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13 November 2026
"It is a folk art of sorts, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilised in the form of lifelong controlled suffering,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in Correction. In the ‘autobiographical’ novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship, Bernhard explores the conditions needed for continuing to live in an intolerable world by at once both aligning and contrasting his accommodation of the contradictory impulses for survival and self-destruction with the accommodation or lack of accommodation made between these impulses by his friend Paul Wittgenstein, whose resulting madness periodically incapacitated and ultimately destroyed him. The novel opens with the narrator and Paul both confined to departments in the Baumgartner Höhe hospital in Vienna, “isolated, shunted aside, and written off”: the narrator in the pulmonary department, not expected to live, and Paul in the psychiatric department, receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and kept in a caged bed. The two had met at the apartment of a mutual friend at a time when the narrator was afflicted by suicidal thoughts, when at the height of his despair Paul appeared as his “deliverer”, a man who, like the narrator, ''loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.” Whereas the narrator writes because “I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it,” Paul has no such defence. “Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness: one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. … Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them the mainspring of my existence.” Both the narrator and Paul exhibit neuroses (such as “the counting disease”) as a means of resisting the pull of annihilation, and share a passion for music (‘culture’ itself being a neurotic mechanism for collectively resisting the pull of annihilation). All efforts, though, to act as if the intolerable is tolerable are increasingly difficult to maintain. “As we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise.” The narrator knows that continuing is always only a postponement of the moment at which continuing becomes impossible: “I had behaved towards myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessless that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own overestimation of myself and the world.” Paul is destroyed by their shared madness, but the narrator is not yet destroyed. He survives by, in effect, sacrificing Paul. The narrator at ones both claims and disavows Paul as his alter ego, both emphasises and denies their shared identity (is that not always so with friendships?): “We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into even greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties.” When Paul, debilitated by his bouts of madness and the brutality of his treatment, desperate for some practical demonstration of friendship, invites the narrator to his apartment and the narrator sees in its squalor and hopelessness “the last refuge of a failure,” he feels a sudden revulsion for Paul and flees, leaving Paul weeping on his sofa (the last remaining artefact of his squandered former wealth). The narrator finds despicable what he once found admirable. His own destruction yawns too near his feet and he abandons his friend. He sees Paul as spent, as a man dying. “I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul’s shadow as I had about the real Paul of earlier days. … I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than meet him [for] we shun those who bear the mark of death.” When the narrator returns from a period overseas he learns of Paul’s death in a mental hospital in Linz a few days after attacking his cousin in his final madness, and of Paul’s lonely, abject funeral. “To this day I have not visited his grave,” he states. Paul’s death could be seen as the narrator’s displaced suicide, as a way in which the narrator has continued to exist. “I had met Paul, I now see, precisely at the time when he was beginning to die,” he says. “It seems to me that I was basically nothing but a twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend’s dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival.” He goes on: "It is not far-fetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible." This book is both a tender tribute to a friend, written in guilt, and an unflinching examination of that guilt.
A world bificuated. A world in chaos. A world in order. A story of dopplegangers. A story of resistance. A story of mystery and uncertainty. The story of a painting.
In Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party we meet each protagonist in the near future; a future beyond a catastrophe — an incident never fully explained. One that has split the world in two. Ari has arrived back in the world after almost two decades in prison. Curfew has just been lifted and Kareem is having a party to celebrate. Ari tags along with her flatmate Gloria. Their world is chaotic and unpredicatble — America now a series of nation states, many still tussling at their borders and others still raging within — but in new California people are hopeful that the years of war have passed. They are looking up and out at the prospect of a positive future no matter how furtive that future may be. But something is wrong with the party, and the lives of Ari, Gloria and Kareem will be altered in ways they could not imagine and hardly explain. A Side.
B Side opens at the half way point of the novel, and we meet a fresh set of characters some 33 years on from the party (which does not happen in this world) , if it is possible in this non-linear structure to keep time in order. St. John Mandel cleverly weaves time, as she does worlds, moving back and forth along strings of perspective and story, each portion telling us something new as we piece togther the parts. We are propelled forward by what each character knows (or doesn’t). What does exist in this ordered highly surveiled world is technology and a scientific experiment. For a variety of reasons, but often diffferent (especially between the lead scientists) physicists Nico and her husband, Kareem, have devised a system of teleportation. They have moved objects and mice across the laboratory and now it is their turn. We know Nico was uncertain. She had told her best friend Ibari Waker (who just happens to be Service – a dedicated employee of the state’s surveilance department ) to promise to look out for her children. Ibari imagines this is a immenient divorce situation, but the break-up is more permanent than either could have imagined.
The painting, ‘Swan Dive’, appears in both worlds. It comes from a time before the world splits, and has a magnetism for several in both worlds. Kareem (A Side) inherited it, Gloria covets it, Nico was gifted it (B Side), Ari bought it, and Sebastian (Gloria’s son) stole it. St. John Mandel infiltrated it. Like David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame, St. John Mandel works charcaters, happenings, and in this case a painting, into Exit Party. Ibari/Ari features in an earlier novel, and ‘Swan Dive’ can be found hanging on the wall in The Glass Hotel. For anyone who has read the authors other novels, there’s fun in the matching, but knowing is not necessary, and doesn’t explain the situation. That a painting sits quietly at the epicentre is an intriguing proposition.
In A Side, Ari moves on from America to Paris, on the run with Felix – her business partner and later her first husband – after some shady gun dealing does wrong. Yet Felix has a mark on his back, and misadvenuture follows this man (once he was a ballet dancer — and still is in B Side). Ari, forever the opportunist, lands on her feet with her second husband Bill, an ex-mercernary, but chaos isn’t something you can control. Ari’s instinct saves her, while Bill’s rationalist approach does not. In B Side, Ibari is moving up the ranks of Service, but her curiosity about Nico’s disappearance and her involvement with Nico’s children runs at crossroads to the rationale for Service. She realises that the world is slippery, and, as she fits the puzzle pieces together, she has more questions then answers.
What is St. John Mandel delving into? Throughout we are struck with questions. What is better, chaos or order? What shapes us, nature or nurture? Should we toe the line or rebel? What does resistence look like? All have consequences for their actions, but when situations are enforced on someone how responsible are they for their behaviour? In her previous novels, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, we have crossed the tracks of time, speculative worlds and metaphysics, and in her most well known Station Eleven we have an end of world dystopia. These are not new themes, but in Exit Party, the convolutions are addictive, her ability to weave story-within-story narratives clever and like her other work, the characaters are compelling and their stories hook you, doubled.
There are many possible futures for our crisis-riven present. Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel explores two of these, probing them in parallel and then tracing what happens when their separation is breached, albeit very slightly. The strength and fascination of the book is St. John Mandel’s sensitivity to her characters and the ways in which they respond and change to circumstances, be those of their wider worlds or or of the moment that they touch: the biggest issues are always felt on a very personal scale.
