scholar truly translates rhythm and movement until Gilgamesh breathes anew." —Yusef Komunyakaa
"The translation is elegant and eloquent. The essays and elucidations are learned, lively, and hugely illuminating. Sophus Helle is a poet, a scholar, and, if truth be told, a genius." —Marshall Brown, University of Washington
"Helle's new translation reminds us just what a miracle it is that Gilgamesh has survived, an emblem of mortality available only in fragments, yet speaking to our mortal loves and fears with undying force." —Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University

 

Natalja’s Stories by Inger Christensen (translated from Danish by Denise Newman) $36
modeled after Boccaccio's Decameron, takes an usual approach to the theme of migration by focusing on the shifting ground of meaning itself. It is a tale told to the narrator by her grandmother — about her mother, "abducted" by a Russian from Copenhagen: taken to Russia, she tries to flee the Revolution; she dies and her ashes are carried back to Denmark. But the story is told and retold in marvelous ways, digressing playfully (often hilariously), and involving murders and absurd characters, with wonderful repeating motifs and passages. Natalja's Stories springs surprise after surprise and, instead of a conventional heartbreaking story of loss and disaster, the book appears as a tantalising account of a character seizing the moment, leaving the past behind, and becoming someone else — offering, in fact, a deconstruction of the usual take on migrant fate as a tragic narrative. [Paperback]
 "Her luminous prose confirms what was already evident in the poems: that Christensen was one of the eminent visionaries of the 20th century." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"She whispers to me in my own writing, a brilliant, fierce literary mother whom I will read and reread again and again." —Siri Hustvedt

 

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman $80
Maira Kalman's most autobiographical and intimate work to date, Still Life with Remorse is a beautiful, four-color collection combining deeply personal stories and 50 striking full-color paintings. Tracing her family's story from her grandfather's birth in Belarus and emigration to Tel Aviv — where she was born — Maira considers her unique family history, illuminating the complex relationship between recollection, regret, happiness, and heritage. The vibrant original art accompanying these autobiographical pieces are mostly still lifes and interiors which serve as counterpoints to her powerful words. In addition to vignettes exploring her Jewish roots, Kalman includes short stories about other great artists, writers, and composers, including Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, and Robert Schumann. Through these narratives, Kalman uses her signature wit and tenderness to reveal how family history plays an influential role in all of our work, lives, and perspectives. A feat of visual storytelling and vulnerability, Still Life with Remorse explores the profound hidden in the quotidian, and illuminates the powerful universal truths in our most personal family stories. [Hardback]

 

Landfall 249: Aotearoa New Zealand arts and letters edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
For almost 80 years, Landfall has been a dedicated space for writers, artists and reviewers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Published twice a year, each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews and essays. Bringing together a range of voices and perspectives, from established practitioners to emerging talents, Landfall is always an exciting anthology with a finger on the pulse of innovation and creativity in Aotearoa today. Landfall 249: Autumn 2025 also announces the winner of the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Prize, an annual competition that encourages up-and-coming writers to explore the world around them through words. Landfall 249 will feature the winning essay, alongside the judge’s report from Landfall editor, Lynley Edmeades. [Paperback]

 

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica (translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses) $33
In the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, the unworthy live in fear of the Superior Sister's whip. Seething with resentment, they plot against each other and await who will ascend to the level of the Enlightened - and who will suffer the next exemplary punishment. Risking her life, one of the unworthy keeps a diary in secret. Slowly, memories surface from a time before the world collapsed, before the Sacred Sisterhood became the only refuge. Then Luca arrives. She, too, is unworthy — but she is different. And her arrival brings a single spark of hope to a world of darkness. [Paperback]
Barbaric, brutal and utterly beautiful. The Unworthy is a searing haunt of a novel that I will never forget.” —Lucy Rose
”Brutal and aching. A perfect fever dream of a book.” —Heather Darwent
”Unflinching, uncompromising, and unforgettable. Agustina Bazterrica shines a light at the end of the brutal and bleak path we are on so that maybe, just maybe, we can turn around and forge a new one.” —Paul Tremblay

 

Japan: An autobiography by Peter Shaw $50
Peter Shaw first went almost unwillingly to Japan 25 years ago, staying in Tokyo for only two days. Surprised at how little he knew or understood he was, however, smitten. In the following years he returned many times searching for answers about the country’s culture: its art, architecture, food, religion, history and people. Accompanied by many of his own photographs this book conveys a New Zealand writer’s feelings and thoughts about a unique culture. A nicely designed and produced volume with photographs throughout. [Paperback with French flaps]

 

Carbon: The book of life by Paul Hawken $40
Carbon animates the entirety of the living world. Though it comprises only a tiny fraction of Earth's composition, our planet would be lifeless without it. From the intricate microscopic networks of fungi in the Earth's soils to the tallest trees of the forests to every cell in every animal, the very fabric of life on Earth is shaped by carbon. Though it is much maligned as a driver of climate change, blamed for the possible demise of civilisation, that is only one part of its story. In this stirring, hopeful and deeply humane book, Paul Hawken illuminates the omnipresence of this life-giving element and the possibilities it provides for the future of human endeavour, inviting us to see nature, carbon and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined and inseparably connected. [Paperback]
Carbon is an enormously hopeful book — hopeful about the creatures we live among and about our innate human capacities.” —Elizabeth Kolbert
”A book you'll find yourself quoting and reading aloud to anyone who will listen. Hawken tells the beautiful story of carbon's role in our world-as our lifeblood, our synthesis with all living things, our planet's protector-with the grace and fluency of a deep, compassionate thinker. A masterful, urgent, powerful book.” —Isabella Tree

 

The Story of Scandinavia: From the Vikings to social democracy by Stein Ringen $30
1,200 years of drama, economic rise and fall, crises, kings and queens, war, peace, language and culture! Scandinavian history has been one of dramatic discontinuities of collapse and restarts, from the Viking Age to the Age of Perpetual War to the modern age today. For a thousand years, the Scandinavian countries were kingdoms of repression where monarchs played at the game of being European powers, at the expense of their own populations. The brand we now know as ‘Scandinavia’ is a recent invention. During most of its history, Denmark and Sweden, and to some degree Norway, were bloody enemies. These sentiments of enmity have not been fully settled. Under the surface of collaboration remain undercurrents of hatred, envy, contempt and pity. What does it mean today to be Scandinavian? For the author, whose identity is Scandinavian but his life European, this masterly history is a personal exploration as well as a narrative of compelling scope. [Paperback]

 

The Light of Asia: A history of Western fascination with the East by Christopher Harding $32
From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the twentieth century much of Asia might have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back. The Light of Asia is a history of the many ways in which Asia has shaped European and North American culture over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters, and the central importance of this vexed, often confused relationship. From Marco Polo onwards Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. [Paperback]

 

The Green Kingdom by Cornelia Funke $21
Caspia's summer is transformed when she discovers a bundle of letters containing ten botanical riddles in this enchanting adventure. Twelve-year-old Caspia hates big cities, especially one as busy as New York. So she isn't thrilled by the news that her parents are taking her to stay in Brooklyn. It's summer-devouring bad luck! But everything changes when Caspia discovers a bundle of letters, hidden in an old chest of drawers. They belonged to two sisters who lived there long ago. Each letter contains a 'green' riddle, with clues leading to a different plant. Caspia sets out to solve the riddles and, as she does, she meets friends she could never have imagined and discovers that anywhere can feel like home, if you are just brave enough to put down new roots. [Paperback]

 

Looking at Women Looking at War: A war and justice diary by Victoria Amelina $40
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country's literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children's book author. Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book. On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. [Paperback]
”Rare, powerful and affecting, a work of principle and courage by a truly brilliant and inspiring writer.” —Philippe Sands

 

Ten Little Rabbits by Maurice Sendak $21

The magician pulls ten rabbits out of a hat — and then puts them back in! Acounting book up to ten and back again. [Board book]

 
EXPANDING HORIZONS for the Curious

Books are wonderful. They are sources of information, knowledge, and witness. They are worlds to get lost and found in, with stories that entertain, inspire, or provoke. Books are ideas; and, for children, building curiosity and encouraging the ability to question should never be underestimated. Here are a handful of books on our shelves for the curious child in your life.

