All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

One Day a Taniwha by Tīhema Baker $38
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of Turncoat. As the pressure of fatherhood tightens its grip, sleepless nights and rising tensions begin to erode Hepa's sense of control. When the line between fear and reality begins to blur, can he be trusted with his own son? Hepa hasn't slept properly in four months. His newborn son, Wi, cries through the night. The bills keep coming. The pressure to hold everything together is closing in. Hepa tells himself to harden up. Be the pillar his family needs. The only place he feels in control is in his dreams. Since childhood he's been able to shape them, to bend the dream world to his will. Until something begins watching back. A presence with paua-shell eyes starts appearing in his dreams, and then in waking life. In the shadows. In strangers' faces. Whispering to Hepa while he rocks Wi to sleep. It feels like living with a taniwha on his shoulder. Hepa can't tell where the nightmares end and the real world begins — and he's terrified of what he might do... [Paperback]
”One of Aotearoa’s most exciting, innovative novelists.” —pip adam
”A brilliant book that speaks to our time.” —Brannavan Gnanalingam
>>Read an extract.
>>Reclaiming the mana of fatherhood.
>>The impact of colonisation on Māori fatherhood.
>>Stella interviews Tīhema Baker about Turncoat.
>>Read Stella’s review of Turncoat.

Iron Lung by Kirstine Reffstrup (translated from Danish by Hunter Simpson) $42
A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic of the early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own, she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed in an iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in an orphanage for boys. The child goes by the name of 'Boy' but is not like the others, as their body seems to transcend the categories of boy or girl. Between these two young people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond that stretches across time and space. [Paperback with French flaps]
 'Reading Iron Lung felt like remembering a past life, at once so foreign and familiar. With her lucid, pulsating sentences, as poetic as they are precise, Kirstine Reffstrup pierces a little hole in history and pulls a thin, but shining thread through it: a vital and very moving connection between two distant young children living at the edges of time and normality. The result is a wonderfully singular novel that is both historically rooted and full of queer fabulation, both violent and brimming with a desire for embodiment and connection.' —Jonas Eika, author of After the Sun
'What if bodies were not told as pathologies or perversions but rather as stories of spiders, rivers, eggs, and laboured breaths? With sensuous sensitivity, Iron Lung imagines the queer twinnings that arise between bodies cast aside by the twentieth century.' —Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
'A wonderful book: writing which is so vital and so visual coupled with a story which is strange, psychedelic, precise and filled with melancholy. Virtuosic work.' —Aidan Cottrell-Boyce

The Given World by Melissa Harrison $38
April brings spring surging with it, giving rise, among many in the village, to a comforting illusion that all is somehow still right with the world, and that nothing will ever change. In the ancient Welm Valley, something is shifting — the river is behaving oddly, while the arrival of spring, with its familiar rhythms, is shadowed by an undercurrent of unease. A woman falls while out walking and hopes to be found before nightfall; a builder experiences sudden, overwhelming vertigo on a farmhouse roof; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast, strange dream. And alone in the converted priory, overlooking watermeadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives devastating news which will force her to reconsider her family's past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence. [Paperback]
”A novel that reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives. I can't think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty.” —Evie Wyld
”A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I've read this year. Extraordinary. An elegy for the death of the English countryside and also a beautiful demonstration of how a piece of realist literary fiction can subtly borrow from the fantastic, weaving in threads of the mythic and the unearthly that enrich the this-worldly sense the book is making.” —Francis Spufford
”A wonderful reading experience. It is careful and full of care and I loved learning the rhythms and concerns of the characters and understanding their connections. It's an authentic and deeply observed multiperspective portrait of a village. An Under Milk Wood for the twenty-first century.” —Amy Liptrot
”A truly groundbreaking novel, setting the day-to-day rhythms of rural life against troubling and sinister shifts in nature's calendar. Melissa Harrison's forensic portrayal of the village and its residents — wild and human, old and new — deserves a place at the very heart of the English post-pastoral canon.” —Stephen Moss
>>Spreading narrative weight.

Everyday Tang: On what we can learn from a dynasty by Xiaolu Guo $27
After decades living in England, writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo travelled to her native China with her daughter. Her objective was twofold: to show her eleven-year-old where she came from, and to discover what remained of an enigmatic period that had long fascinated her: the magnificent and cosmopolitan Tang Dynasty (618-907). As they wander through the great cities of Xi'an and Luoyang, and cross the Wei and the Yangzi Rivers, Guo ponders the unique artistic, intellectual and social achievements of the Tang Dynasty and its influence on Western culture. Part travelogue, part historical reflection, Everyday Tang is an often startling meditation on China's Golden Age. [Paperback]
”Xiaolu Guo reveals how this pivotal era continues to shape the culture, imagination, and identity of China today.” —Paul French
>>They continue to dream.
>>Call Me Ishmaelle.

