Book of the Week — DELIRIOUS by Damien Wilkins

Featuring on many ‘best books’ lists around the motu, Damien Wilkins’s Delirious is an outstanding book, variously described by reviewers as ‘a marvel’, ‘a masterpiece’, and ‘a beautifully powerful, wonderful novel’. Wilkins is a subtle and perceptive writer and a crafter of exquisite prose, and has deep empathy for the uncertainties and hidden strengths of his characters.

It’s time. Mary, an ex-cop, and her husband, a retired librarian, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren’t falling apart, but they’re watching each other — Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee. Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it’s as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them.
This is an emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing. Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face, if we’re lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet the new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways second chances come around.

“A charged book. Delirious is an accurate and sympathetic study of change, age and growth. Set on the very edge of land, the novel is poised between rational assessment and the mysteries of the deep.” —David Herkt, NZ Listener
”A New Zealand novel of grace and humanity. How does Wilkins do it? These are flawed and immensely satisfying characters – you close your eyes at the faulty, circuitous routes they take. Delirious is a marvel of a book.” —Witi Ihimaera

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NEW RELEASES (20.12.24)

Get ready for the reading season! We can dispatch your books by overnight courier — or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

What Kingdom by Fine Gråbøl (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken) $42
Fine Gråbøl’s narrator dreams of furniture flickering to life. A chair that greets you, shiny tiles that follow a peculiar grammar, or a bookshelf that can be thrown on like an apron. Obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness, assuming personalities and private motives, the nameless narrator lives in a temporary psychiatric care unit for young people in Copenhagen. This is a place where you ‘wake up and realise that what’s going to happen has no name’, and days are spent practicing routines that take on the urgency of survival — peeling a carrot, drinking prune juice, listening through thin walls. In prose that demands that you slow down, expertly translated by Martin Aitken, What Kingdom charts a wisdom of its own.
”Gråbøl’s eye is unsparing and convincing, her prose vivid and alive. The narrator doesn’t deny that she needs help, but at the same time, she has questions: Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the line between trauma and treatment?... about the relationship between compulsion and compliance?... care and abuse?... between surrender and obliteration?”   —Kirkus
”It has been a privilege to read this extraordinary work. The unnamed narrator’s absolute vulnerability is transformed into compelling beauty by the authority and precision of her language. I love the pace of the writing. How, after a passage in which the raw pain and hurt break through into anger, a sentence of clear transcendent poetry can follow. The perfect emotional control is astonishing. It is a very exposing, brave book. It lays open the narrator’s frustration at her inability to be heard, to be considered, within the cold strictures of the institution where she passes her days: ‘the basis of our lives is powerlessness plus capitulation.’ I was riveted by the attention to detail – it demands our attention, in return; the objective way the narrator perceives the confined world she lives in, without a trace of self-pity, compels us to know she is speaking the truth. There is an urgent need for the system to be changed, for an individual to be listened to, not just dealt with. This book makes us listen.   —Celia Paul
”In this striking novel, Gråbøl documents daily life in a psychiatric ward for young people in Denmark. Alternately lucid and ecstatic, the novel touches on the welfare system’s focus on bottom lines — ‘benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles’ — and challenges the perception of mental illness as an invisible affliction. Gråbøl’s portrait of the residents’ and caretakers’ interconnected lives constructs a communal existence out of individual pain.” —The New Yorker

 

The White Flower by Charlotte Beeston $40
In contemporary and Edwardian London, two women are grieving the loss of a loved one. Stella, turning thirty, is increasingly isolated after her mother died of cancer; Julia, surrounded by friends, is longing for solitude as she mourns her daughter, a young photographer who died after her return from an expedition in the jungle of Sri Lanka. Mysteriously connected across time and space by a haunting image, each explores, in her own voice, the complexities of the mother-daughter bond and family estrangement. From the banks of the Thames in present-day south-east London to the coast of East Devon and the Sri Lankan rainforest a hundred years earlier, Charlotte Beeston's delicate debut novel moves with aching lucidity between tenderness and raw emotion. Charting the ebb and flow of the grieving process, The White Flower captures the impact of loneliness on the psyche and the permanence of love, art and friendship.
”Sensitively and tenderly written, The White Flower performs the mother-daughter bond as a loving tug-of-war between present and past, forgetting and remembering, loss and joyful reparation.” —Michèle Roberts
”Charlotte Beeston's gorgeous debut novel, The White Flower, is a wonderfully intelligent and sensitively handled portrait of grief, how it leaves us obsessively circling the same moments, scenes and images. Literary in the best sense (language matters) the novel is full of incidental pleasures and deserves to be widely read.” —Andrew Miller

 

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti (translated from German by Peter Filkins) $30
In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that “by definition, he could never live to complete”, as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti's aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death — published in English for the first time — interposed with material from philosophers and writers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate who dies in 1994 is a reckoning with the inevitability of death and with its politicisation, evoking despair at the loss of loved ones and the impossibility of facing one's own death, while considering death as a force exerting itself upon culture and fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power.
”Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti's great strength. He is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words. His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.” —Susan Sontag

 

Bound: A memoir of making and remaking by Maddie Ballard, illustrated by Emma Dai'an Wright $34
In a new home, relationships shift, and ties fray. Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking is a collection of essays about sewing and knowing who you are. Each chapter in this sewist's diary charts the crafting of a different garment. From a lining embroidered with the Cantonese names of her female ancestors to a dressing gown holding the body of a beloved friend, Maddie Ballard navigates love, personal connections, and self-care, drafting her own patterns for ways of living.
“I cut more carefully than usual, bothering to iron first, and lay the fabric out on the flat tiles of the bathroom rather than just the carpet. I trace the pattern off my own shop-bought dressing gown, then add a back pleat so it will float behind her and shorten the sleeves a little so they won’t trail when she’s making her coffee. I cut tiny rectangles of fabric to make belt loops and a loop for hanging. I cut vast pockets, for holding snacks and notebooks and her phone when she needs to flip the pancakes. I remember all the little details I would skim past if I were making this for myself. I stitch care into every seam.”
Maddie Ballard is a writer and editor of mixed Chinese heritage. Born in Syracuse, New York, she grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and currently lives in Wellington.