My Little Book of Big Questions is a great place to begin. I think this might be my favourite Britta Teckentrup book (and she is the author and illustrator of many delightful children’s books). The illustrations are variously thoughtful, joyful and enigmatic.
As are the questions, that range from the whimsical to tentative to philosophical and provocative. Here there are only questions, some where the only answer may be who knows? or only time will tell, while others open doors to conversations and contemplation.

Here’s a small selection:
Will I be able to fly someday?
Who will be my friend?
Why I am afraid of what I don’t know?
Am I special?
Why is nature so colourful?
Are dreams as true as reality?

 

From The School of Life crew comes this excellent introduction to philosophy. Big Ideas for Curious Minds features leading figures in the history of philosophy, engages young minds with the concept of thinking, its relevance to everyday life, and why asking questions will always be important.
It’s informative, well-written, relevant to modern life and young people’s concerns and interactions.

So if you would like to know what Hypatia was thinking in 400AD, why Kant thought it important ask why, and how Derrida can make you think again, this is the book for you. There are lots of thinking and talking points, and everyone is bound to learn something new about themselves, each other, and the the world and how it ticks.

 

Who can resist a book written by Speck Lee Tailfeather — a bird? In Architecture According to Pigeons Speck Lee is determined to share his passion for architecture, and show off his knowledge a little, too! Take a trip around the world to some standout buildings and constructions and get a pigeon-eyed view for a new perspective!

Speck Lee Tailfeather will introduce to the Hungry Beaks Hall (Sydney Opera House), The Worm (The Great Wall of China), The Colosseum, Taj Mahal, The Crabshell (Notre Dame de Ronchamp) and many other architectural wonders. Fabulous illustrations with plenty to look at and dotted with facts and curious tidbits from Tailfeather, as well as architectural notes. Enjoy and learn.

 

Take an anthropologist, take an artist and shake up how humans live in the world. David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky free-wheel in Cities Made Differently . Melding history and myth, science and imagination, this is a visual interpretation of a dialogue over several decades between the two authors.

With thought-provoking examples of past cities, and ideas about future cities, the conversation not only grapples with the physicaltity of the spaces we live in, but also ideas of who holds power within these structures and how we want to live together. Mind-spinning stuff — a visually imaginative portal!

 

Things Come Apart 2.0 is a brilliant book for those who need to know how it works! If you love to navigate the world by unpacking it — literally — then this will be an endless source of fascination short of deconstructing every appliance in the house. (It may well inspire some coming apart, so consider a few defunct items to be close at hand!).

This highly visual catalogue will appeal to the deconstructor in your household, as well as the budding designer. The attention to detail of all the components neatly ordered and looking superb right down to the nuts and bolts is almost meditative!

At VOLUME we offer a book subscription service. There are many options, including a Non-Fiction selection for children. Our book subscriptions for children are so enjoyed that we have many repeat yearly subscribers. Find out why with a six-book taster! ( All subscription prices include postage.)

AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK by David Diop (translated by Anna Moschovakis) — Reviewed by Stella

Mesmerising from the opening lines, At Night All Blood is Black will take hold in its repetitive, rhythmic structure, creating a landscape of madness and violence that is haunting, beautiful, disturbing, and viscerally rich. This is trench warfare pared back to the lives of two Senegalese soldiers fighting for the French. Spurred on by mistaken loyalty to the mother country and by the false cultural narrative (encouraged by their Captain) of the fearsome savage — the brave, rising into no-man’s land on the shrill whistle — the attack signalled for all, both friend and foe, these two men run side-by-side screaming into the void. Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop are more-than-brothers, raised in the same village, in the same family, with a shared life that binds them to each other and their destiny. The opening paragraphs of Alfa’s confession to a crime lead us quickly to the death of Mademba. In looping sequences, David Diop carves out the story through Alfa’s guilt and his jarring memories in line with the young man’s descent into madness. Guilty for denying his more-than-brother’s dying request, not once but three times, Alfa sets out to avenge his enemy as well as his conscience in an increasingly gruesome manner. An activity, at first applauded and then reviled by his brothers in arms, as well as his superiors — who eventually send him away from the front — unnerves his companions. With a brevity of action and repetitive narrative, Diop (with the excellent translation of Anna Moschovakis) invades us with the rawness, violence and fear of the front, with the absurdity of the actions of war, and the disturbing hollowing of emotion only to be replaced with superstition and mistrust. As Alfa wreaks havoc in a situation overwhelmingly chaotic, he becomes further separated from reality, and increasingly isolated, living to his own strange rationale, and becomes a symbol of bad luck, and feared by his fellow soldiers. In the second half of the book, reassigned to the Rear and a psychiatric ward, Alfa’s grip on reality tips further. Here, as his memories of village life, the disappearance of his mother, the social politics of his age sect, and the friendly rivalry, as well as enduring bond, with Mademba, come to the fore as the intensity of the Front is pushed aside, we sense why his madness descended so intensely. Here, we have myth and story. Here, we see that Alfa, without his French-speaking more-than-brother Mademba, is at sea on the battlefield and in his ability to communicate beyond gesture and drawing. Diop cleverly keeps us in Alfa’s head, our mad and unreliable narrator, but gives us enough clues to set the alarm ringing as we dip into a dream-like sequence that will take us somewhere unexpected. So unexpected that you will loop back to the start to read this slim, but unforgettable novel with fresh eyes. Stunning, unrelenting and beautifully executed. 

FLIGHTS by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft) — Reviewed by Thomas

When something is at rest it is only conceptually differentiated from the physical continuum of its location, but when moving its differentiation is confirmed by the changes in its relations with the actual. Likewise, humans have in them a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation so far as it is acknowledged and encouraged, otherwise a casualty of repression or of fear. “Barbarians stay put, or go to destinations to raid them. They do not travel.” Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments, for instance when Tokarczuk reframes the world as an array of airports, to which cities and countries are but service satellites and through which the world’s population is constantly streaming, democratised by movement, no preparation either right or wrong in this zone of civilised indeterminacy. To create a border, to restrict a movement is to suppress life, to preserve a corpse. Tokarczuk’s fragments are of various registers and head in different directions, but several strands reappear through the book, such as the story of a father and young son searching for a mother who disappears on holiday on a small Croatian island. Historical imaginings include an account of the journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris to Poland following his death, the ‘biography’ of the ‘discoverer’ of the achilles tendon, and an account of a peripatetic sect constantly on the move to elude the Devil. For Tokarczuk, we find ourselves, if we find ourselves at all, somewhere in the interplay between impulse and constraint. 