”What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel's imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights. Extraordinary.” —The Guardian
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
THE END OF EVERYTHING by M. John Harrison $37
Winner of the 2026 Booker Prize. ’The sky is glitching, and something strange, formless and growing is soon to come out of the sea, to imitate our speech, forms, and customs. Our left-behind inhabitants scavenge where and what they can, provisional alliances are made and broken, shocking violence occurs, and no one can agree on exactly what has happened. A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering and oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.’ —2026 Booker Prize judges’ citation. (More stock due soon! Order your copy now.)
ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME: V by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Siphia Hersi Smith) $33
"Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time-and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day." —Hernan Diaz
THE ROUSE by China Miéville $45
Winner of the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize. “Excellent though all the books on the shortlist are, it seemed only right to give this year's Goldsmiths Prize to the one that, in terms of ambition, bold use of history, linguistic experiment and sheer scale, broke most explosively with expectation.” —Francis Spufford, Goldsmiths Prize judge
PARTITA by Barbara Kingsolver $38
"Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature's masters. A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver's familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement." —Kirkus
MAY WE FEED THE KING by Rebecca Perry $35
May We Feed the King dances between a historical subject who resists the march of progress and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present, to offer a beguiling meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
A Thought Without Collision by Adrian Duncan $30
Summer, 1923. Six-year-old Catherine Carolan grows restless on her parents' farm. It's already clear that her intellect will soon outgrow the two-room schoolhouse across the fields. But in post-Civil War Ireland, an education is not an easy thing for a girl to access, and young Catherine is not the only one in her family who will come to tire of rural life. Summer, 1951. To ease him through his final days, Dr. Josef Alois calls for someone from his past. Enter Catherine Carolan, now an Oxford professor. As Alois's mind and body falter, Catherine must decide how far she will follow this man that she loves. A novel in two strands, A Thought without Collision is a beautiful meditation on how we construct our relationship to the world around us. [Paperback with French flaps]
’A brilliant interrogation of philosophy and wonder.’ —Daisy Hildyard, The Guardian
'An original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms.' —Colm Tóibín
'The book is an elegant rarity in contemporary fiction: a novel in which form, voice, style and story are inseparable from each other.' —Cathy Sweeney
’A Thought Without Collision manages to seamlessly intersperse fascinating passages of mathematical philosophy with encounters of profound human tenderness, asking questions of what, exactly, it is that makes us human: the messy, tearaway nature of our thoughts? Our yearning for sense-making? Or the uncontrollable and yet transformative points of connection between us? With formal innovation and elegant, blistering prose, Duncan offers a different model of novelistic causality, with characters that feel alive in their vivid and quiet complexity.’ —Susannah Dickey
>>Slightly on the outside of things.
>>A superfluity of precision.
The Appointment by Herta Müller (translated from German by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm) $28
'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.' So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective. [Paperback]
”Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism. Muller has an exceptionally rare talent — to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful.” —Prospect
O Now! by Niall Williams $25
October in the parish of Faha, County Clare: the beginning of the season of spirits. Four nights a week, Bat Considine calls on his neighbour Mossie Crowe; a beloved widower known to all in the townland of Faha as Ganga. They sit by the fire and, as Bat reads the newspaper aloud, wait to see which of them will die first. But this week, Bat will make a discovery that changes this routine forever. In the coming days, Ganga's small community will gather, and his family travel home from far away — to celebrate a quiet life, in all its miracles. O Now! leads readers back down the road that leads to Faha and explores what it means to live a meaningful life, and what it means to leave it behind. [Hardback]
”A tender portrait of a male friendship, filled with the kind of sentences that make you pause mid-reading. Williams's writing is masterful in its economy, while packing a huge emotional punch.” —Irish Examiner
”I am utterly obsessed with Niall Williams.” —Ann Patchett
We Go to the Park by Sara Stridsberg (translated from Swedish by B.J. Woodstein), illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna $40
The park beckons us to leave our daily routines behind and enter its zone of endless possibility. In the park, the usual rules don't apply. In the park, what matters most is the moment, and losing track of time to the timelessness of imagination, invention, observation, and chance. In the park, there are risks, of course, but also the deepest rewards, to be found in the freedom experienced through play that is both embodied and participatory. It is not the lone ‘I’, but the ‘we’ that goes to the park, where chance encounters might suddenly become moments of deep connection — however fleeting — with others, nature, and ourselves. The text and images work together to transport the reader and widen their world. Beautifully produced. [Hardback]
"Taking a deep look into the emotional life of children, this thoughtful narrative uses spare, poetic language in a lyrical first-person perspective. Thickly layered illustrations further encourage an emotional response, as the vivid, sometimes jarring colors demand attention and add to the tone of instability. The narrator recognizes that the park, like life in general, is a place of many possibilities, a situation that is both frightening and thrilling." —Booklist
>>Look inside!
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of mothers and daughters by Rachel Aviv $60
You Won't Get Free Of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other (and for themselves). With uncanny depth of perception, Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in the New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other parents' children. In the final story, a daughter's traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother — the writer Alice Munro — in stories celebrated around the world. You Won't Get Free Of It is an astonishing investigation of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives. [Hardback]
”These essays struck deep notes when I read them in the New Yorker; she is simply brilliant.” —Anne Enright, Guardian
”I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint — she makes vivid experiences we can't explain.” —Ben Lerner
”Being a mother doesn't make you better or more sage, but in Aviv's care, at least, it seems to have brought new depths to her already excellent journalism.” —The Times
>>The most complex bond of all.
>>The problem does not lie with the sentences.
The Book of Genocides by Dana Mashoian Walrath $48
In this haunting graphic narrative, an award-winning writer, artist and descendant of genocide survivors brings history's darkest horrors to life, calling on us to remember, repair and resist. The Book of Genocides is a haunting graphic narrative that compels readers to confront the most harrowing chapters of human history not as distant events, but as visceral experiences. Dana Mashoian Walrath covers ten major atrocities across five centuries: the mass slaughter of the First Peoples of the Americas; the brutalisation of Black Americans; the devastation of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders; the Armenian genocide; the Holocaust; the Cambodian killing fields; the Rwandan genocide; the Bosnian genocide; the deadly persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar; and the genocide in Gaza. Walrath makes plain that the purpose of genocide is always a land grab, and its central apparatus is dehumanisation: each chapter delves into how dehumanisation operates, not just through violence but through the political and intellectual systems that enable it. The book's unique interactive design allows readers to reshape images of victims into grotesque forms mirroring the mental mechanisms of dehumanisation. With each page turn, the victims' humanity is restored, making their suffering undeniable. The Book of Genocides is an unsettling experience, shot through with the emotional gravity of horrific events — not just historical memories but ongoing realities, painful truths that shape our world and demand our action. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>Visit the book’s website.