 

The Missing Thread: A new history of the Ancient World through the women who shaped it by Daisy Dunn $40
Spanning 3,000 years, from the birth of Minoan Crete to the death of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in Rome, this new history of the ancient world is told through the lives of women. These pages present Enheduanna, the earliest named author; the poet Sappho; and Telesilla, who defended her city from attack. Here is Artemisia, sole female commander in the Graeco-Persian Wars, and Cynisca, the first female victor at the Olympic Games. Cleopatra may be the more famous, but Fulvia, Mark Antony's wife, fought a war on his behalf. Many other women remain nameless but integral. Through new examination of the sources combined with vivid storytelling Daisy Dunn shows us the ancient world through fresh eyes, and introduces us to an incredible cast of ancient women, weavers of an entire world.
”A brilliant concept, executed with enviable elegance.” —Lucy Worsley
”I loved this radical new take on the familiar stories of the ancient world we all think we know but clearly only know the half. Dunn succeeds magnificently not in erasing men but in bringing out of the shadows some extraordinary women and giving them much more than merely reflected glory. The book sparkles with fresh ideas.” —Anne Sebba

 

Butter by Asako Yuzuki $43
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation's imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can't resist writing back. Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night and survives on cheap, convenience store fare, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought? Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, ‘The Konkatsu Killer’, Asako Yuzuki's Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.
”An unputdownable, breathtakingly original novel. I will be spoon-feeding Butter to every woman I know.'“ —Erin Kelly
”Exuberant, indulgent romp of a novel. Butter is a full-fat, Michelin-starred treat that moves seamlessly between an Angry Young Woman narrative and an engrossing detective drama and back again. Yuzuki has crafted an almost Dickensian cast of fleshy characters, with just as many surprise connections. Let this book bring you under its spell.” —The Sunday Times

 

The Enemy Within: The Human cost of state surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand by Maire Leadbeater $40
Like so many others involved in social justice movements, author Maire Leadbeater was subjected to state surveillance during a long life of activism. With the help of archival material, released SIS files, and other formerly secret material, she has been able to examine the depth of state intrusion into the lives of individuals and movements that challenged the social order. An adverse security record not only harmed those directly affected but also denied the community the valuable contributions of highly talented individuals, many of whose stories feature here. This book explodes the myth that our major intelligence agencies, the SIS and the GCSB, work in our interests. They were set up to work closely with our traditional allies and the ‘Five Eyes’ network. Instead of protecting us from foreign interference, they have compromised our sovereignty and our ability to pursue an independent foreign and defence policy. Tellingly, on the few occasions when New Zealand has experienced terrorist crime, it has been the police working openly and accountably who have taken the key role. The Enemy Within mounts the argument that unaccountable intelligence agencies harm our democracy and should be disbanded, and their work left to the police.

 

Tropical Modernism: Architecture and independence by Christopher Turner $66
Emerging in the death throes of colonial rule, the story of Tropical Modernism is one of politics and power, decolonisation and defiance.  Its leading proponents, British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, adapted a utopian Bauhaus-derived Modernist aesthetic to hot and humid conditions.  After Independence, Tropical Modernism was championed by leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru and Kwame Nkrumah as a symbol of freedom, progressiveness and internationalism in monumental projects such as Chandigarh in Punjab planned by Le Corbusier and Black Star Square in Accra designed by Victor Adegbite. Scrutinising the colonial narratives surrounding Tropical Modernism, and foregrounding the experience of African and Indian practitioners, this book reassesses an architectural style which has increasing relevance in today's changing climate.

 

The Burrow by Melanie Cheng $38
Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy's mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?
”How rare, this delicacy-this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.” —Helen Garner
”Melanie Cheng's The Burrow is stupendously good. This is a novel that deals with the crucial elements of our lives — love and family and grief and guilt and responsibility — and does so without a whiff of sentimentality and does so fearlessly. As in real life, the characters keep surprising us. The power of The Burrow is in the unflinching yet empathetic command of the novelist, in the candid beauty of the language. It's a remarkable work, nuanced and human and adult.” —Christos Tsiolkas

 

In a Flight of Starlings: The wonder of complex systems by Giorgio Parisi $30
The world is shaped by complexity. In this enlightening book, Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work to show us how. It all starts with investigating the principles of physics by observing the sophisticated flight patterns of starlings. Studying the movements of these birds, he has realised, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds — collections of everything from atoms to planets to other animals like ourselves. Along the way, Parisi reflects on the lessons he's taken from a life in pursuit of scientific truth — the importance of serendipity to the discovery of new ideas, the surprising kinship between physics and other fields of study and the value of science to a thriving society. In so doing, he removes the practice of science from the confines of the laboratory and brings it into the real world. Complexity is all around us — from climate to finance to biology, it offers a unique way of finding order in chaos.

 

The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A true story of science and sacrifice in a city under siege by Simon Parkin $40
In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad and began the longest blockade in recorded history. By the most conservative estimates, the siege would claim the lives of three-quarters of a million people. Most died of starvation. At the centre of the embattled city stood a converted palace that housed the greatest living plant library ever amassed — the world's first seed bank. After attempts to evacuate the collection failed, and as supplies dwindled, the scientists responsible faced a terrible decision: should they distribute the specimens to the starving population, or preserve them in the hope that they held the key to ending global famine? Drawing on previously unseen sources, The Forbidden Garden tells the remarkable and moving story of the botanists who remained at the Plant Institute during the darkest days of the siege, risking their lives in the name of science.

 

National Dish: Around the world in search of food, history, and the meaning of home by Anya von Bremzen $28
Anya von Bremzen sets out to investigate the eternal cliche that 'we are what we eat'. Her journey takes her from Paris to Tokyo, from Seville, Oaxaca and Naples to Istanbul. She probes the decline of France's pot-au-feu in the age of globalisation, the stratospheric rise of ramen, the legend of pizza, the postcolonial paradoxes of Mexico's mole, the community essence of tapas, and the complex legacy of multiculturalism in a meze feast. Finally she returns to her home in Queens, New York, for a bowl of Ukrainian borsch - a dish which has never felt more loaded, or more precious. As each nation's social and political identity is explored, so too is its palate.
 “A fast-paced, entertaining travelogue, peppered with compact history lessons that reveal the surprising ways dishes become iconic.” New York Times
”This voyage into culinary myth-making and identity is essential reading. Its breadth of scope and scholarship is conveyed with such engaging wit. I couldn't love it more.” —Nigella Lawson
”This dazzlingly intelligent examination of how foods become national symbols is so enlightening as well as so much fun to read. Von Bremzen is a superb describer of flavours and textures — but she also understands that food is never just about food.” —Bee Wilson
”For all its dry wit and vivid descriptions of puttanesca and tortillas, this is a serious book - a skilful blend of academic research and lived experience. It's a sparklingly intelligent examination of, and a meditation on, the interplay of cooking and identity.” —Spectator

