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Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them — and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing? A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real — to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth. From the author of A Ghost in the Throat. [Paperback]
”The effect is electric, like seeing a ghost returned to life.” —New Statesman
”Obliterates every clear definition of genre and form. Astounding and utterly fresh.” —Irish Independent
”Lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go: sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity.” —Sunday Times
”Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death — dichotomies abound, but the questions of women's lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.” —Paris Review
>>Lost voices from the asylum.
>>Grateful to live these days.
>>Also available in hardback!
Dear Memory: Letters on writing, silence, and grief by Victoria Chang $40
For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly and in the silences of her father. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In letters to family, past teachers, fellow poets, and to the imagination itself, Victoria Chang offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories. Illustrated with artworks by the author. [Paperback]
"Groundbreaking. Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." —NPR
"Dear Memory is an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection. Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still. Her own project is not to erase those incisions — or even, as a child might hope, to heal them — but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." —New Yorker
>>Look inside.
>>The grammar of loss.
>>A different kind of life.
>>Other books by Victoria Chang.
Hexes of Deadwood Forest by Agnieszka Szpila (translated from Polish by Scotia Gilroy) $38
Anna Frenza hates the tyrannical tree huggers and the idiotic eco-warriors, after all, she's the CEO of Poland's biggest oil company. But then she finds herself in a trance, sleepwalking into the woods and making love to a tree, manically, all caught on camera. Her career ends and, in the fallout, she discovers her husband's disturbing secret. Her mind splinters and whether by delusion or possession of spirit, she finds herself in medieval province ruled by the Catholic Church. Deep in the past, Anna falls in with Mathilde Spalt, leader of the Earthen Ones — a congregation of women who live in the woods and reject all patriarchy, instead engaging in ecstatic, sensuous worship of Mother Earth and learns to love the forest . . . until the Church decides to fell the forest and all the women within it. [Paperback]
”The kind of debut that grabs you by the collar and doesn't apologise, it's bold, surreal, feminist and ferociously funny — exactly the kind of book that rewires your brain. A fever dream of feminist fire, we've never read a book quite like it.” —Service 95
”You're holding a torpedo of a book in your hand. Take a seat and get comfortable. This novel's energy, humour, and rebel spirit will awaken your mind and change your way of thinking.” —Olga Tokarczuk
>>Ecofeminist rollercoaster.
>>Alchemical dreams.
B is for Bird by Lily Emo $25
Make your way through the alphabet with this stunning book featuring a cast of familiar birds. From albatross to fantails, ganets to quail, and all the way to the silvereye (also known as Zosterpos lateralis), B Is For Bird is a beautiful celebration of birds, illustrated with collage and written by Whakatū artist Lily Emo. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>How the collages were made.
Talking Classics: The shock of the old by Mary Beard $40
What's exciting about a piece of bread 4,000 years old? Or some pots of paint abandoned in the eruption Pompeii? Why should we be bothered with the distant past anyway? What's the point? The life, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome have something to offer everyone. They are not the property of wealthy white men only. They make us wonder how to make sense of people who lived long ago (from angry landlords to giggling senators) — and to think harder about our own world, to look at it differently. In Talking Classics, Mary Beard points to the surprising connections between antiquity and the present. From revolutionaries to dictators, Bob Dylan to Beyoncé, she joins forces with the varied modern characters who have been transfixed by the ancient world. It's not compulsory, she argues to be excited by antiquity, but it's a shame not to be. After half a century teaching and studying classics, she fills the book with lively stories, curious facts and some good gossip. Talking Classics explains why the deep past does really affect us all. [Hardback]
”This book is a true delight, a thought-provoking, engaging and deeply personal look at the classical world from an author who understands it like no other.” —Elodie Harper
>>A laboratory for understanding what it would be like to be different.
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan $38
Dilara's father is disappearing. His memories are collapsing, dementia stealing a little more of him each day. She has persuaded him to move in with her, hiring builders to adapt her apartment to his new needs, but when the renovation is complete she discovers a big problem: instead of a new en-suite bathroom, the builders have installed a Turkish prison cell. At first she is outraged. There has surely been some mistake. Dilara's family are exiles — they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her estranged homeland appearing uninvited in her new home. But as the weeks pass, her indignation gradually gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners murmuring, rustling, crying out in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue. Even as she struggles to care for her father, to keep the family finances afloat and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, Dilara is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her — to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets — drawn inexorably back to Istanbul. [Paperback]
”Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told — like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodovar — I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end. Kenan Orhan is a truly gifted writer, drawing us down into a tunnel of memory and madness.” —Avni Doshi
”Elegant, propulsive and wholly original, The Renovation is a profound meditation on familial duties, memory, displacement and the devastating longing for a home that exists solely in the past. It will stay with me for a long time.” —Cecile Pin
”The Renovation brilliantly describes what it's like for ‘elsewhere’ to be ‘here’. An instant entry not just into the canon of migrant literature but into the literature of now.” —Isabel Waidner
>>A thing and a half.
>>A place that no longer exists.