Hiapo: Past and present in Niuean barkcloth by John Pule and Nicholas Thomas $60
A landmark study of one of the Pacific’s most remarkable yet little-known art traditions. ‘Hiapo’ is the Niuean word for barkcloth or tapa. Produced primarily in the nineteenth century, these extraordinary painted cloths combine striking visual beauty with rich cultural and historical significance. Drawing on years of research in museum collections, fieldwork in Niue, and conversations with elders, authors John Pule and Nicholas Thomas trace the history of this distinctive art form and the people who created it. From bold geometric designs to detailed depictions of plants, people and ships, these works offer a vivid window into life in Niue during a period of profound cultural change and growing contact with the wider world. This beautifully redesigned edition features an updated introduction and new material reflecting two decades of further research and discovery. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>See also Tapa.
Lonasei and the Mystery of Origin Grove by Kenneth Chapman $28
Eleven-year-old Lonasei is lonely — she wishes her older sister Eva Grace wasn't so mean, and that her mum, Aria, didn't have to work so much. But when Aria inherits her childhood home, Lonasei discovers she can enter her late Aunt Malia's paintings and experience the memories within. Through them, she discovers that her mother had another sister, Agnes, who went missing as a child. Lonasei's questions about the lost aunt she never knew existed lead her to explore the basement at Origin Grove, where she discovers a whole new world of possibility, and a chance to steal precious moments from the life that could have been. [Paperback]
”Haunting and tender. You will never look at paintings (or basement walls!) the same way again.” —Gracie Kim
>>Putting a Polynesian character in a fantasy world.
Lozhka: Eastern European soups, stews, and other things we eat with a spoon by Alissa Timoshkina $65
Alissa Timoshkina celebrates Eastern Europe through one of its most humble and powerful symbols: the spoon. Blending soulful recipes with rich storytelling, she brings together history, memory and cookery in a portrait of the region that is both deeply comforting and strikingly contemporary. From herb-scented soups and hearty grain stews to pillowy dumplings and custard-soaked desserts, each dish carries a sense of meaning, memory and belonging. Drawing on a wide range of traditions, including Ukrainian, Jewish, Tatar, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak and Roma, amongst others, Lozhka reveals a borderless cuisine shaped by resilience and generosity. Vibrant, vegetable-led and full of smoky, tangy and creamy flavours, these recipes are made for today’s kitchens while honouring centuries of tradition. More than a cookbook, Lozhka is a journey through kitchens, cultures and shared histories — an invitation to slow down, gather round and savour the stories carried in every spoonful. Nicely presented. [Hardback]
”I couldn’t love this book more.” —Diana Henry
”Just as you would tuck into a bowl of Alissa’s quince borscht or linger over her boozy, chocolate and smetana-layered trifle, I promise you will want to do the same with this deeply felt gem of a book.” —Polina Chesnakova
>>Look inside.
Gloria of Greymouth by Dam Duckor-Jones $60
In 2020 sculptor and poet Sam Duckor-Jones bought an abandoned church in Greymouth and named her Gloria. With yarn-bombed rafters, a costume bazaar, a plush loft, papier-mâché parishioners in the pews and pink neon light bouncing off a rhinestone piano, Gloria has become a celebration of queer creativity. In this record of Gloria's establishment, Sam wrestles with solitude, religion, intimacy, art and identity. He finds community in fellow artists and friendly locals, and solace in the rhythms of a quiet life. Gloria of Greymouth is a chronicle of a magnificent transformation, a manifesto for play and pleasure, and the story of an artist's being. Lusciously illustrated throughout. [Cloth-bound hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Visit Gloria’s website.
Stupid Faces in Stunning Paintings: A serious exploration of art history’s silliest expressions by Matthijs Van Mierlo $49
Famous paintings are celebrated for their beauty and depth, but they're also a treasure trove of ridiculous faces. From bewildered angels to screaming cats, stunning paintings are chock-full of weird expressions. In Stupid Faces in Stunning Paintings, Matthijs Van Mierlo takes you on a journey to the strangest corners of the art world, uncovering the stories behind 50 wacky faces — stories about religion, love, vanity, and just one very confused unicorn. Why does Vermeer's ‘The Girl with the Wine Glass’ look so bug-eyed? Who let Frida Kahlo paint a disturbingly dazed toddler? And why does baby Jesus look like he's about to file your taxes? This is the art history book to answer those questions and more. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>You want spectacular?
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‘Two beachcombers meet and exchange words at the intertidal; we are in Kent, and it is the near-future, but one that recognises itself to be in the middle of a catastrophe. The sky is glitching, and something strange, formless and growing is soon to come out of the sea, to imitate our speech, forms, and customs. Our left-behind inhabitants scavenge where and what they can, provisional alliances are made and broken, shocking violence occurs, and no one can agree on exactly what has happened. A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering and oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.’ —2026 Booker Prize judges’ citation
‘Many of M. John Harrison’s previous novels warn about the fantastic as a consolation, and the risks of exceeding the appropriate prescription, and I think The End of Everything may also be read as a depiction of a world subject to overdose, where lives have been saturated by the unreal. There is a grain of ambiguous hope in one character’s declaration that it doesn’t matter that the world has ended, “because another one will be along soon enough,” but what I felt when the novel released me was more immediate. I felt the urge to go outside, to run around and shout, not to celebrate the novel’s brilliance (although I think it is brilliant), but simply to prove that, for now, something real still exists.’ —Niall Harrison, Locus Mag
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6 November 2026
How can I write my review, or live my life, or do anything without repeating myself, I wonder. Here I go again! My life seems to consist of smaller and larger circles of repetition, my days are filled mostly of content indistinguishable from that which filled and will fill other days, barring some disaster or some miracle that is, though I have only my experience of this moment, shaded with what I call memory, inflected with what I think of as anticipation, to give me any idea of this repetition. I do experience repetition, I experience time, as if it actually exists, but how can I bear this? Any generalisation about the state of the world is a subjective state, but I suppose this endless repetition gets things done, I am a cog in the world-machine or else an untoothed wheel spinning needlessly and without traction, it is hard to tell, but I get things done. Repetition is the mode of action, but it causes me more suffering than it should. I think that perhaps I do not like getting things done. I think that I could so easily slip out of this shuddering machine, any thing could provide a way out, observing anything without the illusion of context would release me from its meaning and allow me to see it clearly, without language, without intention, without usefulness, but for what? Would this be the ultimate dislocation from my world or the ultimate dissolution in it? We repeat ourselves to keep the middle way, to preserve the idea that we have of ourselves, or the idea that others have of us. Tara Selter, in Solvej Balle’s seven-part novel On the Calculation of Volume, finds herself trapped in an endlessly repeating 18th of November, or she repeats her presence in what everyone else experiences as a single day. In this second volume, Tara decides to travel through Europe, guided by a meteorological chart, pursuing the experience of a passing year by moving to places where the conditions on the 18th of November resemble those she would associate with a changed season. She travels north to ‘winter’ and south to ‘summer’ and records the fiction of a passing year in a green notebook in a sustained attempt to live against the facts. When the notebook is stolen and does not reappear, Tara concludes, “I have had no seasons. Seasons are not scenes and locations. You cannot construct a year out of fragments of November.” She considers a Roman sestertius that she has with her and “At that moment I felt a void come into being. I felt a loss, a slide, a shift. It was as if a space was opening up, very slowly, not a big space, or at least it didn’t feel big, but I couldn’t close it again.” There is a ‘looseness’ to the world, she realises, and she is simultaneously immersed and separate from it. “I am walking around the streets, superfluous and out of circulation. It is not a disaster. It is not nothing, but it is not much either. Even the sound of my own feet is superfluous. I am walking through a space that ought to be empty. The place I occupy ought to be vacant, but for some inexplicable reason Tara Selter has taken it. I am in the way, I am a foreign body, an error. I am a strange creature who ought not to be among people with a direction.” It is solipsistic to consider myself an intruder on my own absence, as Tara does, but I suppose we are all intruders on our own absence (or absences (it is hard to know whether not existing is entirely a personal thing or something I would share with everything else that did not exist)). Everyone in this 18th of November experiences the day each time the same (there is no reiteration for them, after all), except when Tara intrudes upon their world and they are affected or respond to her. The anomalies she brings to them change their day but have no effect, for there is no day after, or if there is, Tara cannot reach it. What would be the cumulative effect of all these anomalies, the effects of Tara, if these became compound and consequential? She is right to consider herself a monster, after all. What Tara consumes is not renewed, so although it may seem that she is free from the consequences of her actions, the world, however out of joint, offers her no such liberation. Her dilemmas are those in which we all find ourselves all the time, though our lives are constructed in denial of them. We can follow no thought through to its end. We live against the facts in order to stay within the limits of the space where we can get things done. “My time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a vessel, a container,” writes Tara. Each volume of this remarkable book provides a space for our thought, and equipment to stimulate its exercise.