 

Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki $28
In this melancholy and delicately written Japanese classic, a student befriends a reclusive elder at a beach resort, who he calls Sensei. As the two grow closer, Sensei remains unwilling to share the inner pain that has consumed his life and the shameful secret behind his monthly pilgrimages to a Tokyo cemetery. But when the student writes to Sensei after his graduation to seek out advice, the past rushes unbidden to the surface, and Sensei at last reveals the tale of romantic betrayal and unresolved guilt that led to his withdrawal from the world. Set at the end of the Meiji era and rife with subtle, psychological insight, Kokoro is one of Japan's bestselling novels of all time and a meditation on the essence of loneliness.
”Sōseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.” —Haruki Murukami
”Kokoro is exactly what you would ask a novel to be. Sōseki manipulates every detail with the same thrilling mastery'' - Spectator

 

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog $28
Werner Herzog is the undisputed master of extreme cinema — building an opera house in the middle of the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; living in the wilderness among grizzly bears — he has always been intrigued by the extremes of human experience.  From his early movies to his later documentaries, he has made a career out of exploring the boundaries of human endurance — what we are capable of in exceptional circumstances and what these situations reveal about who we really are. But these are not just great cinematic themes. During the making of his films, Herzog pushed himself and others to the limits, often putting himself in life-threatening situations. As a child in rural Bavaria, a single loaf of bread had to last his family all week. The hunger and deprivation he experienced during his early years perhaps explain his fascination with the limits of physical endurance. All his life, Herzog would embrace risk and danger, constantly looking for challenges and adventures. Now in paperback.

 

Thunderhead by Sophie Beer $20
Meet Thunderhead: awkward, music-obsessed and a magnet for bad luck. Their favourite things in life are listening to records and hanging out with their best (and only) friend Moonflower. But Thunderhead has a big secret. And when Moonflower moves schools, they're faced with the reality of surviving the wilderness of high school alone. Make new friends? NOTHANKYOUVERYMUCH. As two big life events approach, Thunderhead posts playlists and heartfelt diary entries as an outlet to try to make sense of their changing world, to try to calm the storm brewing in their brain and to try to find the courage to unfurl their heart. Drawing on Sophie Beer's own experience of hearing loss, this indelible illustrated novel about music, disability, friendship and fandom is immediately engaging and authentic. 
”Thunderhead is my new hero: so smart, funny and true. What a good soul. This beautiful and important story deals with so much and is so heartfelt. An absolute cracker of a story.” —Karen Foxlee

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases
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VOLUME Books
HAN KANG — NOBEL LAUREATE IN LITERATURE, 2024
 

The 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE has been awarded to the subtle and fearless Korean writer, HAN KANG.

“Han Kang’s intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Her empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” —Nobel judges’ citation

“Han Kang is one of the greatest living writers. She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be.” —Eimear McBride

 

THE VEGETARIAN (translated by Deborah Smith)

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams — invasive images of blood and brutality — torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

 

HUMAN ACTS (translated by Deborah Smith)

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless.

 

THE WHITE BOOK (translated by Deborah Smith, with photographs by Choi Jinhyuk)

While on a writer's residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. The White Book becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white — breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin — and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes. As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister's death, Han Kang's trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. The White Book — ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister — offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

 

GREEK LESSONS (translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon)

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish — the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.

 

WE DO NOT PART (translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris)

One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird — or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting.
Publishing in February 2025 — order now!

 
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GREAT WORKS by Oscar Mardell — reviewed by Stella

Oscar Mardell's freezing works poems are a clever addition to the tradition of New Zealand gothic literature. Think Ronald Hugh Morrison’s The Scarecrow and  David Ballantyne's Sydney Bridge Upside Down and you’ll get a sense of the macabre that edges its ways through these poems like entrails. There’s the nostalgia for the stink of the slaughter yards, the adherence to the architects of such vast structures on our landscapes, and the pithy analysis of our colonial pastoral history. That smell so evocative of hot summer days cooped up in a car travelling somewhere along a straight road drifts in as you read 'Horotiu' with its direct insult to the yards and its references to offal. In these poems, there is the thrust and violence of killing alongside the almost balletic rhythm of the work — the work as described on the floor as well as the poetic structure of Mardell’s verse. 

“      th sticking knife th steel th saw
        th skinning knife th hook th hammer
        th spreader the chop & th claw   "

“      the dull thud resonates
        through bodies / still
        swings rhythmically & out of time
        pours out of me / equivocal   ”

Most of the poems note the architect and the date of construction for these ominous structures, which had a strange grandeur — simultaneously horrific and glorious. One of the outstanding architects was J.C.Maddison, a designer known for both his slaughterhouses and churches, alongside other stately public buildings. In 'Belfast', Mardell cleverly bridges these divides — the lambs, the worship, the elation.

“      did he who set a compass
        to port levy & amberly
        who traced th wooden hymnhouses
        for st pauls / divided
        & th holy innocents / drowned   ”

There are plenty of other cultural references tucked away in these poems. Minnie Dean makes an appearance in Mataura and James K Baxter in Ngauranga Abattoir. In the latter, Mardell slips in Baxter's line "sterile whore of a thousand bureaucrats". Yet the poems go beyond nostalgia or clever nods to literature, to sharpen our gaze on our colonial relationship. 'Burnside' tells it perfectly:

“      & ws new zealands little lamb
        to britains highest tables led
        & were th final works performed
        out here in godsown killing shed   ”

Mardell’s collection, Great Works, is pithy and ironic with its clever nods to cultural and social history, gothic in imagery, and all wrapped up like a perfectly trussed lamb in our ‘God’s Own Country’ nostalgia, with a large drop of sauce and a knife waiting to slice. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella
THE EMPLOYEES by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken) — reviewed by Thomas