NEW RELEASES (23.5.25)

There’s still a week of autumn left to squirrel away your store of books for the winter. Click through to our website to place your orders. Your books can be sent to you by overnight courier or collected from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Cry When the Baby Cries by Becky Barnicoat $60
A glorious antidote to parenting books, this darkly humorous, candid and insightful graphic memoir brings the early years of parenthood to life — in all their chaos, wonder and delirium. Intimate, relatable and very funny, Becky Barnicoat explores everything from the anatomy of the hospital bag to the frantic obsession with putting your baby down drowsy but awake, to the tyranny of gentle parenting. From pregnancy to the feral toddler years, Barnicoat extends a sticky hand to all new parents grappling with the impossible but joyous jigsaw puzzle of their lives. Barnicoat gives us permission to cry when the baby cries — and also laugh, snort, lie on the floor naked, drool and generally revel in a deeply strange new world ruled by a tyrannical tiny leader, growing bigger and more loved by the day. [Hardback]
”This book is a perfect testament to the wild ride of early parenting. It's tender, moving, beautifully drawn and also, extremely hilarious. Parents everywhere: you will feel very very seen.” —Isabel Greenberg

 

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno (translated from French by Natasha Lehrer) $40
"Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers." —Annie Ernaux
Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, and Sinno started a new life in Mexico. Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, Sinno explores the different facets of memory — her own, her mother's, as well as her abusive stepfather's; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others. Sad Tiger — the title inspired by William Blake's poem ‘The Tyger’ — is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern — how to protect others from what the author herself endured? [Paperback]
"An achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath. Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse." —Lauren Christensen, New York Times
"Sad Tiger is not what you'd expect from a memoir about sexual abuse and trauma. Unlike Vanessa Springora's 2020 international bestseller Consent, say, which was also translated by Natasha Lehrer, Sad Tiger is not a taut narrative of devastation and reclamation. At times Sinno writes with the essayistic force of Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory, at others with the vividness of Edouard Louis's novels. She shares Annie Ernaux's will to self-excavation and proclivity for experimentation. Sinno refuses to be hamstrung by genre, choosing a balletic approach, as if only a choreographed dance around her subject, again and again, will properly encapsulate its blast radius." —Elias Altman, Bookforum

 

An Uncommon Land: From an ancestral past of enclosure towards a regenerative future by Catherine Knight $50
A story of enclosure, dispossession, colonisation and — ultimately — hope for a better future. Through the lens of her ancestors’ stories, Catherine Knight throws light on the genesis and evolution of the commons, its erosion through enclosure and the ascendency of private property in parallel with the rise of capitalism — a history that has indelibly shaped New Zealand society and its landscape. Like other European settlers, the lives and future prosperity of the author’s ancestors had their foundations in war, land appropriation and environmental destruction — but in their histories lie glimmerings of the potentiality of commons: tantalising hints of an alternative path to a re-commoned, regenerative future. From a past of enclosure, resource exploitation and exponential growth, this book shines light on the potentiality of a different future, taking inspiration from our collective history. [Paperback]
”A highly original, intriguing and excellent work of scholarship, An Uncommon Land looks to the past to provide a pathway to a sustainable and fairer future. Weaving family histories of migration brilliantly into broader themes of colonisation, the commodification of land and climate change, Knight suggests we look to the concept of the commons as a way of managing finite environmental resources for the benefit of all. A timely, topical and essential read.” —Vincent O'Malley

 

I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s war, 1868—1869 by James Belich $40
"You were made a Pakeha, and the name of England was given to you for your tribe. I was made a Maori, and New Zealand was the name given to me. You forgot that there was a space fixed between us of great extent — the sea. You, forgetting that, jumped over from that place to this. I did not jump over from this place to that. Move off from my places to your own places in the midst of the sea." —Titokowaru.
Straddling the Maori and European worlds of the 1860s, Titokowaru was one of New Zealand's greatest leaders. A brilliant strategist, he used every device to save the Taranaki people from European invasion. When peaceful negotiation failed, he embarked on a stunning military campaign against government forces. His victories were many, before the battle he lost. Although he was 'forgotten by the Pakeha as a child forgets a nightmare', his vision was one that would endure. Titokowaru (Ngati Ruanui) was born in South Taranaki in 1823. Converting to Christianity (and pacifism) at 20, he later became disillusioned with Christianity and joined the bitter fighting of the period — protesting against continual land loss and the erosion of his people's rights. Leading a strong intertribal force, Titokowaru nearly succeeded in repelling the colonial forces in the Taranaki wars of 1868-69. But at the final hour his people deserted him, in circumstances that remain unclear. [Paperback]

 

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (translated from German by Daiel Bowles) $30
Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in armament industry shares. Along the journey they bicker endlessly over the past, throw handfuls of francs into a ravine and exasperate the living daylights out of their long-suffering taxi driver. The crimes of the twentieth century are never far behind, but neither is the need for more vodka. Eurotrash is a bitterly comic, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. Kracht's novel is a narrative tour-de-force of the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. [Paperback]
Long-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Eurotrash is the auto-fictional account of a writer contemplating his unpleasant and abusive childhood, his morally repugnant ancestry and his toxic financial inheritance as he drives his crotchety, alcoholic, senile mother through the landscape outside Zurich. This doesn’t sound like much fun! But this book is one of the most entertaining and ultimately moving stories we read. It is brilliantly, bitterly funny, even as it documents a vicious and tarnished emotional universe. This book is immaculately and wittily translated; on every page its sentences sparkle and surprise like guilty-legacy gold.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
”Whether he's fictionalising history in order to question the validity of history, or fictionalising himself in order to question the validity of self, it is by now apparent to me and to his many readers that Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation.” —Joshua Cohen
”Christian Kracht is a master of the well-formed sentence, the elegance of which conceals horror. His novels involve Germany, ghosts, war and madness, and every conceivable fright, but they are also full of melancholy comedy, and they all hide a secret that one never quite fathoms.” —Daniel Kehlmann

 

Air by John Boyne $35
Being in limbo, 30,000 feet in the air, offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it's an opportunity to connect with his 14-year-old son as they travel halfway across the world to meet a woman who isn't expecting them. Unsettled by his past, and anxious for his future, Aaron is at a crossroads in life. The damage inflicted upon him during his youth has made him the man he is, but now threatens to widen the growing fissures between him and his only child. This trip could bind them closer together, or tear them further apart. In this penetrating examination of action and consequence, fault and attribution, acceptance and resolution, John Boyne gives us a redemptive story of a father and a son on a moving journey to mend their troubled lives. This novella completes ‘The Elements’ quartet. [Hardback]

 

Three Wee Bookshops at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw $40
The Bookseller at the End of the World described the first part of Ruth Shaw's tumultuous life, touching readers in powerful ways. It became an international bestseller, translated into eleven languages. Three Wee Bookshops at the End of the World picks up Ruth's story with more charming, heartbreaking, brave and funny tales. Having found the love of her life, Lance, she tells of their sailing adventures together, world travels, conservation efforts and their wee bookshops. Life has never been easy for Ruth but, despite that, her book is chock full of extraordinary people and situations, many of them laugh-out-loud funny. Tales from the bookshops are interwoven with Ruth's story, along with expert book recommendations. Written in Ruth's characteristic style, this absorbing memoir traverses the highs and lows of a life lived to the full. [Hardback]

 

The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the time of Stalin by Michel Krielaas $55
When Stalin came to power, making music in Russia became dangerous. Composers now had to create work that served the state, and all artistic production was scrutinised for potential subversion. In The Sound of Utopia, Michel Krielaars depicts Soviet musicians and composers struggling to create art in a climate of risk, suspicion and fear. Some successfully toed the ideological line, diluting their work in the process; others ended up facing the Gulag or even death. While some, like Sergei Prokofiev, achieved lasting fame, others were consigned to oblivion, their work still hard to find. As Krielaars traces the twists and turns of these artists' fortunes, he paints a fascinating and disturbing portrait of the absurdity of Soviet musical life. [Hardback]

 