In the week that installment five has landed, I’ve just completed book three. I’m eeking these out between other reading. One: so they remain distinct, and two: so I don’t finish what has been translated and then have an impatient wait for the seventh and final volume. So yes, still loving this stuck-in-November-18th meditation on life, time, and what makes us tick. In Books I and II, Tara was alone, attempting to navigate her way through this strange scenario — time standing still for everyone else but her. Waking to the start of the 18th yet again, the newspaper falling to the floor at the exact same time, the remeeting of acquaintances — for her a remeeting, for them the first time in that day. In the first book Tara tries to explain to her husband Thomas what has happened, but as each morning dawns she finds it harder to explain again, and he understanding but puzzled by her insistence of what is happening with time. In the second book, she decides to travel — to chase the seasons — to find variety in her day, finding ‘winter’ in the north. And at the close this book an obssession with the fall of Rome, trying to summon a reason for the time problem, only to find something more mysterious. A fellow traveller. In Book III, Henry and Tara exchange notes, discuss the autumnal day of 18th of November, and debate the reasons for their quandry. Book III begins as an investigation through two perspectives. Yet it’s not enough to keep the world they are now fragmented from at bay. Henry misses his young son in America, and Tara, her husband Thomas. Each return to their loved ones, promising to meet up again in 100 days. Tara at first starts to explain again each morning to Thomas what is happening, but as the days go by, she feels a terrible weight of responsibility for the confusion she is causing. She retreats once more to the spare room and is a secret within its walls, until a knock on the door announces something unexpected. Olga. Another person stuck in November 18th seeking her help. There are others. Book III widens the field: Tara is no longer just responsible for herself, but as part of a group navigating the world that moves around them. But what can a handful of people do in this stange scenario where they know the future (having lived through it multiple times)? Are they responsible for the actions of others, for accidents or encounters between people? And if they have been upended into this 18th November, why and what should or can they do about it? Is there a purpose or an opportunity to make the world different? By the close of Book III, as the small group try to find certainty in the situation; it feels like nothing is certain. This is an intriguing series, with its layers of thinking about time, our place in the world, our consumption of resources, our tentative hold on time, and what it means to be a human in a world fraught with ambiguities. In these books the mundane, the quotidian, meets the exceptional and philosophically inventive.
(and there is a choice of cover design!)
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
MAY WE FEED THE KING by Rebecca Perry $35
May We Feed the King dances between a historical subject who resists the march of progress and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present, to offer a beguiling meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.
THE DISAPPEARERS by Marlon James $38
’James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange. The Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.’ —Booker Prize judges’ citation
THE TREATY OF WAITANGI COMPANION by Vincent O’Malley and Bruce Stirling $60
Weaving together voices, documents and images from centuries of co-operation, conflict and change, this important book ranges from first contact between Maori and Europeans to today's debates over the place of te Tiriti o Waitangi in our constitutional arrangements. Beautifully presented and fully illustrated.
THE ROUSE by China Miéville $45
“Excellent though all the books on the shortlist are, it seemed only right to give this year's Goldsmiths Prize to the one that, in terms of ambition, bold use of history, linguistic experiment and sheer scale, broke most explosively with expectation.” —Francis Spufford, Goldsmiths Prize judge
THE VALLEY OF UNLIKELY ACQUAINTANCES by Terri Te Tau $38
“This is a real deal Māori sci-fi thriller dripping in small-town charisma, rongoā, and twists. Terri Te Tau somehow manages to prove, with eye-watering brains and a bit of Indigenous futurism, that the highest technology in the cosmos truly is our whakapapa.” —Coco Solid
“The Rouse is a monumental work that combines a sprawling history of Britain’s postcolonial entanglements in the latter half of the twentieth century with speculation about what lies ‘beyond the veil’ of death. China Miéville sets himself the daunting task of describing phenomena that are indescribable, stretching language to its limits and pushing formal and genre boundaries. In a time when much fiction is careful to colour inside the lines, this enormous, exuberant, overflowing book is a reminder that the novel is capable of containing multitudes. Excellent though all the books on the shortlist are, it seemed only right to give this year's Goldsmiths Prize to the one that, in terms of ambition, bold use of history, linguistic experiment and sheer scale, broke most explosively with expectation.” —Goldsmiths Prize judges
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
This Must Be the Island — Liga Hanai e Motu: Oceanic conversations by John Puhiatau Pule and Gregory O’Brien $70
In 2010, poet-artists John Puhiatau Pule and Gregory O'Brien embarked on a voyage of artmaking and travel around the South Pacific, making collaborative etchings, corresponding, writing poetry and immersing themselves in Moana Oceania. Sixteen years on, their collaboration continues to yield a heady mixture of dreams, memories and a pervasive sense of the joy and wonder of being alive in this part of the world. This Must Be the Island--Liga Hanai e Motu is the story of their creative friendship and an art project as expansive and all-encompassing as the Pacific. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
PUKE by essa may ranapiri $35
A takataapui verse epic that follows two atua waahine living their queer, poorhara lives on a giant Dead Fish. They first meet a million years ago, in the eruption of a volcano. The second time, it's in a liquor store: Hinenuitepo is buying a lighter for Mahuika; Hinemoana is picking up drinks. Before long, they become entangled in rituals of mortality — love, hot chips, a carved bone strap-on, multiple evictions and a new puppy — all while holding down their duties as Death and the Sea. But there is a great sickness rising in them both. The other atua have begun to disappear, and their world is slowly dying. Somewhere, an insidious power waits. As the story shifts between our two lovers, PUKE weaves a modern puuraakau of desire, decay and decolonisation. [Paperback]
>>No relation.