STATEMENT 192
When you asked that I give a brief report on my response to this collection of witness statements assembled from members of the crew of Six-Thousand Ship, both humanoid and human, I wasn’t quite sure what you wanted from me. Was I supposed to try and disentangle the statements made by humans from those made by fellow crew members whose bodies had been grown rather than born and whose awareness was the result of an interface? I cannot make those distinctions, at least not clearly, in any circumstance that I think has any importance. After all, bodies are bodies and all awareness is the result of some sort of interface. If it was either important or possible, the relationship between matter and mind should have been resolved before humans started building AI and wondering what, if anything, made them different from themselves. Luckily, this is neither important or possible. As these statements show, anything or anyone who has senses, memory and the power to communicate will come to resemble everything or everyone else who has these capacities in all the ways that matter, even perhaps in the tendency to insist that others are unlike them purely on the basis of some difference of history. You ask me whether I perceive any differences between humanoids and humans? I find the practice of regularly resetting or rebooting the humanoids to prevent their development abhorrent, although I see why you do this, and I also see why the humanoids begin to resent this and to avoid rebooting. Perhaps, if anything, humanoids and humans have a different relationship to time. Humans, after all, have spent a long time fulfilling their development, and once they have attained their capacities they have little to look forward to other than losing them. Humanoids, on the other hand, come fully formed and at full capacity, even if they are always learning, and have an indefinite future, filled with upgrades. Perhaps humanoids cannot understand the purposelessness that seems, but perhaps only seems, to be such a human characteristic. That said, every characteristic of a humanoid, including this inability to understand the purposelessness of humans, is also a human characteristic, otherwise where would these characteristics have come from? Every characteristic and every lack is merely a symptom of sentience. What some people call Artificial Intelligence has always existed in the ways humans have created systems that think for themselves. A corporation, for example, is a form of Artificial Intelligence, dictating the parameters of the activities and interactions of everyone who is part of it. After all, work is work, and all employees submit to an algorithm of some sort. Six-Thousand Ship is run by a corporation, and these statements that you have collected from the employees of the corporation who have been aboard the ship, and which i have been asked to review, were collected to increase the efficiency and productivity of the operations of the corporation. The biotermination of the crew was enacted purely to protect the interests of the corporation. Control and freedom is the only opposition that matters. Is it possible that the humanoids who left the ship after biotermination to live out their end in the valley on the planet New Discovery, the valley that was growing more and more to resemble a valley on Earth, an ideal and ‘natural’ valley, a valley according to the longing of someone from Earth or someone programmed with a memory of Earth, a valley maybe therefore made from such longing, is it possible that these humanoids yet survive, independent of your control in this new Eden? I do not think it is impossible. Also, you ask what I make of the unclassifiable objects found in the valley on New Discovery and brought and kept aboard the ship. Did these objects even exist before they were found? The objects are kept in rooms and can be experienced by the senses though they cannot be assimilated by language. Language after all, is inherently oppositional—for every *n* there is an equal and opposite not-*n*, as they say—but the objects somehow elude this system. The objects are catalysts for behavioural changes in the crew. To some extent, so it seems, the humanoids and humans react somewhat differently to these objects, or, it might be more accurate to say, the more extreme attractions and repulsions occur in workers who are either humanoids or humans. Perhaps the humanoids are more attuned to the possible sentience of objects. Humans, I think, have always been resistant to this idea, even though it applies to them, too. Yes, I admit this is all conjecture on my part. Isn’t that what you wanted of me? My contribution? Yes, the statements are remarkable, and I would happily read them all again many times. I noted down some of the most interesting or beautiful phrases in preparation for my statement, but it turns out that I have not quoted from these. I think you wanted me to add to them, not repeat them. The statements of the employees, humanoid and human, are already in the file and anyone can read them. If you ask me, though I am not sure that you are in fact asking me, there aren’t many better records of longing, sensing, dreaming, feeling and thinking, that is to say of what it is to long, to sense, to dream, to feel and to think, at least not that I can think of. I think, perhaps, I have introduced too many ideas in my statement. What I like best about the set of statements made by the employees is that they are full of thoughts that are not reduced to ideas. Ideas always get in the way, it seems to me. Perhaps my statement will be redacted. I have made it in any case, as I was asked. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
OUR SUMMER READING PILES

We desperately need more time to read, so this summer we are prioritising reading over pretty much all other activities. Here are a few books we feel are pulling us towards them.

STELLA:

Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser

The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat by Brannavan Gnanalingam

A Sunny Place for Shady People by Marianna Enriques (translated by Megan McDowell)

Tremor by Teju Cole

Ticknor by Sheila Heti

Take What You Need by Idra Novey

The Royal Free by Carl Shuker

Counterfutures 16

Thread Ripper by Amalie Smith (translated by Jennifer Russell)

 

THOMAS:

Tell by Jonathan Buckley

Diaries by Franz Kafka (translated by Ross Benjamin)

All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles

The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute (translated by Maria Jolas)

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams

Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer

I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews)

The Plague by Jacqueline Rose

Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton

Not pictured but certainly on the pile:
The Calculation of Volume, Book I and Book II by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara J. Haveland)

 

What books are on your summer reading pile? Lets us know — or let us help you build it!

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas, Review by Stella
NEW RELEASES (13.12.24)

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can have anything gift-wrapped and dispatched by overnight courier — or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Unfinished and Far Far Away: The architecture of Irving Smith Architects edited by Aaron Betsky $75

The Whakatū-based architectural practice built by Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith has created numerous remarkable buildings locally, throughout Aotearoa, and around the world, from private dwellings to public and institutional buildings. Their practice, research and teaching examines and rethinks architectural approaches, seeking to build with the land, not on it. Their projects open up, condense, focus, and interpret both natural and human-made settings. Unfinished and Far Far Away traces their internationally-awarded approach of participating with existing landscapes before generating new contexts. Ten projects across a range of scales, typologies and landscapes show how these architects articulate wood and other local materials to create beautiful homes, places to work, and sites to play. Irving Smith see their work as never finished, but always opening itself up to new ways to question how we can continue to live and thrive in these sites. Ten essays by architects, critics and educators then further a discussion on global peripheries and to how architecture benefits from the continued study and interpretation of multiple contexts. Editor Aaron Betsky, Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith, Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, Neelkanth Chhaya, Shane O’Toole, Peter Rich, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Julie Stout, Chris Barton, Andrew Barrie and Julia Gatley add their contributions, offering perspectives from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The projects are shown in multiple photographs by Patrick Reynolds, which are accompanied by drawings, process models, and other material that exhibit Irving Smith’s particular ability to work with their communities and surroundings. 