Too Little, Too Hard edited by Lucy Mercer and Livia Franchini $45
In recent years, countless arguments have been made for and against the enduring value of literature: reading improves mental health and offers refuge from the news cycle; the novel is dead, poetry obsolete, writers replaceable by AI. Too Little, Too Hard adds nuance to these discussions by examining a topic that tends to be left unexplored: the working conditions of professional writers. What does it mean to write under a neoliberal economy? What can writers afford to work on — and what can't they touch? What side-work sustains them, and what does it cost? What does the publishing industry want, and what does it quietly refuse? And what has happened to literary criticism, to the university, and to the conditions that once made writing possible? In this wide-ranging anthology of essays, fifteen of our most important writers reflect on their experiences of writing under — and against — capitalism. At once practical and utopian, Too Little, Too Hard seeks to reckon with the material crises in the present state of literature while proposing collective action as the way to secure a future in which a writing life becomes possible once again. Contributions from Rachael Allen, Sanah Ahsan, Anthony Anaxagorou, Julia Bell, Emily Berry, Sarah Brouillette, Helen Charman, Claudia Durastanti, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Will Harris, Amber Husain, Dizz Tate, Lara Williams, Holly Pester, Andy Perluzzo, Omar Robert Hamilton. [Paperback with rench flaps]
>>Brtual economics.
>>The something in things.

Deliverywoman by Eva Wyles $39
Thirteen short stories that dive into the complexities of human connection, the pursuit of meaning, and modern-day loneliness. Across a diverse cast of characters — from teachers and gas station workers to hedonistic revellers and wealthy gamers — Wyles explores the strange dimensions of our world and the dangers of ordinary life in small-town Aotearoa and elsewhere, with needle-sharp writing both real and surreal. [Paperback]
”Only someone with an astute understanding of the human condition and an ability to write a freshly turned phrase could have written it. Eva Wyles is the real deal.” —Linda Burgess
>>Ruthless in Waikanae.

Hush by Anna Scaife $40
In eleven stories, Anna Scaife describes the sudden fear, the macabre, the middle-age feminist rage, and the unexpected tragedies which befall everyday New Zealanders. “We turned and sprinted until our lungs stung in our chests. I kept my eyes on the road. I tasted acid, like the candied ginger Nan served at Christmas that burned your throat. If she knew we were out there with a knife getting mixed up with the Mitchells, she’d have killed us.” [Paperback with French flaps]
>>The Jeweller’s Replacement.

Bird Land: Te Kāhui Manu $60
The islands of Aotearoa New Zealand were once inhabited by birds. Shrieking, warbling, tinkling, booming. Poised, strutting, gliding, dancing in scribbled loops through the air. Forest, river, marsh, mountain, ocean, shore—everything charged with their mauri, life force. Across centuries, artists have strived to capture the essence of these birds, creating a rich dialogue that traces human and avian histories in parallel. This new book is an immersive visual exploration of the cultural, ecological and imaginative breadth of the realm of birds—from ancient rock art and taoka Māori, to colonial and scientific drawings and paintings, to modern and contemporary sculpture, weaving, carving, ceramics and photography. This is bird land, through the eyes of many of New Zealand’s most significant artists, from the collections of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

The Castle: Adventures in a world of unravelling men by Jon Ronson $40
When Jon Ronson received a series of disquieting texts from his son Joel who’d been lured to a mysterious castle in the forests of New England late one night, it sets Ronson Sr. off on an extraordinary adventure into an underworld of unmoored and disaffected men. As Jon follows his instincts and deepens his investigation into the castle and the wider ‘man crisis’ – some of whom are feeling tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies of what it means to be a man – urgent questions come to light. What exactly is ‘Princessing’? Why did a charming lawncare influencer dress as a baby in front of billions of online viewers, with catastrophic results? And more pressingly, why are two recently released murderers on their way to pay Jon a visit? From the death of utopian factory towns to the false promise of YouTube influencer culture, Jon shows us our rapidly changing world like never before, and the men caught in the middle. A world drained of purpose, of collapsing institutions, where a new era of disinhibited behaviour has taken hold of our online and real-world selves. And as the castle mystery twists and turns into a cat and mouse story, will Jon be able to discover its terrifying secret hidden from the world? [Paperback]
”Fantastic and intensely of-the-moment, The Castle explores the nature of male anxiety, the spiralling delusions of the internet, the destructive allure of anti-woke defiance, the obsequious flattery of AI chatbots, the impunity of the mega-rich and so many other subtle (and not so subtle) currents that are currently roiling our existence. One of the scarier aspects of this book is the way the ante seems always to be upping, across its various stories and characters. It's a dogged feat of investigation from one of our greatest non-fiction storytellers.” —Patrick Radden Keefe
”Ridiculously compelling and wonderfully weird, this is a book that helps us understand why so many men seem to be unravelling, filling their lives with ill-conceived dreams and self-performance. The Castle is vintage Ronson: wise, timely and extremely funny.” —Louis Theroux
”Every Jon Ronson book has made me see the world differently. Nobody tells an unbelievable-but-true story like him. He's done it again with The Castle: I was utterly gripped from page one. If you want a totally compelling live mystery that will make you burn for justice, READ THIS BOOK URGENTLY.” —Marina Hyde
>>101 princesses.
>>This is not a book about the Manosphere!