Tapa: Pacific histories in cloth by Nina Tonga, Rachel Yates and Sean Mallon $95
The most significant contribution of knowledge about tapa in a generation, offering new views on its practices, meanings and histories across art, dress, culture and curation. This multi-authored book draws upon the vast collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, illustrating over two hundred tapa from 18 Pacific island nations, from Taiwan to Hawai‘i, to explore its lineages. For centuries, people across Pacific communities have created beautiful and functional tapa cloth from tropical tree bark. Understood by many names, its uses for mats, clothing, ceremony and art are well known and have been further highlighted by the recent revitalisation of customary techniques. Tapa reveals the many creative processes that shape how tapa mediates these Indigenous histories, both in and out of the museum. Placing artists and makers at its centre, the authors and contributors explore the processes and cultural politics of contemporary tapa making alongside experiences of migration, art, dress, conservation and curatorship that reflect the complex social and cultural lives of tapa cloth. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
My Cinema by Marguerite Duras (translated from French by Daniela Shreir) $55
Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni). In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression. Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history. A beautifully designed and produced volume, illustrated with film stills.
”To still be able to hear Marguerite Duras’s voice as she speaks and writes about her filmmaking practice is a gift.” —Bette Gordon, filmmaker
”Both ahead of her time and nostalgically mired in the past, in My Cinema, Duras deconstructs her own methods, going gleefully against the grain in order to ‘destroy’ conventional cinema. A beautifully translated collection of writing by an often maddening genius.” —Lizzie Borden, filmmaker
>>Look inside!
>>Some films by Marguerite Duras.
Iron Lung by Kirstine Reffstrup (translated from Danish by Hunter Simpson) $38
A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic of the early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own, she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed in an iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in an orphanage for boys. The child goes by the name of 'Boy' but is not like the others, as their body seems to transcend the categories of boy or girl. Between these two young people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond that stretches across time and space. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Reading Iron Lung felt like remembering a past life, at once so foreign and familiar. With her lucid, pulsating sentences, as poetic as they are precise, Kirstine Reffstrup pierces a little hole in history and pulls a thin, but shining thread through it: a vital and very moving connection between two distant young children living at the edges of time and normality. The result is a wonderfully singular novel that is both historically rooted and full of queer fabulation, both violent and brimming with a desire for embodiment and connection.' —Jonas Eika, author of After the Sun
'What if bodies were not told as pathologies or perversions but rather as stories of spiders, rivers, eggs, and laboured breaths? With sensuous sensitivity, Iron Lung imagines the queer twinnings that arise between bodies cast aside by the twentieth century.' —Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
'A wonderful book: writing which is so vital and so visual coupled with a story which is strange, psychedelic, precise and filled with melancholy. Virtuosic work.' —Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
The Chancy Now: 120 sonnets by C.K. Stead $25
In the 1970s a young professor, I rescued from a puddle in Princes Street a Penguin of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, dried it and read it, annotating as I went, underlining his thought that one must have chaos within if one is to give birth to a dancing star. At 93, his wife Kay and son Oliver recently dead, writing nothing, C. K. Stead thought there were no more books. Then, ‘alive on pills, / and the surgeon’s knife’, enduring grief and recovery, sonnets began to appear, three or four a week, the poems collected in this volume. Chaos won’t teach a sonnet to limit its lines but every sonnet should have its dancing star. From the ABs under the high ball to Braunias’s lamingtons, from Dionysus to Guide Rangi, from the Uber driver (‘He’s a Wittgenstein man so we get along perfectly / passing over in silence what can’t be discussed’) to the author (‘My Chookspeak’s better than my French because I learned it / in the right way, by ear, not off the page’), 120 sonnets reveal a poet battered, bruised and still in his prime. After a sonnet tending to self-pity and crap I consign it to the bin and set off knowing today’s wild northerly wind and rough seas at Kohi will knock me into shape. [Paperback]
'If we were able to talk comfortably of an Australasian literature, rather than its Australian and New Zealand sub-branches, then C. K. Stead would be regarded as one of the dominant writers of the past half century . . . a towering talent, cosmopolitan, lucidly intelligent. Few writers on either side of the Tasman have matched Stead's multi-faceted achievement.' —Peter Pierce, Sydney Morning Herald
'Stead writes the way Torvill and Dean skate. He makes it look so easy you don't realise until afterwards that very few people can put together such luminous sentences.' —Iain Sharp
Electric Spark: The enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson $30
“A revolutionary book. When Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, it was recognised as unique — something that quite simply had never been done before. Wilson's achievement in Electric Spark is equally remarkable: an entirely original method of life writing which leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust. Electric Spark heaves with ghosts and furies, burglaries and blackmail. It is disquieting and absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn't put me down.” —Lisa Hilton, Spectator
”Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam — and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
>>World-beating buster-upper.
>>Odd things happened when she was around.
>>Life echoes fiction (or vice versa).
>>Right into the deep end.
>>Spark meets her match.
>>The matter of fact.
>>Twin menace.
>>More than nerve.
>>Strike a few Sparks.
>>Also still available in hardback.
>>Other remarkable biographies by Frances Wilson.
Anya and the Light Above the Ocean by Amelia Giudici $22
When her scientist mum disappears one night, Anya sets out to find her in the middle of a storm. Taking a boat out to sea, she encounters a strange window of light hovering above the waves. Transfixed, she reaches out to touch it. Moments later, Anya wakes in her boat. The sea now eerily silent. With her mum still missing, Anya is packed off to stay with the odd, unwelcoming Mr and Mrs Ungsworth. Trapped under their watchful gaze, she uncovers a shocking secret: the light has split her into two people. Anya escapes and returns home — to find another girl, identical to her, living there. Confronted with this impossible situation, the girls soon realise the organisation their mum worked for, Janus, is seeking to harness the power of the mysterious light and is now after them. Thrown headfirst into the perilous world of Janus, both versions of Anya must now team up to escape them. But can Anya’s battle to find herself also lead her back to her mother? [Paperback]
Birdlands: Up close and personal with the birds of remote New Zealand by Edin Whitehead $50
In the most remote outposts of Aotearoa, our islands are populated not with people, but with birds. From the storm-lashed Subantarctic Islands in the deep south to the scattered volcanic islands of Tikapa Moana/Hauraki Gulf in the north, Birdlands offers a rare passage through the largely inaccessible places where birds still thrive. Guided by scientist and writer Edin Whitehead, Birdlands is part natural history and part love letter to these remote edges and their inhabitants, with stunning photography capturing the wonder and urgency of life among albatrosses, petrels, penguins, kakariki, kiwi and more. This is New Zealand as few of us will ever see it, wild and fragile, and a beautiful reminder that while these birdlands are not ours to visit, they are ours to protect. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black woman in the Romantic archive by Mathelinda Nabugodi $35
Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats — the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world. Their writings are associated with the sublime power of nature and revolutionary politics. But these literary icons also lived through the climax of the transatlantic slave economy. They witnessed both the explosion of the abolition movement — and the reactionary formation of white supremacist ideologies. The Trembling Hand examines how the lives and works of six major Romantic authors were entangled with the racial politics of their era. Mathelinda Nabugodi studies manuscripts and archival treasures — a teacup, a baby rattle, a lock of hair — to recover startling links between the poetry of freedom and the practices of slavery in the Romantic period. [Now in paperback]
”Propelled by a voice that is urgent, exasperated and eager to share what it knows. Her account of Byron shows why she wrote this book, and also her ability to argue with herself, to dramatise her own doubts. That's a rare gift for any critic. Her passion, and her learning, ensure that one will never look at these poets in quite the same way.” —The New York Times
”Ambitious and ingenious, Mathelinda Nabugodi engages the reader both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past. A voice sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter.” —Colm Toibin
>>And also still available in hardback.