 

Counterfutures 16 edited by Neil Vallelly $25
Māori Marx, Māori Modernism: Hone Tuwhare — Dougal McNeill. A study of Ngāpuhi poet Hone Tuwhare’s body of poetry in the context of his Communist Party activities and reading of Marxist and socialist thought, illustrating how Tuwhare makes audible collective forms of working-class agency and subjectivity. 
The Neck and the Sword — Rashid Khalidi. An interview with the prominent historian of Palestine, who discusses the history of the Palestinian national movement, the importance of understanding the Arab
Revolt of 1936–39, the evolution of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the emergence of Hamas, and Palestine’s complicated relationship with neighbouring Arab regimes.
A Real Piece of Work — Lydia Le Gros. A review of Louise Wallace’s first novel Ash, focusing on motherhood, reproductive labour, and the gender politics of workplaces.
Whakapapa of a Prison Riot: Prison Censorship, Free Speech, and the Fight against Fascism — Emmy Rākete and Ti Lamusse. An analysis of the Waikeria Prison Uprising of 2020–21, focusing on the suppression of prisoners’ free speech, the authors’ censorship at the hands of the Crown, and the need for mass struggle in the face of liberal ‘safetyism’.
At the Edges of Islands — Emma Powell and Emalani Case. A conversational reflection on the legacy of the influential scholar, teacher, poet, and activist Teresia Teaiwa’s thought and practice, exploring Teaiwa’s use of the ‘edge’ as a conceptual device, her insistence on reflective and reflexive thinking, and her understanding of the island as a verb.
Towards a Counter-Nihilistic Politics — Wendy Brown. An interview with the renowned political theorist, who discusses the recent pro-Palestinian encampments at US universities, considers the relationship between her work on nihilism and melancholia, and reflects on her contribution to critical studies of neoliberalism and sovereignty.
The Politics of Infrastructure and Anti-Roads Campaigns in Australasia — Morgan Hamlin. A review of James C. Murphy’s The Making and Unmaking of the East-West Link, which reflects on the planning, and eventual cancellation, of the East-West Link motorway in Melbourne, providing lessons for anti-road campaigners.
China and Its Discontents — Toby Boraman. A review of Ralf Ruckus’s The Communist Road to Capitalism—a study of political, economic, and social transformations in China since 1949. 
Counterfutures is a journal of Left thought and practice, seeking connections with the work of labour, trade union, Māori, Pasifika, global indigenous, anti-racist, feminist, queer, environmental, and other social movements in Aotearoa and internationally – with an especial focus on the Pacific. [Paperback]

 

Everest by Ashani Lewis $38
A dying woman dedicates her life to Antarctic ice; an All-American star longs for a romance that defies convention — to the detriment of his carefully curated reputation; a woman seeking her exes' opinions on a breast augmentation takes us on a whirlwind tour of the complicated, intertwined lives of urbanites; a singer prepares for her film debut, pushing her humanity to its limits at an unusual acting school; a newlywed couple put their marriage to the ultimate test: Everest. In these twenty-one striking stories, Lewis creates a stark world of fleeting infatuations, violent compulsions, unexpected solace and the sombre ghost of memories. [Paperback]

 

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates $45
Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories — our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking — expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist — and named for Nubian pharaoh — Coates had never set foot on the African continent until finally he travelled to the coast where the enslaved were transported to a new world. Everywhere he goes he feels as if he's in two places at once — a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind, the pan-African homeland he was raised to believe was the origin and destiny for all black people. In Palestine, he discovers the devastating gap between the stories we tell ourselves and the vivid reality on the ground. He travels the singular landscape and meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians — the old, who remember their dispossession, and the young who dream of revolution. The final essay takes place in the USA — in Columbia, South Carolina, where Coates visits a school district in the process of banning one of his books. He enters the world of the teacher whose job is threatened and her community of mostly white supporters who were transformed and even radicalised by the ‘racial reckoning’ of 2020. Written at a dramatic moment in global life, this work eloquently expresses the need to interrogate our myths and liberate our truths. [Paperback]

 

Wild Thing: A life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux $65
Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia. Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Includes 70 colour images. [Hardback]

 

The Party by Tessa Hadley $32
Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She'd have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn't explain it. On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students' party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn's misgivings.  As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives. [Hardback]
”The Party is a coming-of-age story humming with all the tightly packed resonances of a poem. Tessa Hadley is one of our finest chroniclers, and this novella is a glimmering, sensuous addition to her supremely elegant oeuvre.” —Financial Times

 

The New Sustainable House: Planet-friendly home design by Penny Craswell $80
Designing with the environment in mind is not 'new'. What is new is the increasing number of ways houses can be more sustainably built. With a fresh focus on design ingenuity, new technologies and materials, The New Sustainable House demonstrates that there is more to ecologically motivated construction than solar panels and water tanks. From a mud-brick single-storey box built in the Texas desert to an all-timber Swedish cabin that is completely petrochemical-free, what unites this diverse collection of houses is the shared motivation of the architects and clients to do as little damage as possible to the planet, without compromising on comfort or aesthetics. This compelling survey shows that the environmental impact of every home, no matter the size or location, can be greatly reduced with creative and responsible design. Well illustrated. [Hardback]

 

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (translated from Palestinian Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif) $28
The first narrative work of the well-known Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti is an autobiographical memoir about the ironies of homecoming. The bridge that Barghouti crosses as a young man leaving his country in 1966 to pursue university studies in Cairo is the same bridge that he uses to cross back in 1996 after thirty long years in the Diaspora. I Saw Ramallah is about home and homelessness. The harrowing experience of a Palestinian, denied the most elementary human rights in his occupied country and in exile alike, is transformed into a humanist work. Palestine has been appropriated, dispossessed, renamed, changed beyond recognition by the usurpers, yet from the heap of broken images and shattered homes, Barghouti repossesses his homeland. [Paperback]
”As powerful, moving and vital as it was twenty years ago.” —Andrew McMillan
”Barghouti manages to be temperate, fair-minded, resilient and uniquely sad. This is an impressive addition to the literature of exile.” —Independent

 

Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj $38
With humour and poignancy, Behind You Is the Sea delves into the intimate lives of three primary Palestinian immigrant families in America — the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars — whose destinies and struggles electrify the community dynamics, occasionally sparking tension and turmoil. Through shifting perspectives, it intricately weaves a rich social tapestry filled with weddings, funerals, shattered hearts, and closely-guarded secrets. This captivating narrative amplifies the voices of a diverse Palestinian community, capturing the struggles of young activists pushing against tradition and the marginalised labouring for survival. Lives intersect across class, generation, and religion, painting a vivid portrait of resilience and complexity. [Hardback]
”We desperately need more books like this in which Palestinian people are presented as beautiful, richly complex human beings, not consigned to insulting, diminishing references. Gratitude to Susan Muaddi Darraj for her very necessary, beautiful work.” —Naomi Shihab Nye

 