Mythica: A new history of Homer’s world, through the women written out of it by Emily Hauser $40
Hauser takes readers on an epic journey to uncover the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece's greatest legends — and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Contrary to perceptions built up over three millennia, ancient history is not all about men. In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world's greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer's epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women — queens, mothers, warriors, slaves — were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not - until now) remembered them. A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer's epics charted entirely by women — from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope — Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologised women of Greece's greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it. [Paperback]

 

The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems by Fiona Kidman $40
The Midnight Plane comes in to land exactly half a century after the 1975 publication of Kidman’s debut book, the poetry collection Honey and Bitters and contains poems from each of her six published collections as well as new sequences. There’s a sense in which The Midnight Plane works like an alternative memoir, offering a poet’s immediacy of vision and gift of linguistic precision on a life unfolding in real time. The Midnight Plane speaks to human relationships, to connection and disconnection, to the mystery and the majesty of life, to seasons of loss and cycles of renewal. Each of these poems is, in its own way, a midnight plane, flying in the dark, navigating for home in sometimes perilous conditions. [Hardback]

 

The Eyes of Gaza: A diary of resilience by Plestia Alaqad $35
In early October 2023, Palestinian Plestia Alaqad was a recent graduate with dreams of becoming a successful journalist. By the end of November, she would be internationally known as the 'Eyes of Gaza'.  Millions of people would be moved by her social media posts depicting daily life in Gaza amid Israel's deadly invasion and bombardment. Written as a series of diary extracts, The Eyes of Gaza shares the horrors of her experiences while showcasing the indomitable spirit of the men, women and children that share Plestia's communities. From the epicentre of turmoil, while bombs rained around her and devastation gripped her people, she witnessed their emotions, their gentle acts of quiet, necessary heroism, and the moments of unexpected tenderness and vulnerability amid the chaos. Through the raw honesty and vulnerability of a normal 22-year-old woman trying to make her way through a human tragedy, The Eyes of Gaza is a powerful call for peace. It recounts a harrowing experience, but it is not a heart-breaking lamentation. Rather, it is a manifesto for hope, advocating for a better future for Gaza, the Middle East, and our divided world. [Paperback]

 

Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent $40
In 2003, seventeen-year-old Australian exchange student Hannah Kent arrives at Keflavík Airport in the middle of the Icelandic winter. That night she sleeps off her jet lag and bewilderment in the National Archives of Iceland, unaware that, years later, she will return to the same building to write Burial Rites, the haunting story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland. The novel will go on to launch the author's stellar literary career and capture the hearts of readers across the globe. Always Home, Always Homesick is Hannah Kent's love letter to a land that has forged a nation of storytellers, her ode to the power of creativity. [Hardback]

 

Limitarianism: The case against extreme wealth by Ingrid Robeyns $30
An expert in inequality makes the case for a hard limit on personal wealth.  We all notice when the poor get poorer — when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this game-changing intervention, leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental and psychological terms, she shows, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all — the rich included. In place of our current system, Robeyns offers a breathtakingly clear alternative — limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism — and the opportunity for a vastly better world — lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. [Paperback]
”Powerful — a must-read.” —Thomas Piketty
”Effortlessly navigating between ethics, political theory, economics and public policy, Ingrid Robeyns's nuanced and persuasive defence of limitarianism is also a much-needed manifesto for reimagining political institutions.” —Lea Ypi

 

A View from the Stars: Stories and essays by Cixin Liu $25
We re mysterious aliens in the crowd. We jump like fleas from future to past and back again, and float like clouds of gas between nebulae; in a flash, we can reach the edge of the universe, or tunnel into a quark, or swim within a star-core. We re as unassuming as fireflies, yet our numbers grow like grass in spring. We sci-fi fans are people from the future.” —Cixin Liu, from the essay 'Sci-Fi Fans'
A View from the Stars features a range of short works from the past three decades of bestselling author Cixin Liu's prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu's experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years. [Paperback]
”His stories are filled with a sense of wonder as they push ideas about the future of humanity to their extremes, and the personal essays offer a rare glimpse into attitudes towards science fiction in China and how the genre has changed. A fascinating collection.” —Guardian

 
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize: HEART LAMP by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi

On awarding Heart Lamp the International Booker Prize, the judges said: “In a dozen stories – written across three decades — Banu Mushtaq, a major voice within progressive Kannada literature — portrays the lives of those often on the periphery of society: girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India. These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society, exposing the rot within: corruption, oppression, injustice, violence. Yet, at its heart, Heart Lamp returns us to the true, great pleasures of reading: solid storytelling, unforgettable characters, vivid dialogue, tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn. Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper.
Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.  Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters — the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost — that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.”

THE FACULTY OF DREAMS by Sara Stridsberg (translated from Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner) — reviewed by Thomas

In this beautifully abject and uncomfortable biographical novel, Sara Stridsberg suspends her subject, Valerie Solanas, indefinitely at the point of death in San Francisco’s disreputable Bristol Hotel in 1988 and subjects her to a long sequence of interrogations by a self-styled ‘narrator’, superimposing upon the distended moment of death two additional narratives stands: of her life from childhood until the moment  Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968, and from the trial via the mental hospital to society's margins and the Bristol hotel. Stridsberg has strung a multitude of short dialogues in these strands, typically preceded by the narrator setting the scene, so to call it, in the second person, and then scripting conversations between Solanas and the narrator, or with Solanas’s mother, Dorothy, or with her friend/lover Cosmogirl, or with Warhol or ‘the state’ or a psychiatrist or a nurse, or with the opportunistic Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press published Solanas’s remarkable  SCUM Manifesto , a radical feminist tirade against the patriarchy at once scathingly acute and deliciously ironic. Stridsberg (aided by her translator into English, Deborah Bragan-Turner) conjures Solanas’s voice perfectly, animating the documentary material in a way that is both sensitive and brutal. This is, of course, both against and absolutely in line with Solanas’s wishes, making herself available to “no sentimental young woman or sham author playing at writing a novel about me dying. You don’t have my permission to go through my material.” The Solanas of the dialogues is often largely the deathbed Solanas, suspended in a liminal state between times and on the edge of consciousness, whereas her interlocutors are more affixed to their relevant times, for instance her mother Dorothy forever caught in Solanas’s childhood — in which Valerie was abused by her father and, later, by her mother’s boyfriends — yet hard to get free of, due to “that life-threatening bond between children and mothers.” The scene/dialogue mechanism that comprises most of the novel appears to remove authorial intrusion from the representation of Solanas’s life more effectively than a strictly ‘factual’ biography would have done, while all the time flagging the fictive nature of the project. “I fix my attention on the surface. On the text. All text is fiction. It wasn’t real life; it was an experience. They were just fictional characters, a fictional girl, fictional figurants. It was fictional architecture and a fictional narrator. She asked me to embroider her life. I chose to believe in the one who embroiders.” Stridsberg does a remarkable job at being at once both clinical and passionate, at undermining our facile distinctions between tenderness and abjection, between beauty and transgression, between radical critique and mental illness, between verbal delicacy and the outpouring of “all these sewers disguised as mouths.” Solanas shines out from the abjection of America, unassimilable, a person with no place, no possible life. “It was an illness, a deranged, totally inappropriate grief response. I laughed and flew straight into the light. There was nothing to respond appropriately to.” At the end of the book the three strands of narrative draw together and terminate together: Solanas shoots Warhol at the moment of her own death two decades later, and the personae are released. All except Warhol, who lived in fear of Solanas thereafter: “People say Andy Warhol never really came back from the dead, they say that throughout his life he remained unconscious, one of the living dead.”