What a Time to Be Alive! Scenes from a strange age by Marina Hyde $38
What a Time to be Alive! So lettuce remember Liz Truss, relive the last days of the Tories, meet the guy they called No-Drama Starmer, and succumb to hyper-resistant superbug Nigel Farage. Travel stateside to meet our supranational Silicon Valley overlords, Donald Trump and his cavalcade of henchmen — then head for infinity and beyond with Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos. Experience testing times for misunderstood men in television, create wonder in every moment with Meghan, and relive the horror of the Gwyneth Paltrow ski massacre trial. Truly, these are times that make you want to put your hands over your eyes, even when your hands are already over your eyes. Collected from Hyde’s weekly Guardian columns. [Paperback]
'Britain’s foremost living satirist.' —Vogue
'Hyde's columns are the solid-silver lining of Britain's political shitstorm.' —Caitlin Moran
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
On the Calculation of Volume: V by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith) $33
Tara Selter has become someone new. It becomes clear just how ridiculous it is: life in progressive time. Or was. Before we came to a halt. How foolishly one can spend a life in a time that moves forward. The nonsense of the ceaseless grind. Tara has returned to Thomas, but she is no longer the person he remembers. She has now spent twelve years in the eighteenth of November, while Thomas has endlessly repeated his identical day. He struggles to reconcile Tara as she is now with the Tara he loves. And so she rejoins her new friends, with whom she finds companionship and understanding. They set off for Val Benoît, where other time-stranded people have created a community built on curiosity, conversation and even optimism. As the eighteenth of November continues to expand, Tara's connection with those around her deepens, and a life beyond Thomas comes unexpectedly into view. [Paperback]
'The greatest literary work of the 21st century so far. These books will be seen by future scholars as the work which best captured the soul of our times.' —The Herald
"The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle's miraculous septology has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight. On the Calculation of Volume is a literary phenomenon nearly 40 years in the making. It's a speculative masterwork" —Cat Zhang, New York Magazine
"The novel's propulsive imaginative brilliance lies in Tara's metaphoric search for a language with which to communicate the sheer incomprehensibility of her condition." —Morten Hoi Jensen, The Washington Post
"What the best novels can do is open up spaces. And she has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible. I think it's a fantastic book." —Karl Ove Knausgaard
"Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time-and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day." —Hernan Diaz
”Each volume of this remarkable book provides space for our thoughts, and equipment to stimulate their exercise.” —Thomas
>>The New Directions edition will be here soon, if you prefer that.
>>Catch up on any volumes you have missed, or start if you haven’t started.
Opening Night by Sara Baume $38
'I met Mollie's paintings before I met Mollie.' Shortly after the imposed isolation of the pandemic, Sara Baume came across a painting at a pop-up exhibition in a renovated shed in rural West Cork. It so intrigued her that she was inspired to make contact with the artist. Mollie Douthit, a North Dakotan exile, was living and working alone in a log cabin down a ravaged laneway surrounded by rugged coastline. Sara and Mollie discovered they had much in common — a dysfunctional attitude towards companionship, a devotion to the daily rituals of their respective art practices, an affinity with nature. They started to meet every month for soup and punishing swims in the Atlantic. Sara fell under the spell of Mollie's paintings, pictures that welded memory and reality, and gradually started to write about them, curious as to whether any particular insight might be provided by the intimacy of friendship with the artist, and whether it might be possible to craft a book in the style of the paintings. But what she had not anticipated was that a settled period in her own life would coincide with a period of tumultuous change for Mollie, and soon she found herself squabbling with more complex ideas, about community and nationality, about neurosis and mysticism, about love and pain and the power of art. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Sara Baume is a writer's writer, able to clothe her insights on life, art and human connection in beautifully evocative language. There are few living writers who can artistically convey compassion in a single sentence. Sara has given us all the gift of friendship with this book, but most importantly, has allowed us the privilege of getting to know Mollie through the creative lens of an unreliable memory.” —Derek Owusu
”Opening Night is such a beautifully and carefully observed book. I felt like I was in conversation with Baume's thoughts the entire time I was reading it. This book made me think deeply about my own friendships, my creative practice and the place I've come to call home and, for this, I am profoundly grateful. No one knows their way round a quietly profound sentence quite like Sara Baume does.” —Jan Carson
”Sara Baume's Opening Night is a unique and moving portrait of a friendship between an artist and a writer. It's so intimate and honest I felt bereft when I finished it. In her compelling, concise prose, Baume evokes what it means to devote your daily life to conjuring something new and true — and how complex and demanding an activity that is. I've never read anything like it.” —Jennifer Higgie
”In this beautifully written and resonating book, Sara Baume has created an archive via the frame of friendship. Opening Night captures the mystery, infatuation, fantasy, and doubling that occurs in artmaking and between new friends. It is an impressive and generous work, chronicling the pandemic years with fine detail, questions, observations. I had the feeling, while reading, that I was encountering something completely of our time, something that will be read in the future.” —Lauren Aimee Curtis
>>A Fierce friendship.
>>A book in the style of a painting.
The Treaty of Waitagi Companion by Vincent O’Malley and Bruce Stirling $60
Weaving together voices, documents and images from centuries of co-operation, conflict and change, this important book ranges from first contact between Maori and Europeans to today's debates over the place of te Tiriti o Waitangi in our constitutional arrangements. Rather than offering a single narrative, Vincent O'Malley and Bruce Stirling bring readers close to the historical record itself. They draw on the words of key figures, from William Hobson and Hone Heke to Dame Whina Cooper, Sir Edward Taihakurei Durie and Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke. These voices trace the story from te Tiriti's signing in 1840 through war and land loss, Maori renaissance and Waitangi Tribunal inquiries, and on to the debates that continue to shape Aotearoa today. Ever more relevant, this browsable edition is beautifully presented and fully illustrated. [Wrappered flexibound]
>>Look inside.