Ngāti Kuia: He pūtake, hei pakiaka ora; A history by Madi Williams $60
Ngāti Kuia are tangata whenua of Te Tauihu-o-Te-Waka-a-Māui (the northern South Island). Descended from the ancestress Kuia, their whakapapa sits within a rich and complex Māori lineage, connecting with the stories held by neighbouring iwi - particularly the other Kurahaupō waka groups. Their networks also stretch towards the head of the country, linking to iwi originating from the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island), such as Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu, Muaūpoko, and ultimately back to the Polynesian homelands, Hawaiki. Drawing on hundreds of whakapapa, pūrākau, waiata and karakia recorded in nineteenth-century tribal manuscripts and court records, Madi Williams presents Ngāti Kuia history in Ngāti Kuia voices. From the stories of such tīpuna as Kaikaiāwaro and Hinepopo, through early encounters with neighbouring iwi and European settlers, to recent events such as the Treaty settlement process, this expansive account places Ngāti Kuia at the heart of the region's living, layered history. As Te Kenehi Teira observed during the Ngāti Kuia Treaty claim, the history of the iwi resembles “one huge jigsaw puzzle — you have to find all the pieces and put them together”. In this book, the pieces finally sit alongside one another. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Strength and agency.
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a world of change by Rebecca Solnit $37
”An old world is dying; a new world is being born; now is the time of monsters'.” —Antonio Gramschi. Solnit maps the extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights that we've experienced over the last fifty years, which has profoundly changed our world. In recognising the interdependent and symbiotic relationships in nature and among humans, this revolution is beginning to overturn capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the human domination of nature — despite the best efforts of the old world to fight back. The Beginning Comes After the End is a culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach. [Hardback]
”The optimism of this book arrives like a breath of fresh air. Solnit is adamant that positive change — social, political, climate — is not only a possibility but inevitable.” —Irish Times
”It would be easy to think we inhabit a global-digital age of despair. Think again, says Rebecca Solnit. In nine deft chapters, she pushes back on the current political gloom, setting it against the achievements made since the 1960s in decolonisation, environmentalism and gender equality, as well as within her own experience of US civil, labour, LGBT+ and indigenous rights.” —Financial Times
”Beautiful and inspiring: this book gives us the courage to face change, and to make it.” —George Monbiot
”A powerful meditation on transformation in turbulent times. Solnit argues that the current turmoil signals the dying throes of patriarchy and colonialism. A rallying call for all those who yearn for a just, sustainable and flourishing society.” —The Conversation
”Timely. As a deliberate exercise in reframing — as an open-ended invitation to consciously adopt new paradigms — The Beginning Comes After the End is very effective. Solnit is wise to focus on the nonlinear, and sometimes almost entirely invisible ways that change happens.” —Guardian
>>The change has begun.
Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen $28
Life on a remote Scottish island is turned upside down by a stranger's arrival, testing bonds of family and tradition and leaving a young dreamer's future hanging in the balance. It's no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence. The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper, known as The Father, and his otherworldly son, Ouse. Them, and the occasional lodger to keep the wolf from the door. When one of those lodgers — Firth, a chaotic writer — arrives from Edinburgh, the limits of the world the keeper and his son cling to begin to crumble. A tug of war ensues between Firth and the lighthouse keeper for Ouse's affections — and his future. As old and new ways collide, and life-changing decisions loom, what will the tides leave standing in their wake? [Paperback]
”A kaleidoscopic and linguistically daring work.” —Ocean Vuong
”A quirky and original debut that sizzles with scintillating prose.” —Bernadine Evaristo
”Michael Pedersen is a rare writer of real passion and power and this debut is phenomenal.” —Matt Haig
The Secret Life of Fungi: Exploring the otherworldly beauty of New Zealand’s micro-marvels by Jay Lichter $50
Obsessive fungi photographer Jay Lichter takes you on an extraordinary journey into the mysterious world of fungi — from the tiniest fruiting bodies barely visible to the naked eye, to the sprawling mycelial networks that stretch for kilometres beneath our feet. From urban backyards to suburban parks and beyond exists a magical world that weaves every living thing together in a vast underground web of connection. Without fungi, there would be no plants, no animals, no us. With his stunning photography and infectious curiosity, Jay uncovers the bizarre beauty, hidden intelligence and ecological genius of the fungi world. Funny, fascinating and a little bit filthy, this book celebrates the unsung heroes of our planet — the recyclers, the networkers, the quiet alchemists who make life possible. Once you've glimpsed their secret world, you'll never look at fungi the same way again. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Shuffling in the moss.
Insuring the Future: Reimagining home insurance in Aotearoa by Jonathan Boston $35
Securing home insurance is no longer a sure thing. Nor is it always affordable. In this clear-eyed work, public policy expert Jonathan Boston tackles one of the defining policy challenges of climate change: how can residential property insurance remain accessible and affordable as climate-intensified risks escalate? Given New Zealand’s distinctive natural hazards profile and numerous at-risk communities, small policy changes won’t be enough. Sustainable insurance affordability will require a paradigm shift in risk governance, adaptation planning, and property insurance arrangements. We need fair, collective risk-sharing, vigorous risk avoidance, and serious public investment in risk reduction, including planned relocation where long-term protection is neither cost-effective nor feasible. Navigating the stark realities of climate-intensified risks and implementing effective reforms will be challenging. There are powerful political incentives for procrastination and buck-passing. But delay will be costly; poor policy choices likewise. To enable progress, evidence-informed public debate about the policy options is vital. Insuring the Future seeks to encourage that debate and proposes a practical, integrated set of reforms. [Paperback]
”Urgent and timely.” —Max Rashbrooke
>>A climate-impacted future.
>>”Politics is the art of the possible.”