The Winners at the Ockhams — a Note from Stella

I’m reposting my review of Delirious by Damien Wilkins this week. Delirious took out the coveted Acorn this week! If you don’t know what that is and didn’t notice the biggest event on the book industry calendar, then it’s time to take note. The Ockhams are our annual book awards, a celebration of writing and publishing in Aotearoa and home to the prestigious $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Congratulations to Damien and the other award winners! Publishing in a small country is hard work, and we are lucky to have a rich and diverse literary culture. However, this can’t happen on merely good wishes, a few prizes, and ever-dwindling funding streams. Those who work in the book trade — publishers, reviewers, booksellers, authors — are highly committed, but all this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. So: celebrate in the best way by buying a book. Aotearoa authors, booksellers and publishers exist only with your support. Thank you, readers!

Review:

Mary and Pete are sorting things out. They are going to make the ‘big move’. Time to downsize, to choose low maintenance over steps one may tumble down. Mary knows Pete’s heart isn’t up to it. Pete knows Mary’s state of mind is tentative. So, no choice really. Or is there? Damien Wilkins’s Delirious is a spotlight on that thing that looms for all of us — old age. A novel on ageing and the problems this conjures, whether practical or philosophical, doesn’t sound very promising. Think again. Wilkins uses his exceptional craft as a writer, a sharp analysis of human behaviour, and an observant eye to bring us a thoughtful novel. One rich in emotion, without being cloying. In these pages are grief and loss: for Mary a phone call triggers a trauma from the past — a trauma which neither she nor Pete have fully resolved. Here is Mary, ex-cop, unsure how to proceed. Here is Pete, ex-librarian, searching for the right words. This is a novel with a heart that beats and not all the beats are the same. Take Pete’s mother. In dementia, Margaret finds an escape, of sorts. An escape from her overbearing husband and from conformity. Her mind’s slippage is both frightening and hilarious. 
Mary and Pete are the every-people: people you know and maybe who you are. They are what we might call average. Mary’s a bit more aloof than Pete. Pete’s keen on helping out. The community that revolves around them, friends, family, colleagues and neighbours are all set up a little by Wilkins. Delirious takes a gentle poke at our society, and a less subtle, but delightfully funny, dig at ‘the village’. From Mary’s ex-boss perfecting his bowling, to the snide comments of the narrow-minded, to the heat-pump “we will never have one of those”, to the new but not quite right interior decor, there is something about the retirement village that doesn’t encourage the couple to unpack their boxes. What they don’t say — especially to each other — and don’t do underscores much of the novel. Then something changes. Mary and Pete will make the big move, but not the one you or they expected. 
Delirious is by turns sad and funny. It’s profoundly honest about ageing and caring for others in illness, and all the dilemmas this poses, yet cleverly balances this poignancy with sly satire.

Book of the Week: THE BOOK OF GUILT by Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey’s new novel is an unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others and the public shows a disturbing tolerance for injustice and cruelty. When triplets from a cancelled medical experiment are released into the community, they find that the world is a darker and more complicated place than they had been led to believe. Chidgey’s novel addresses deep ethical and social issues in an assured and compelling way.

OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS 2025 — Winners!

The category winners in this year’s book awards have just been announced. Find out below what the judges have to say about each of these excellent books, then click through to our website to find out more and to secure your copies. We can send your books by overnight courier, or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

 

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Delirious is an unforgettable work of fiction that navigates momentous themes with elegance and honesty. With a gift for crisp, emotionally rich digression, Damien Wilkins immerses readers in Mary and Pete’s grapples with ageing and their contemplations of lost loved ones who still thrive in vivid memories. What stood out to the judges was the assured but understated touch of prose as it flows elegantly across decades, threads the intricacies of relationship, and fathoms the ongoing evolution of a couple’s grief. Wilkins manages to contend with colonialism, racism, and climate change while remaining intimate, funny, and, above all, honest. Delirious is an absorbing, inspiring novel, and a damn fine read.

 

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale (Otago University Press)
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit displays an exceptional ability to turn confessional anecdotes into quicksilvery flashes of insight. It's a book about fibs and fables; and telling true stories which are perceived by others as tall stories; and the knock-on or flow-on effects of distrust, the scales dropping from one's eyes. It's about power and a sense of powerlessness; it's about belief and the loss of belief, it's about trust and disillusion; it's about disenchantment with fairytales. It's about compassion. Emma Neale is a writer fantastically sensitive to figurative language and its possibilities. There's also scepticism, a sense of malaise and unease, but bolstered by a quick wit, liveliness and humour, where thought moves through the lines, arriving simultaneously with the word.

 

BOOKHUB AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu), Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī) (Auckland University Press)
Described as groundbreaking, a landmark publication and a ‘bold and ambitious endeavour’, Toi Te Mana is a comprehensive survey of Māori art. Twelve years in the making, extensively researched and thoughtfully written, it casts a wide inclusive net. The result is a beautifully designed visual tour de force of images both newly created and archivally sourced, and a cultural framework that approaches toi mahi with intelligence and insight. This is a book of enduring significance with international reach.
Toi Te Mana is dedicated to the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, one of the three authors responsible for this magnum opus. The judges congratulated Professors Deirdre Brown and Ngarino Ellis for carrying the baton to completion, a herculean task akin to the mahi of Maui himself.

 

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) (HarperCollins Publishers Aotearoa New Zealand)
Hine Toa is a rich, stunningly evocative memoir that defies easy categorisation. As well as painting a vivid picture of Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku’s early life, from her childhood on 'the pā' at Ōhinemutu to her many creative and academic achievements, it is also a fiery social and political history that chronicles the transformative second half of the 20th century in Aotearoa from a vital queer, Māori, feminist perspective. From its extraordinary opening sentence, it weaves Māori and English storytelling traditions: “Once upon a time there was a pet tuatara named Kiriwhetū; her reptile skin was marked with stars.” Hine Toa is both a personal testimony and a taonga, and it was a clear winner for the judges.

 
 

MĀTĀTUHI FOUNDATION BEST FIRST BOOK AWARDS

HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION

Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu (Ngāti Rahurahu, Ngāti Tahu–Ngāti Whaoa) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Poorhara is a road trip novel unlike any other. Two cousins, Erin and Star, pile into a 1994 Daihatsu Mira in a desperate bid to escape the suffocation of racism and poverty, the rigid expectations of whānau, and the trajectory of their own pasts. The judges were impressed by the urgency of Michelle Rahurahu's tragi-comic crises and the clarity of her depiction of colonialism, a presence in the book as incessant and rotten as Star’s relentless toothache.

 

JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY

Manuali'i by Rex Letoa Paget (Saufo'i Press)
This debut collection from Rex Letoa Paget convinces through an incantatory lyricism and chant-like rhythms that surge like ocean waves. Manuali'i ensnares and uplifts; it carries us with it through its propulsive lyrical momentum.There's a freshness and an optimism to the poems which work as semi-parables about self-growth and self-realisation: they are celebratory or elegiac bricolages, each a melange of urban realism and Pasifika mysticism. With its flow and flux, its tonal patterns and subtle imagery, Manuali'i delivers a powerful new voice.

 

JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker (Auckland University Press)
An academic tome on the expansiveness and diversity of women’s art practice in Aotearoa, Sight Lines is derived from author Kirsty Baker’s doctoral thesis, and complemented with essays from eight other contributors. The book traverses many artforms and does a stellar job providing a vista through New Zealand art history across time, space and place. Liberally illustrated, with intentional, subtle design, Sight Lines will likely become a go-to text for tertiary art history students, and a point of reference within the country’s art analysis literature.