Consciousness: A book of thinking by Roger Horrocks $38
What is consciousness, and why has itbecome such a controversial subject? Consciousness has been described as “simultaneously the most familiar and the most mysterious thing inthe universe.” It is something we experience in all our waking moments, yet science still struggles to agree about what it is or how it has arisen. Among the many controversies covered by the book is the current debate over artificial intelligence. Can non-biological creatures such as robots share thepower that we call consciousness? This ‘Book of Thinking’ takes an exceptionally broad approach by exploring what science, philosophy, and the arts have to say about consciousness. Sometimes these traditions clash and collide in their views, but each yields rich insights. The book presents a range of innovative ways to understand the nature of subjective experience. [Paperback]
Stations by Louise Kennedy $37
In 1982, Róisín and Red meet as teenagers in their hometown in Ireland. Red's reputation for trouble might precede him, but Róisín finds in him an intelligent and funny — if unlikely — friend. When a brush with the law pushes Red into a corner, he escapes their town and his family for good to start a new life in England. As the years pass, they grow up and apart. Despite Red's particular gift for disappearing, they remain tethered to one another, a fragile thread holding their once fierce friendship together. When Róisín arrives in London to spend Christmas with her estranged father, she finds herself swept up once more into Red's storm. Róisín longs for the closeness they once had, but Red continues to travel away from her — and as the past weighs on the present, Róisín wonders if she'll ever reach Red where he is. Stations is a devastating story of love and friendship, and the choices we blithely make when we are young, unaware that the consequences will reverberate throughout our lives. [Paperback]
”Louise Kennedy's brilliant Stations is a moving and immersive novel about first love, addiction, and regret. Smart, propulsive, and emotionally powerful, this narrative is a transcendent exploration of yearning, transformation and rescue.” —Min Jin Lee
”You can love Stations for the grit and nuance of Roisin's voice and for the 'heart-scalding' story she has to tell, but I loved it for the way it holds a national sorrow. Barry, Red, Muiris are some of Ireland's many lost boys, and this book is a lovely work of mourning and reclamation.” —Anne Enright
”Full of startling insight and rich in social detail, this exceptionally strong second novel emphatically confirms Kennedy's place in the front rank of Irish fiction.” —Times Literary Supplement
>>Thanks to Barry’s Tea.
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare $28
The legacy of William Blake stretches 200 years to today not only through poetry and art but traditions of social, spiritual, sexual and political noncomformity. Philip Hoare drags himself from the company of whales and follows Derek Jarman to follow Paul Nash to photograph the megaliths at Avebury and towards a shared encounter with the luminous William Blake, electrically alive and inspiring to them all. Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the unfettered genius of William Blake. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up 20th century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. As Hoare shows, art and poetry still have the power to make change. [Now in paperback]
'Wild, free, exhilaratingly beautiful, and so alive to the past that everyone and everything seems to be happening right now on the page. I cannot think of a more original writer at work today ... To look at English art through his eyes is to see more than you ever could before.' —Laura Cumming
'A dazzlingly written and wildly eccentric mashup of biography, history and memoir ... Hoare picks up the pieces and rearranges them in a dazzling new pattern, and the result is one of the most original and uncategorisable works I've read for a long time.' —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times
'Everything exists at once: horror, stars, trees, art, love, and it's up to us to behold it all. Which is exactly what Philip Hoare does ... He really sets out to behold it all.' —Helena de Groot, Poetry Foundation
>>Slumber on the banks.
>>Swimming or drowning.
>>The ecstasy of art.
>>Why William Blake became a queer icon.
>>William Blake’s radicalism.
>>William Blake vs. the World by John Higgs.
Butterflies and Moths of Aotearoa by Liv Sisson $50
Aotearoa is home to colourful, curious species that are variously conspicuous and covert. We have world-famous monarchs, a gold-flecked moth as old as dinosaurs, butterflies that flash from purple to orange, and a lime-green moth said to bring messages from the spirit realm. But where do they live, how did they get here and what do they do when we aren't looking? Discover how to find, identify and support these remarkable creatures in this practical guide from Liv Sisson, author of the very popular Fungi of Aotearoa. Featuring hundreds of full-colour photographs, diagrams, fun facts and up-to-date descriptions, Butterflies and Moths of Aotearoa will delight any curious mind, and inspire fresh adventures in your own backyard. [Flexibound]
>>Look inside.
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid $30
In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time. With startling modernity, the people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of fragments of their everyday lives. Immortalised in clay and stone are intimate details from 4000 years ago. We find accounts of an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, a parent desperately trying to soothe a baby with a lullaby, the imprint of a child's teeth as it sank them into their clay homework, and countless receipts for beer. In Between Two Rivers, Moudhy Al-Rashid examines what these people chose to preserve in their own words about their lives, creating the first historical records and allowing us to brush hands with them thousands of years later. [Paperback]
”Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.” —George Monbiot
”I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves. There are beautiful descriptions of what it is to be pregnant, to give birth, to have small children, to love a dog. I love the way in which she's not just writing about priests or kings, but is giving us a clay tablet on which a little child has bitten, so you have the imprint of his teeth. It melts away the sense of time.” —Tom Holland
”A tender, moving and vivid history of ancient Mesopotamia and how it still speaks to us. This is so my jam.” —Robert Macfarlane
>>The stories we tell become the world we inhabit.
>>Cuneiform explained.
Styx: The river by Nikita Gill $40
The firstborn child of Titans, Styx is revered as the first of her kind — until she is eclipsed and forgotten amid her scores of siblings, the Oceanids and the Potamoi. Coming of age in a world simmering with paranoia and unspoken fear of Kronos, the volatile and unchecked god-king, Styx learns to conceal the rage ignited by her growing disillusionment with her parents and her vain and unkind siblings. Instead, she finds solace and sisterhood in her cousin, Asteria. Together, they train in the arts of creation and magic. And as they seek to learn their divine purpose and their place within the Titanomachy, they discover both the joy sparked by true love and the fierce resilience birthed from motherhood. In this verse retelling and adaptation of a Greek myth of sisterhood, identity, love, and war, Styx must carve her own path to womanhood — and ultimately, godhood. [Paperback]
”One of the things I loved best was the unapologetic and comprehensive focus on the female experience hidden in plain view in these ancient stories. We have Styx and Asteria's childhood friendship as a bond that rivals their eventual marriages, we have mothers, sisters, grandmothers and all the complexities, love and rivalry of those relationships. The book is in many ways a love story revolving around a female friendship. It absolutely broke my heart. It also contains a devastating warning — if as a woman you serve the Patriarchy, it will devour you.' —Elodie Harper
>>6000 siblings.
>>Also by Nikita Gill: Hekate.