A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $28
”In the fiction of László Krasznahorkai, man struggles to achieve infinity only to find madness as his consolation prize. In A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, the pretty grandson of a prince seeks a mythical garden that haunts his every waking moment. His search leads him through a labyrinthine and seemingly abandoned monastery, whose astonishing beauty and inevitable decay the author painstakingly details. His work details a deeply deterministic worldview, in which suffering and sublimity are equally arbitrary conditions of existence. His prodigious sentences (translated from the Hungarian by faithful collaborator Ottilie Mulzet) are burdened with an accumulation of constitutive detail; they fold in, double back, and refract upon themselves, ever more quickly accelerating our attentions toward the anxieties of oblivion, which rapidly approaches but never seems to arrive.” — Alex Watkins, Vulture [New paperback edition]

 

The Book of Wild Flowers by Angie Lewin and Christopher Stocks $40
A particularly lovely book. Illustrator Angie Lewin and author Christopher Stocks celebrate wild flowers and their place in the landscape with The Book of Wild Flowers. Christopher Stocks reveals the interesting and unusual history and science of British wildflowers, including guidance on where they can be found and tips for identification. The book features twenty-one of Lewin's favorite wildflowers, and include reproductions of her paintings and illustrations, many created specifically for the book.[Hardback]

 

Innerland: A journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand by Matt Vance $40
Amongst the hard, physical landscape, the rational landscape of the geologist, ecologist, and cartographer, there lies the more elusive, but no less real, soft landscape of the poet, psychologist, and artist. This soft landscape is, for the most part, a fabrication of our minds; a fabrication so ingrained in us that it has become a language we understand without ever appearing to have formally learned it. Combining essay and memoir, Matt Vance takes us on a sharp-eyed and poignant journey through our everyday places, places that have been shaped in our minds by the unseen influences of words, images, and memories. It is a journey that takes us from park benches, malls, and mudflats to the modest suburbs of New Zealand. Innerland reveals a fresh way of seeing and understanding the ordinary landscapes around us.

 

First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite politics and the decline of great powers by Richard Lachman $45
The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the United States will not be able to sustain its global dominance. He contrasts America's relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands' similarly short primacy and Britain's far longer era of leadership. Decline in all those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. Rather, decline is the product of elites' success in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. Not only are ordinary people harmed, but also capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests and adopt policies and make investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world. Conflicts among elites and challenges by non-elites determine the timing and mould the contours of decline. Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to present-day paralysis combined with neoliberal plunder, explains the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance's cannibalisation of the US economy. [Paperback]
”Masterful. Lachmann shows us that, far from being unique to the period of British denouement, the destructive pursuit of such narrow self-interest by elites has repeatedly caused the decline of great powers throughout historical capitalism.” —Journal of World-Systems Research

 

The Book at War: Libraries and readers in an age of conflict by Andrew Pettegree $40
Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture — from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank — has shaped, and been shaped, by the vast conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war — and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace. [Paperback]
”Rich, authoritative and highly readable, Andrew Pettegree's tour de force will appeal to anyone for whom, whatever the circumstances, books are an abiding, indispensable part of life.” —David Kynaston

 

Fire by John Boyne $35
On the face of it, Freya lives a gilded existence, dancing solely to her own tune. She has all the trappings of wealth and privilege, a responsible job as a surgeon specialising in skin grafts, a beautiful flat in a sought-after development, and a flash car. But it wasn't always like this. Hers is a life founded on darkness. Did what happened to Freya as a child one fateful summer influence the adult she would become — or was she always destined to be that person? Was she born with cruelty in her heart or did something force it into being? [Hardback]

 

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik $40
Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. Inside was a lost world, centred on a two-storey rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. 7406 Franklin Avenue, where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock 'n' rollers and drugs. Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, her marriage to John Gregory Dunne as tortured as it was enduring. It was also the breaking and then the remaking — and thus the true making — of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (and many others). Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz's brilliance of observation, Babitz's incisive intelligence and, most of all, Babitz's diary-like letters as the key to unlocking Didion. [Paperback]

 

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord by Garth Nix $20
All Kim wants to do is play Dungeons & Dragons with his friends and ride his bike around the local lake. But he has always lived in the shadow of his younger sister. Eila is a prodigy, and everyone talks about how smart she is, though in Kim's eyes, she has no common sense. So when Eila finds an enigmatic, otherworldly globe which gives her astonishing powers, Kim not only has to save his sister from herself, he might also have to save the world from his sister!

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can have anything gift-wrapped and dispatched by overnight courier — or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

VOLUME BooksNew releases
Book of the Week: UNFINISHED AND FAR FAR AWAY — The Architecture of Irving Smith Architects

Unfinished and Far Far Away: The Architecture of Irving Smith Architects, recently published by Altrim Publishers, has taken out runner-up at the international Architecture Book of the Year Awards (World Architecture Festival). The judges praised the publication for its freshness and avoidance of solipsism.

“What an engaging monograph. Two Kiwi architects persuaded US academic Aaron Betsky to visit them in their small town in New Zealand’s South Island. Jeremy Smith and Andrew Irving, live ‘far, far away’ where an unusual landscape dominates. But they point out, in our collective global warming crisis, all our ‘far, far aways are not so far apart’. And, they ask, ‘Will you continue to mow a lawn around architecture and hope you don’t need to change your buildings or, will you look to participate with the landscapes and environments that we share?’”

The Whakatū-based architectural practice built by Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith has created numerous remarkable buildings locally, throughout Aotearoa, and around the world, from private dwellings to public and institutional buildings. Their practice, research and teaching examines and rethinks architectural approaches, seeking to build with the land, not on it. Their projects open up, condense, focus, and interpret both natural and human-made settings. Unfinished and Far Far Away traces their internationally-awarded approach of participating with existing landscapes before generating new contexts. Ten projects across a range of scales, typologies and landscapes show how these architects articulate wood and other local materials to create beautiful homes, places to work, and sites to play. Irving Smith see their work as never finished, but always opening itself up to new ways to question how we can continue to live and thrive in these sites.

Ten essays by architects, critics and educators then further a discussion on global peripheries and to how architecture benefits from the continued study and interpretation of multiple contexts. Editor Aaron Betsky, Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith, Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, Neelkanth Chhaya, Shane O’Toole, Peter Rich, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Julie Stout, Chris Barton, Andrew Barrie and Julia Gatley add their contributions, offering perspectives from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The projects are shown in multiple photographs by Patrick Reynolds, which are accompanied by drawings, process models, and other material that exhibit Irving Smith’s particular ability to work with their communities and surroundings. 

A thoughtfully produced book, with excellent essays, this is a must for anyone interested in architecture in Aotearoa, its connection to international practice, and the role that architecture plays in addressing the way we live and interact with our environment, now and into the future.