 

E.H. McCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION

The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
We are living through terrifying times – perhaps a mass extinction event – and that can be hard to think about. In this singular essay collection, Una Cruickshank uses pearls, jet, amber, coral, and other biogenic talismans to open new perspectives on climate change, humanity, and maybe even hope. The Chthonic Cycle is bold and convention-breaking, and unlike anything the judges had read before.

 
LA VITA È DOLCE by Letitia Clark — review by Stella

A sweet pastry with morning coffee, a biscotti for a mid-morning snack, or a satisfying panna cotta? All can be found in Letitia Clark’s Italian-inspired dessert cookbook, La Vita è Dolce. Dipping into this warm and delightful book, I was pleasantly surprised to see a wide range of baking, some simple recipes, others more complex, and some that look complicated but aren’t. That is, they look great! Almond biscuits that look like tiny perfect peaches! But Clark reassures us in her introductory paragraphs that she’s not a perfect cook, and that “cooking should never be a drama… Baking is not a divine gift or even a precise science…”, There are sections on biscotti, crostate (tart), torte, dolci al cucchiaio (sweets by spoon), gelato and gifts. Making a cake is often in celebration of a milestone event — a birthday (layer cake please!), wedding, a memorial or an achievement. Making a cake is a gift: generally you make a cake for someone in celebration or to carve out a little time. All the cakes in La Vita è Dolce look and sound delicious. Letitia Clark is a champion of the upside-down cake (as she says in her notes, her dessert recipes are Italian-inspired; she’s a French-trained Englishwoman living in Sardinia). I couldn’t go past the Candied Clementine, Fennel Seed & Polenta Cake. Those citrus and aniseed flavours, served with a good dollop of youghurt — it’s relaxed and aromatic. Need a recipe to impress and prep ahead of an occasion? The Ricotta, Pear & Hazelnut Layer Cake will be your jam! And a spiced pumpkin cake sounds just right for an autumn afternoon.
A sweet mouthful is a small luxury, an indulgence to lift your day or finish a meal. There’s something divine about a silky creamy panna cotta. Choose from Toasted Fig Leaf (yes, the leaves!), Roasted Almond or Cappuccino. Or head to the simpler Green Lemon Posset. The ‘Gifts’ section includes a delicious chocolate salami, playful and colourful marzipan fruits, and of course, classic panforte and truffles!
There’s plenty to keep you baking through wet afternoons and cool evenings here.
And this, along with Wild Figs and Fennel — a seasonal year in Clark’s Italian kitchen — are in our annual cookbook sale.

LORI & JOE by Amy Arnold — reviewed by Thomas

The inability to tell on a coldish day whether the washing you are getting in is actually still a bit damp or merely cold is a universal experience, he thought, at least among those whose experiences include getting in washing on a coldish day, which would not be saying much (‘A’ being the universal experience of those who have had the experience ‘A’) if it were not for the fact that perhaps the majority of people (in whom I am immersed and from whom I am separate) have actually had that experience. Why then, he wondered, is Amy Arnold’s book Lori & Joe the first book I have read that records this experience? And why do I find it so thrilling, he wondered, to read this account of what could be termed a fundamental existential dilemma writ small, why, in my deliberately solitary pursuit of reading this book, am I thrilled by the most mundane possible universal experience? Maybe exactly for that reason, the unexceptional experiences, the fundamental existential dilemmas writ small, are exactly those that connect us reassuringly when we are reading solitarily. What is thought like? What is my own thought like? What is the thought of others like? I am not particularly interested in what is thought, he thought, I am more interested in the way thought flows, surely that is not the word, the way thought moves on, or its shape, rather, if thought can be said to have a shape: the syntax of thought, which, after all is the principal determinant of thought, regardless of its content but also determining its content. If my primary interest is grammar, then what I want from literature is an investigation of form, an adventure or experiment in form. I think but I do not know how I think unless I write it down or unless I read the writings down of the thoughts of another in which I recognise the grammar of my own thoughts. What I think is a contingent matter, he thought. Why washing is called washing when it is in fact not washing but drying is another thing he had wondered but maybe nobody else has wondered this, he thought, it does not appear in this book but this book does not pretend to be exhaustive of all possible thoughts either explicit or implicit in quotidian experiences, though it is fairly exhaustive of all the thoughts that rise towards, and often achieve, consciousness, so to call it, in its protagonist, so to call her, Lori, who takes up her partner Joe’s morning coffee one morning just like every morning and finds him dead, not like any other morning. Lori immediately then sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells, in typical weather and mud, and the book consists entirely of a record, for want of a better word, of the pattern of her thoughts, looping themselves onto the armature of a fairly constrained present, winding twenty-five years of repetitions and irritations and unexpressed dissatisfactions, such as we all have, I suppose, he thought, memories of all those years since she and Joe came to live in the cottage, their isolation, the landscape, the weather, the routines of mundane existence, ineluctable and cumulatively painful when you think of them, their breeding neighbours, no longer neighbours but no less inerasable for that, the small compromises made when living with another that become large compromises, perhaps less conscious ones but maybe intolerably conscious ones, consciousness after all being what is intolerable, through repetition over decades, all wound over and over and around themselves and around the armature of the present, drawn repeatedly, obsessively to whatever it is that troubles Lori the most, but always turning away or aside without reaching that something, or in order not to reach that something, which remains as a gap in consciousness, unthinkable, but a gap the very shape of itself. Lori & Joe is a remarkable piece of writing that shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold shows how Lori’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies. It reminds me, he thought, suspecting that readers of his review might respond better to a little name-dropping than to his attempts to express his own enthusiasm, of works by Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard in its fugue-like form, its musicality, so to speak, in the way that it perfectly calibrates the fractality of thought, so to term it, and he wished that he had not so termed it, upon the unremarkable slow progression of the present.

Book of the Week: HINE TOA by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku

The 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony* is just around the corner. The longlists have been assembled, the shortlists announced, and on Wednesday 14th May the winners in each section will take the stage. Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku is vying for the non-fiction award, and is a strong contender.

'Remarkable. At once heartbreaking and triumphant' — Patricia Grace

'Brilliant. This timely coming-of-age memoir by an iconic activist will rouse the rebel in us all. I loved it' — Tina Makereti

Emeritus professor Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) was the first wāhine Māori to earn a PhD in a New Zealand university. Te Awekōtuku has worked across the heritage, culture and academic sectors as a curator, lecturer, researcher and activist. Her areas of research interest include gender issues, museums, body modification, power and powerlessness, spirituality and ritual.
But growing up in Rotorua in the 1950s, whānau dismissed her dreams of higher education. To them, she was just a show-off, always getting into trouble, talking back, and running away.

In this fiery memoir about identity and belonging, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku describes what was possible for a restless working-class girl from the pā. After moving to Auckland for university, Ngāhuia advocated resistance as a founding member of Ngā Tamatoa and the Women's and Gay Liberation movements, becoming a critical voice in protests from Waitangi to the streets of Wellington.

Hine Toa defies easy categorisation. It is a rich, personal, stunningly evocative and creative memoir of Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku’s life, from early childhood on ‘the pā’ at Ōhinemutu to academic achievements such as being the first wahine Māori to be awarded a PhD in New Zealand. But it is also a fiery social and political history of this country through the mid late 20th century from a vital, queer, Māori, feminist perspective that deserves – and here claims – centre stage." —Ockham judges’ citation

Find out more:

* If you are in Auckland you can head along to the event at the Aotea Centre; the rest of us can watch the Ochkam NZ Book Awards ceremony live here.