The Adventure Illusion: Why life is not a journey by Simon Gusman and Arjen Kleinherenbrink $45
The Adventure Illusion dismantles one of contemporary culture's most seductive myths: that life itself should be an epic journey of trials, transformation, and triumph. The call to adventure saturates domains ranging from media to marketing, politics to business, and tourism to therapy. Drawing on existentialist philosophy, narrative theory, and cultural critique, this book reveals how the hero's journey has evolved from ancient mythology and medieval romance to a modern ideology that promises meaning and destiny where none inherently exist. Adventure's hidden costs are exposed through rigorous philosophical argument and detailed analyses of video games, corporate advertisements, social media behavior, and more. Across a variety of domains, adventure consistently fosters unattainable expectations, individualises systemic problems, legitimises violence through redemptive narratives, and forces marginalised lives into supporting roles. Against both rigid life scripts and postmodern chaos, The Adventure Illusion proposes adventurelessness — a liberating acceptance of contingency and plurality beyond the demand for heroic purpose. At once philosophically precise and culturally urgent, this work challenges readers to imagine stories and lives that no longer need quests to matter. [Paperback]
”The Adventure Illusion offers a philosophically serious diagnosis of the nearly ubiquitous fantasy that life itself has the structure of a meaningful story. Gusman and Kleinherenbrink show how the temptation to read existence retrospectively as an adventure distorts our understanding of freedom, responsibility, and failure. What follows is an unsentimental account of contingency that nonetheless takes seriously the role stories play in our self conceptions.” —Jon Cogburn, Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University
Crack the Case: Mysteries at the Museum by Thea Hay and Facundo Aguirre $40
Solve mysteries and stop dastardly deeds with the help of your trusty Detective Torch. Shine the images on every page to create and crack puzzles, uncovering clues in a race against time. In Mysteries at the Museum, take on the role of renowned detective Inspector Renoir as you chase down a notorious art thief. This book contains three individual mysteries and over 25 puzzles, all part of a single thrilling story. Start the story, slot the Image Disc into your Detective Torch, and get cracking! On each page, you'll find a different puzzle for you and your torch to solve. With the torch switched on, rotate the disc to project the right image. On and off the page, use it to unlock a safe, shine a light on suspicious items, or even examine fingerprints at the scene of the crime. In the hands of an expert detective, there's no end to what your torch can tackle! But the torch isn't the only tool in your crime-fighting toolkit: the sturdy book-box doubles up as a map of the famed art museum where the heist takes place. This will come in handy on select puzzles that require a birds'-eye-view, so you have everything you need to unravel the mystery and catch the thief. Alongside the puzzles and the detective story, you'll find non-fiction entries on real-life art heists, crimefighting techniques, and even infamous blunders by criminal not-quite-masterminds! Crack the Case: Mysteries at the Museum is a one-of-a-kind interactive adventure that is sure to appeal to gamers, codebreakers and detectives-in-the-making, complete with timeless illustrations and memorable characters. The game is afoot — will you take up the chase? Includes: A gift-ready book-box with illustrated puzzle map; A high-quality Detective Torch; Three Image Discs; 64-page illustrated book, containing three mysteries to solve. [Boxed set]
>>Look inside!
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30 October 2026
My life is a sort of an orbit, he thought. My life is a repetitive circular thing, or something very closely approximating a circle, not that an orbit needs to be circular, necessarily, but I think mine is. How many times will I pass this same point in the geography of my life, so to call it, how many times will I pass by, caught in the momentum of my orbit, unable to touch what I observe of my life below, changing slowly, or fast, as it does by the influence of various forces that I also cannot touch. But what am I if I am remote from what I have just called my life, he thought, what am I, the orbiting observer, if I am not my life, if I am orbiting above my life as the astronauts or cosmonauts in the space station in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital orbit above the planet Earth, orbiting and observing, enthralled by the attractive wonderful damaged planet below, remote from it but falling always towards it though never getting closer, in an equilibrium of gravity and momentum. An orbit, after all, he thought, is always firstly an act of attention. “Is it necessarily the case that the further you get from something the more perspective you have on it?” Harvey asks in the novel, as the astronauts stand in awe at the systems and patterns below them. “If you could get far enough away from Earth you’d be able finally to understand it.” Are understanding and participation mutually exclusive, he wondered, then, in my life, on this planet, necessarily, or is participation in itself a form of understanding, albeit enabled by an inescapable narrowing of perspective? As I circle in my orbit, far above my life, falling towards the object of my attention but carried away anyway by momentum, there in the equilibrium of my distance, I see there are no borders, no edges, no entities other than a oneness, if that could even be thought of as an entity, no entities other than those that exist in our minds, arbitrary borders, arbitrary edges, arbitrary entities, not seen from above but only by the participants in the struggle that they enable, the struggle that they condemn us to maintain. The moonshot is the opposite of an orbit. We divide ourselves with edges to get things done, to act one thing upon another, to intend and do, to participate or at least be aware of what we think of as our participation to the limited extent that we are somehow aware. This is how we get things done. This also is how harm is done. Up here in my orbit I observe how tiny all that is, I understand to the extent that I am remote, I am in a plotless place, I am in a place where everything is in an indefinite tense, where everything is a submission to a larger system, somewhere that I am hardly me. “As long as you stay in orbit you will be OK,” says the astronaut. “You will not feel crestfallen, not once.” I do not want to return, he thought. I do not want to leave my space of suspension, though “our hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it.”
We’ve discovered Miss Cat, and Miss Cat is discovering the truth behind the case of Mixus Maximus’s missing canary. Miss Cat runs her detective agency out of an old dairy.
”Her nose was filled by the smell of stinky old milk. Sometimes that was all the breakfast she got.”
Business is slow. Miss Cat wonders if all the criminals had gone on holiday. When the wealthy Mr Maximus laments the kidnapping of Harry, his sweet canary, Miss Cat sets to work.
With not much to go, she starts with Doris, the daughter-in-law and gifter of the canary. A simple enquiry about Harry’s origins leads to a surprising abandoned pet shop and someone trying to warn Miss Cat away. Back to Doris’s house she goes, despite the dog in residence. Luckily, Miss Cat is nimble at climbing tall trees, paw-quiet on the rooftop, good at spying, and has perky ears to overhear. Although a dog will also smell a rat… a cat. Miss Cat smells a rat! Something is not adding up. With the help of her librarian friend Griselda, she looks into the past of Mr Maximus or Mixus the Magnificant, the name he was once famously known by. It’s time to go undercover, do some sneaking, and find out what’s really going on.
“Miss Cat was an expert at the art of disguise….Staking out her own client was an odd thing to do, but she had a sense that something strange was going on.”
Will Miss Cat untangle the secret of Mixus Maximus? What’s with Doris’s slippery behaviour? Who tried to scare her in the abandoned petshop? And what connects a magical jewel with a kidnapped canary?
This is a delightful junior chapter book, comic-style, with a combination of paragraph blocks and speech bubbles. It has just the right amount of mystery and surprise, a little intrepidity, and snippets of wit. Miss Cat is an excellent girl hero in her perky-eared hoodie, with all the best cat qualities, curiousity, smarts, and a good dash of ethics mixed in. This French crime caper will keep both adults and children hooked. It’s a tale with a twist, snappy dialogue and charming characters — an octopus (milk)bar-tender — who I am sure will surface in more stories. The writing from French author Jean-Luc Fromental is superb, and Joëlle Jolivet’s detailed, lively illustrations are spot on. I couldn’t imagine Miss Cat looking any different. This is the first in a series of three. All available now for delightful discovery.