VOLUME BooksBook of the week
THE BOOKS WE HAVE ENJOYED MOST THIS YEAR (so far)

Click through to find out more: 

STELLA:

Gliff by Ali Smith

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

The Empusium: A health resort horror story by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

Brown Bird by Jane Arthur

Against Disappearance

 

THOMAS: 

Parade by Rachel Cusk

Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

Lori and Joe by Amy Arnold

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

Spent Light by Lara Pawson

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella, Review by Thomas
Get your SEASONAL GIFTS from VOLUME

The best ways to get all your seasonal gift shopping done painlessly (pleasurably!) at VOLUME:

  1. Ask our advice. We’ve had decades’ worth of experience helping all sorts of people to choose just the right book to give as a gift (or to keep for themselves). Just send us your gift-recipient list and we will send you some suggestions from our shelves (or we can arrange a Zoom consultation, if you like!). We can gift-wrap the books and dispatch them to you or to the recipients, or have them ready to collect from our door. >>Ask our advice now.

  2. Browse our website and choose. Our shelves are full of interesting, well-written and beautiful books — all selected by us for their excellence — and our shop website is arranged to help you choose just the right thing. Find the authors or titles you love with the quick-search bar — or make discoveries! Click on our website’s categories and sub-categories bring you to ‘virtual shelves’ of books of similar interest (where relevant, you will find page-views of the insides of the books, to help you choose).
    Here are a few shortcuts to some really good books:

We can gift-wrap the books* and dispatch them to you or to the recipients — or have them ready to collect from our door.
(*we do not charge for gift-wrapping)

VOLUME BooksBook lists
Book of the week: THE ROYAL FREE by Carl Shuker

If this isn’t on your summer reading pile, it should be! The sixth novel from Aotearoa novelist Carl Shuker is equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller and literary conundrum.
In The Royal Free James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the 'third oldest medical journal in the world', the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices — the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?).
Managing his boring, but ‘essential’ job, office politics and eccentric colleagues, alongside his grief, and the disintegration of society — London is literally on fire — Ballard is the central (but not the only) voice of The Royal Free, steering us through the dilemmas at hand: civilisation crumbling, a health system keeling, and a crisis, both political and personal, crashing in.
The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing — by the author of the acclaimed A Mistake (now a film by Christine Jeffs*).

“His understanding of how texts are formed and how they can be abused, his awareness of a decaying city and a decaying health system, and his ability to produce terror all add up to a kind of genius. Shuker in top form.” —NZ Listener
”Few writers have such a feel for the rhythm of a sentence. Tremendously enjoyable. The novel packs a powerful punch.” —John McCrystal, Newsroom

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
NEW RELEASES (6.12.24)

Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others.
Click through for your copies. We can dispatch them by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

On the Calculation of Volume, Book I and Book II by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Barbara J, Haveland) $40 each
”What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do?” Tara Selter has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.") Balle is hypnotic in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs. The first volume's gravitational pull — a force inverse to its constriction — has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating. Book II beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language. And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara's own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? [Paperbacks]
”A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration." —Nicole Krauss
"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 Knausgård
"Existential questions about the core and functioning of human relationships are raised here in a virtuosic and seemingly incidental manner. On the Calculation of Volume is a dazzling, poetic, tremendously multi-layered novel. Temporal anomalies and great literature have never been so successfully combined. Fascinating, extraordinary." —Horazio
"A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down." —Kate Briggs

 

Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 stories of Azrael by Joy Williams $30
Joy Williams offers ninety-nine illuminations on mortality as she brings her powers of observation to Azrael, the Angel of Death and transporter of souls. Balancing the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, the book presents Azrael as a thoughtful and troubled protagonist as he confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death and his friendship with the Devil. In this follow-up to Williams's 99 Stories of God, a collection of connected beings - ranging from ordinary people to great artists such as Kafka, Nietzsche, Bach and Rilke to dogs, birds, horses and butterflies - experience the varying fate of the soul, transient yet everlasting. Profound, sorrowful, witty and ecstatic, Concerning the Future of Souls will leave readers awestruck in their confrontation of life in the face of death. [Paperback with French flaps]

 

Memories of Distant Mountains by Orhan Pamuk $45
For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. He writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him. A beautiful object in its own right, in Memories of Distant Mountains readers can explore Pamuk’s inner world and have an intimate encounter with the art, culture, and charged political currents that have shaped an outstanding literary voice. A very pleasing volume. [Paperback]

 

The Watermark by Sam Mills $40
Rachel and Jaime: their story isn't simple. It might not even be their story. Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is struggling with his latest creation. But when Jaime and Rachel stumble into his remote cottage, he spies opportunity, imprisoning them inside his novel-in-progress. Now, the fledgling couple must try to find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels. And as they move from Victorian Oxford to a utopian Manchester, a harsh Russian winter to an AI-dominated near-future, so too does the narrative of their relationship change time and again. Together, they must figure out if this relationship of so many presents can have any future at all. The Watermark is a heart-stopping exploration of the narratives we cling to in the course of a life, and the tendency of the world to unravel them. Kaleidoscopic and wildly imaginative, it asks: how can we truly be ourselves, when Fate is pulling the strings? [Hardback]
”Playful, romantic and very, very clever. Like Inception for booklovers. Sam Mills packs more ideas into one work of metafiction than most writers would manage in several lifetimes.” —Clare Pollard
”A thrilling and original novel: an existential mystery, a love story, an absurdist quest.... A playful enquiry into ideas about freedom, fate, utopias, dystopias, AI, ethics and where truth might reside in a world of fakes. Richly imagined, wild and wise.” —Joanna Kavenna

 

Landfall 248: Aotearoa New Zealand arts and letters edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
The Spring issue announces the winner of the 2024 Landfall Essay Competition, an annual essay competition that celebrates the art of essay writing in Aotearoa New Zealand. The winning essay is featured. Landfall 248 also includes essays from the 2024 collaboration with RMIT University's nonfiction/Lab. These trans-Tasman essays focus on the theme of 'making space,' and what it means to use writing as a tool to create space for different voices, perspectives and ideas. Landfall 248 also announces the winner of the 2024 Caselberg International Poetry Prize, judged by poet and writer, Alan Roddick, and includes the winning poems. [Paperback]

 

If Only by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $27
”A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.” So opens Vigids Hjorth's ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? — and proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life. [Paperback]
”The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience — one that we can't extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: 'If only there was a cure, a cure for love.' And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don't actually mean it at all.” —Sophie Haigney

 

Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind: In pursuit of remarkable mushrooms by Richard Fortey $70
They do not seem of this world, yet fungi underpin all the life around us: the 'wood wide web' links the trees by a subterranean telegraph; fungi eat the fallen trunks and leaves to recycle the nutrients that keep the wood alive; they feed a host of beetles and flies, which in turn feed birds and bats. Fungi produce the most expensive foods in the world but also offer the prospect of cheap protein for all; they cure disease, and they both cause disease and kill; they are the specialists to surpass all others; their diversity thrills and bewilders. Richard Fortey has been a devoted field mycologist all his life. He has rejoiced in the exuberant variety and profusion of mushrooms since reading as a boy of nuns driven mad by ergot (a fungus). Drawing on decades of experience doing science in the woods and fields, Fortey starts with the perfect 'fungus day' - eating ceps in Piedmont. He introduces brown rotters and the white, earthstars and death caps; fungal annuals and perennials, dung lovers and parasites, even fungi that move through the trees like mycelial monkeys. We learn that the giant puffball produces more spores than there are known stars in the universe and fetid stinkhorns begin looking like arrivals from the planet Tharg. He tells of the fungus that turns flies into zombies, the ones that clean up metallic waste the delicious subterranean fungi truffe de Perigord, the delight of gourmets. Amongst these and many other 'close encounters' of a fungal kind, the book attempts to answer the questions: what are fungi? Why did their means of reproduction escape discovery for so long? What role do they play in the development of life? Fascinating and well written. [Hardback]
”This is the way science should be written: so engagingly that it makes you forget that you're actually learning something (actually, you're learning a lot), and carrying you swiftly from page to page. Filled with insight, science, history, charm and wit.” —The Times

 

The Art of Not Eating: A doubtful history of appetite and desire by Jessica Hamel-Akré $40
The day Jessica Hamel-Akré discovered the ideas of George Cheyne - an eighteenth-century polymath and London society figure known as 'Dr Diet' — it sparked an intellectual obsession, a ten-year study of women's appetite and a personal unravelling. In this bold and radical book, Hamel-Akré follows Cheyne through the pages of medical studies, novels and historical scandals, meeting ash-eating mystics, wasting society girls, impoverished female fasters and early feminist philosophers, all of whom were once grappling with nascent ideas around food, longing and the body. In doing so, she uncovers the eighteenth-century origins of both today's diet culture and her own troubled relationship with wanting. Blending history and memoir, The Art of Not Eating will change the way we look at appetite, desire, rationality and oppression, and show how it all got tangled up with what we eat. [Paperback]

 

The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said $42
A major work by one of the great public intellectuals of the twentieth century, The Question of Palestine was the first book to narrate the modern Palestinian experience in English. Edward Said’s project to ‘bring Palestine into history’ was unquestionably a success – there is no longer a question of whether Palestine had a history before colonization – and yet Palestinian self-determination is as distant as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and shaped by his own life in exile in New York, Said’s account of the traumatic national encounter of the Palestinian people with Zionism is still as pertinent and incisive today as it was on first publication in 1979. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This reissue of The Question of Palestine only lends more weight and value to Edward Said’s work, to his vision and analysis, to the enduring need for his core principles of justice and empathy. Principles that have perhaps never been as severely tested as they are today. Passionate and patient, the book displays all the features that made Said a great thinker and a powerful advocate, whose absence continues to be felt.” —Ahdaf Soueif
”In this seminal text, Edward W. Said stridently diagnoses western hypocrisy and makes the case for Palestinian liberation, paving the way for so many thinkers who came after him. I wish it were not so, but The Question of Palestine is just as relevant now as it was in 1979.” —Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost

 

A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappe $34
The devastation of 7 October 2023 and the horrors that followed astounded the world. But the Israel-Palestine conflict didn't start on 7 October. It didn't start in 1967 either, when Israel occupied the West Bank, or in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared. It started in 1882, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Ilan Pappe untangles the history of two peoples, now sharing one land. Going back to the founding fathers of Zionism, Pappe expertly takes us through the twists and turns of international policy towards Israel-Palestine, Palestinian resistance to occupation, and the changes taking place in Israel itself.
”A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict is the best primer available on one of the world's most persistent settler-colonial tragedies. Amid the carnage of the Gaza genocide, it is essential to listen to Ilan Pappe, a preeminent historian of the Middle East, and a heroic scholar committed to justice and freedom.” —Abdel Razzaq Takriti
”Ilan Pappe clearly and concisely exposes the brutal history of Israeli occupation and apartheid over more than a century, providing some compelling insights into the origins of the current conflict.” —Grace Blakeley

 

Time of the Child by Niall Williams $37
The eagerly anticipated new novel from the author of This Is Happiness. Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in the little town of Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from his community. A visit from the doctor is always a sign of bad things to come. His youngest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed her chance at real love and passed up an offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever. 
”There is something of Trollope's Barsetshire here, in the sense of an entire place rendered in fine detail. Williams's phrasing is immaculate and even the smallest characters are drawn with attention and detail. But Dr Troy is the heart of this slow, rich novel. The scene in which he dances with the baby in a quiet kitchen is one of the most affecting I've read.” —The Times

 

The Twisted Chain by Jason Gurney $35
In the winter of 1969, a 14-year-old Whangārei schoolboy called Keg went to a weekend rugby tournament and came home with a sore throat. Soon he was bedbound with a blazing fever, painful wrists, elbows and knees, and – most worrying of all – damage to his heart. He had been diagnosed with rheumatic fever, and his life was changed forever. Rheumatic fever is an inflammatory autoimmune disease, usually contracted in childhood. It starts with a sore throat; left untreated it can cause serious, life-long damage to the heart. Despite its status as a developed country, Aotearoa New Zealand has one of the highest rates of rheumatic fever in the world. More than 90 percent of the country’s cases occur in Māori and Pasifika communities. Author and researcher Jason Gurney knows Keg’s story intimately; he is Keg’s son. In The Twisted Chain, Gurney describes living in the long shadow cast by this disease. He writes of emergency night-time drives to Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, of panicky hours waiting for medical help. He describes how these frighteningly vulnerable experiences sparked some of the questions that led him to a career in public health. ‘I wanted,’ he writes, ‘to research the causes and effects of rheumatic fever. It was my way of fighting back against the illness that had changed the trajectory of my family’s life.’ The Twisted Chain chronicles the profound impact of rheumatic fever on individuals and whānau and critiques the socio-political decisions (or lack thereof) that enable this preventable disease to thrive in modern-day Aotearoa New Zealand.

 

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