NEW RELEASES (9.5.25)

Build your reading pile, or the reading piles of others. Click through to purchase your copies. We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey $38
In a sinisterly skewed version of England in 1979, thirteen-year-old triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a New Forest home, part of the government’s Sycamore Scheme. Each day the boys must take medicine to protect themselves from a mysterious illness to which many of their friends have succumbed. Children who survive are allowed to move to the Big House in Margate, a destination of mythical proportions, desired by every Sycamore child. Meanwhile, in Exeter, Nancy lives a secluded life with her parents, who never let her leave the house. As the government looks to shut down the Sycamore homes and place their residents into the community, the triplets’ lives begin to intersect with Nancy’s, culminating in revelations that will rock the children to the core. Gradually surrendering its dark secrets, The Book of Guilt is a spellbinding and profoundly unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others. [Paperback]

 

Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman $38
Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit, and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before surrealism and a conceptual artist before conceptual art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There's scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn't anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre's Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demimonde to the artistic avant-garde, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie's death. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your coat and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century’s worth of adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature.” — Lucy Sante
”Ian Penman – critic, essayist, mystical hack and charmer of sentences like they’re snakes – is the writer I have hardly gone a week without reading, reciting, summoning to mind. The writer without whom, etc.” —Brian Dillon

 

In the Rhododendrons: A memoir with appearances by Virginia Woolf by Heather Christle $60
When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with. On a recent visit to London's Kew Gardens, Christle's mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager. Her private, British mother's revelation — a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship — propels Christle down a deep and destabilising rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England's sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's 'birthday hill' in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother's story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences. Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives. [Hardback]
”Christle's exacting rigour and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: ‘There is a difference between bones and a book,’ she writes, ‘but both have at their center a spine.’ What results is irreducibly human. In the Rhododendrons is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It's a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art's most urgent living practitioners.” —Kaveh Akbar
”Stunning. I saw her working in a shaft of light, dusting layer after layer off her own life.” —Patricia Lockwood

 

The Gender of Sound by Anne Carson $26
History is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing, ritual shouts. From whom? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes. From antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, this book charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood. [Paperback]

 

This Compulsion in Us by Tina Makereti $40
In her first book of nonfiction, prizewinning author Tina Makereti writes from inside her many intersecting lives as a wahine Māori – teacher, daughter, traveller, parent – and into a past that is as alive and changeful as the present moment. Included are frank and moving essays about the wāhine who have shown her many ways of being a Māori woman, the pain and dark humour of living with an alcoholic, a blue boob from breast cancer treatment, and the potential of art to return power to survivors of colonialism. What if we could transform the events that made us who we are? What if there were a way back to the beginning? [Paperback]

 

An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: Writing systems on the verge of vanishing by Tim Brookes $70
If something is important, we write it down. Yet 85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing — not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for hundreds of years — sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of a people — is lost. This Atlas is about those writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them. From the ancient holy alphabets of the Middle East, now used only by tiny sects, to newly created African alphabets designed to keep cultural traditions alive in the twenty-first century: from a Sudanese script based on the ownership marks traditionally branded into camels, to a secret system used in one corner of China exclusively by women to record the songs and stories of their inner selves: this unique book profiles dozens of scripts and the cultures they encapsulate, offering glimpses of worlds unknown to us — and ways of saving them from vanishing entirely. [Hardback]

 

The Anatomy of Sand by Mikaela Nyman $30
the first poetry collection written in English by the Finnish–New Zealand poet Mikaela Nyman. In an expansive new collection encompassing myths and science, the political and personal, the local and global, lyrical and technical language, from outer space to the microscopic, Nyman ask us to pay attention to how our present-day actions will impact future ecological events. These poems listen to the creaking of space and wash of oceans, document the methane dunes on Pluto and eroding runes at Back Beach, and search the Finnish Kalevala mythology for answers. [Paperback]
”Like the tide, The Anatomy of Sand returns to the shoreline as a haven and a lens to examine our relationship with nature and environmental loss. Nyman is fascinated by the ways we insist on artificially replicating what nature has already abundantly provided, and reminds us that we do not sit outside of our environment. This book is urgent and timely, rich and lively.” —Helen Heath
”This is a book with flashes of humour, a querying of everything, and minute observation. There is a lovely mental toughness, an evolution in the poet herself, in a collection that is absolutely contemporary.” —Elizabeth Smither

 

The Origins on an Experimental Society: New Zealand 1769—1860 by Erik Olssen $65
a new account of the origins of New Zealand: how Pakeha settlers - nurtured on Enlightenment thought and evangelical humanitarianism — encountered Maori, and how the two peoples together developed a distinctively experimental society. With James Cook's arrival in 1769 and the subsequent colonisation, New Zealand became one of the few post-Enlightenment experiments in creating a new nation anywhere in the world. The Europeans who settled these islands brought with them a belief in the power of reason and experience to improve peoples and societies. Encounters between Maori and these new arrivals profoundly shaped the thoughts and behaviours of both peoples. Olssen argues that the people who settled New Zealand planned two experiments in making a better society. They hoped that, in contrast to earlier colonial projects, the indigenous New Zealanders would not be driven to extinction but eventually take their place as equals in a modern commercial society. And they aimed to create a society that was fairer and more just than the one they had left behind; a 'Better Britain'. While both experiments were first conceived by savants and philosophers, they gained ongoing support, by lodging in the hearts and minds of the settlers: whalers and missionaries, mothers and farmers. In turn, Maori adapted these new ideas to their own ends, giving up slavery and inter-tribal warfare, and adapting the institutions of the colonisers in ways that would re-define the experiments. This then is an ethnography of 'tangata Pakeha', a people of European descent changed by their encounters with 'tangata Maori' and their land — just as Maori were themselves changed — and the story of the society they built together. Ranging across intellectual and cultural history, from the beach at Paihia to the coffee houses of Paris, Olssen enables us to understand the origins of New Zealand anew. [Hardback]
”Erik Olssen's book is remarkably lucid and insightful on a broad front of historical scholarship; it is informed profoundly on philosophical, political and scientific thinking of the period, and overall a quite astonishing intellectual achievement.” - Atholl Anderson (Ngai Tahu)
”This new history argues that New Zealand was a series of ‘experiments’ in settling a country. The author tracks the ideas, philosophies and values which were carried in settlers' baggage, the early inter-connectedness between Maori and the newcomers that reshaped those experiments, and the profound significance of these decades for the future of the country and its peoples.” —Claudia Orange
”I found this book stunning, breathtaking even, in its scope and detail. It revisits and explores the origins, themes and complex patchwork of ideas that came together to underpin the founding years of Aotearoa New Zealand. Our early engagement with the intellectual and physical manifestations of global colonisation, as related by Olssen, is especially interesting. This is not an easy book but steady application to its contents leads to immeasurable rewards.” —Buddy Mikaere (Ngati Pukenga, Ngati Ranginui, Ngati Pikiao, Tuhoe)

 

Luminous by Silvia Park $37
In a fictional near-future Korea, robots have integrated seamlessly into society. They are housekeepers and policemen, teachers and bus drivers. They are our lovers. They are even our children. Siblings Jun and Morgan Cho haven t spoken to each other in several years. The children of a celebrated robot designer, both are still grieving the loss of their brother Yoyo, the earliest prototype for what humanoid robots have now become — nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. But Yoyo was always bound for a darker purpose, and his absence has left a chasm in the siblings lives. When a strange disappearance thrusts the siblings back together, neither of them realises that the investigation will not only force them to confront their fractured family’s past, but will also bring them back to Yoyo himself. [Paperback]
“Utterly beautiful.” —Raven Lailani
"With Ishiguro-esque precision, Park dissects sentience and reality, as well as love and death.” —Publishers Weekly

 

Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki (translated from Japanese by Helen O’Horan) $27
A young woman named Izumi details her turbulent twenties in thirteen disarmingly candid vignettes set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo. Seamlessly delivering ennui alongside snark, and tragedy nose-to-nose with apathy, Set My Heart on Fire is singular representation of young womanhood, missteps and miscommunication, and music, men and meds. With chapters titled for tracks by The Zombies, The Supremes and the Rolling Stones, as well as songs by underground Japanese bands of the time, the music of the 1960s and 1970s permeates the story.  There are distinct traces of the fraught tenderness in Marguerite Duras's The Lover, and the raw, decadent post-war generational dissolution of Ryu Murakami's Almost Transparent Blue.  But Suzuki's novel is carried by her own singular charm and wit, which will be readily recognised and enjoyed by readers of her short stories. [Paperback]

 

The Incredible Insects of Aotearoa by Phil Sirvid and Simon Pollard $35
What do you call a grasshopper dressed as a gladiator? Why are sandfly bites so itchy? What links insects and Māori whakairo (carving)? How does a glow worm glow? Why does this book include sorcerers, vampires and dragons? What makes insects in Aotearoa so special? From our backyards to high in the mountains, through forests, along coastlines, and in the darkness of caves, award-winning science writer Simon Pollard and Te Papa insect expert Phil Sirvid answer these questions and more. Share in the secrets and marvels of our natural world through stunning close-up photographs, mātauranga Māori, insightful explanations, and meet-the-expert profiles. [Paperback]

 

Private Revolutions: Coming of age in a new China by Yuan Yang $39
This is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, dreaming of better futures. It is about Leiya, who wants to escape the fate of the women in her village. Still underage, she bluffs her way on to the factory floor. It is about June, who at fifteen sets what her family thinks is an impossible goal — to attend university rather than raise pigs. It is about Siyue, ranked second-to-bottom of her English class, who decides to prove her teachers wrong. And it is about Sam, who becomes convinced that the only way to change her country is to become an activist even as the authorities slowly take her peers from the streets. With unprecedented access to the lives, hopes, homes, dreams and diaries of four ordinary women over a period of six years, Private Revolutions gives a voice to those whose stories go untold. At a time of rising state censorship and suppression, it unearths the identity of modern Chinese society and, through the telling, something of our own. [Paperback]
”An engrossing book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women. What sets the story told in Private Revolutions apart is the speed and magnitude of this upheaval, captured by Yang with palpable admiration for the women negotiating these seismic shifts one day at a time.” —Mythili Rao, Guardian

 

Disaster Nationalism: The downfall of liberal civilisation by Richard Seymour $47
The rise of the new far-right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte, the true peril lies elsewhere. They are but the political manifestations of a potent force — disaster nationalism. This mass cultural phenomenon, propelled through the vast networks of social media and fueled by far-right influencers, emerges from a reservoir of societal despair, fear, and isolation. At its core, disaster nationalism fixates on images of catastrophe — the 'Great Replacement,' Satanic 'cabals' — as explanations for its discontent. It yearns for an 'end of days,' a reckoning, a 'storm' as the QAnon faithful call it, to bring an end to its suffering. This yearning is only heightened by the relentless onslaught of real-world disasters — from economic recessions to global pandemics and ecological collapse. Within this seething cauldron, we witness not only the surge of far-right political movements but also the sparks of individual and collective violence against perceived enemies, from 'lone wolf' killers to terrifying pogroms. Should a new fascism emerge, it will coalesce from these very elements. This is disaster nationalism. In Disaster Nationalism, Richard Seymour delves deep into this alarming phenomenon, dissecting its roots, its influencers, and the threats it poses. With meticulous analysis and compelling storytelling, this book offers a stark warning and a call to action. [Hardback]
”What thinker would you bring to an earth on fire? You would not want to leave Richard Seymour at home: he is essential company for an age of compound catastrophes.” —Andreas Malm
”One of the most consistently brilliant and lyrical thinkers writing today.” —China Mieville

 

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami $37
In a world without privacy, what is the cost of freedom? Sara is returning home from a conference abroad when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside at the airport and inform her that she will commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, their algorithm has determined that she presents an imminent risk to the person she loves most, and must now be transferred to a retention centre for twenty-one days to lower her risk score . But when Sara arrives at Madison to be observed alongside other dangerous dreamers, it soon becomes clear that getting home to her family is going to cost more than just three weeks of good behaviour. And as every minor misdemeanour, every slight deviation from the rules, adds time to her stay, she begins to wonder if there might be more here than first meets the eye. Then, one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and setting off a chain of events that lead Sara on a collision course with the companies that have deprived her of her freedom. [Paperback]
”A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future. An elegant meditation on identity, motherhood, and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience.” —Jennifer Egan

 

Wellness by Nathan Hill $28
When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the 90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other. [Paperback]
”American storytelling at its era-spanning best. An immersive, multi-layered portrait of a marriage, Nathan Hill's follow-up to The Nix is a work of quiet genius, tackling a few big questions: What is truth? What is love? And therefore, inevitably, what is true love?” —Observer

 

Will This Home Do? by Sophie Gilmore $30
Apologising is hard, especially when you’re feeling mad, so when an older sister gets into a fight with her younger sister, she sets off to find a new home. First she tries the dog house — Will this home do? No, it’s too small! What about the large leafy tree — Will this home do? No, because soon it starts to rain. The shed is too dark; the loft is full of moths. Could the very best home be with her little sister after all? A story that begins with the breaking of a toy and ends with the mending of a relationship.

 

The Tear Bottle: A graphic story of love and things by Annemarie Jutel $40
In a series of simple line drawings, Jutel tells the story of a family heirloom that is not quite what she and her sisters remembered. Via the comedy of family dynamics, and with the backdrop of history, she delves into serious issues of death, grief and forgiveness. This is a book about the objects families covet as a way of holding on to their past. It is told by bickering sisters trying to find out the truth about a family heirloom with a surprising twist. A graphic memoir with serious intent, its simple and colourful drawings invite readers to think about their own family histories. Is it really our heirlooms, or the stories we tell about them that help us to understand ourselves, our whānau and what matters to us?

 

Another England: How to reclaim our national story by Caroline Lucas $35
The right have hijacked ‘Englishness’. Can it be reclaimed? With the UK more divided than ever, ‘England’ has re-emerged as a potent force in culture and politics. But today the dominant story told about the country serves solely the interests of the right. The only people who dare speak of Englishness are cheerleaders for Brexit, exceptionalism and imperial nostalgia. Yet there are other stories, equally compelling, about who the English are: about the English people's radical inclusivity, their deep-rooted commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all. These stories put the Chartists, the Diggers and the Suffragettes in their rightful place alongside Nelson and Churchill. They draw on the medieval writers and Romantic poets who reflect a more sustainable relationship with the natural world. And they include the diverse voices exploring the shared challenges of identity and equality today. Caroline Lucas delves into literary heritage to explore what it can teach us about the most pressing issues of our time: whether the toxic legacy of Empire, the struggle for constitutional reform, or the accelerating climate emergency. And she sketches out an alternative Englishness: one that all can embrace to build a greener, fairer future. [Paperback]
”Not just an inspiring, nuanced and deeply literate book, but that rarest of things — a necessary one.” —Jonathan Coe
”Cleverly deploys Elizabeth Gaskell, John Clare and Charles Dickens to demonstrate that a culture can be diverse and coherent, innovative and rooted; many stories told in one beautiful language.” —Telegraph
Tells a new story about England and Englishness, and sets out the possibility for a progressive politics of land, place and nation. This is vital reading.” —Robert Macfarlane