The Vegan Creamery: Plant-Based Cheese, Milk, Ice Cream, and More (A Cookbook) by Miyoko Schinner $70
A delectable collection of over 75 plant-based recipes for vegan butters, creams, cheeses, desserts, and more. Imagine enjoying a batch of fresh strawberry ice cream on a hot summer day. It tastes just as delicious as the beloved classic, but at its creamy core it's actually plant-based. Now you can make all the dairy products you love-milks, creams, cheeses, savory spreads, and rich desserts — with nuts, seeds, and other plant-based ingredients instead of animal products. Miyoko Schinner, a vegan dairy expert, has figured out the best way to make these plant-based milk products mimic real dairy over the past three decades and is ready to share these meticulously curated recipes in The Vegan Creamery. This book encourages people to dig deeper into what various plant milks can do. You'll learn to use the age-old concepts of culturing to make French-Style Soft Truffle Cheese, perfect on a charcuterie board, and fermenting plant-based milk to create Reggie Goat Cheese, a tangy spread that is delicious atop a pizza. You'll use atypical plant-based ingredients like watermelon seed milk to make Mozzarella and mung beans to make Halloumi. Alongside these delectable dairy-free cheese creations, you'll learn to make Pumpkin Seed-Oat Yogurt to serve with a bowl of fresh fruit or Salted Maple Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream to satisfy your cravings for a rich dessert. Miyoko Schinner has become a leader in the evolution of plant-based dairy, and through her recipes and stunning photography you can learn how to craft beautiful vegan food for everyday life that will expand your palate and help save the planet. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Browse our cookbook sale.

Big Bang Bread: A 13.8-billion-year adventure by Lilu Uivel $21
In this time-travel storybook and cookbook with a cosmic twist, take a journey through time and space to discover the secrets of baking! Did you know that bread is made from stardust? Board the rocket and blast off on an adventure through time and space to discover the secrets of a home-baked loaf! Big Bang Bread is a kids' time-travel adventure cookbook with a cosmic twist. Take off with the Big Bang, and drop in dinosaurs, Ancient Egypt and other times and places to collect the ingredients for a delicious loaf of oven-baked bread. Encompassing physics, biology and chemistry, children aged five to nine will be blown away to discover the world history and science of bread making. With a recipe to make their own loaf at home, Big Bang Bread is a great way to kickstart delicious experiments and cooking adventures in the home kitchen. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.

A selection of blue-titled books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:

Bolt from the Blue

Out of the Blue

Blue Self-Portrait

Whaea Blue

The Blue Flowers

Walk the Blue Fields

Man with a Blue Scarf

In Bluebeard’s Castle

A stack to inspire – just a few of the titles in this special offer

It’s time for us to make room on our cookbook shelves in anticipation of new treats ahead. That’s good news for you! Whip up a sweet dessert, make a hearty meal, explore a cuisine, or discover new flavours and add some new favourite recipes to your repertoire. Spice up your shelves with superb cookbooks (over 50 titles to choose from) offered to you at deliciously reduced prices. Make your selections quickly, as there are only single copies available at these prices.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Read our latest newsletter and find our what we’ve been reading and recommending.

21 August 2026

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Blending detailed research with the sensitvities of a novelist and poet, Said the Dead breaches the boundaries that contain the past to resuscitate the voices of women who were inmates in a now-derelict Victorian mental hospital in the city of Cork. As the narrator follows their traces through the archives and through the corridors, she finds in the murmurings of these women much that resonate with her own life and experiences.

"Said the Dead is one of those rare books where a reader encounters the writer and her characters at a dazzling and bewitching height, at a place where essence meets essence. A piercingly beautiful book that is wounding sometimes and consoling at others, the work, in the end, is life confirming: encompassed in the volume is the unparalleled expansiveness and depth of human minds and hearts." —Yiyun Li

Please join our online discussion of Said the Dead at our next Talking Books session at 7PM on Tuesday 17 September.

• In the casebooks.

• Lost voices from the asylum.

• Presences, forgotten voices.

• Messiness of process.

• Eleven photos.

• Grateful to live these days.

• From the author of A Ghost in the Throat.

We all have times when things are too much, when we fall out with friends, or we have to be brave even when we are scared. For children, story-telling can be a perfect way to recognise emotions, articulate feelings, and unpack complex situations. A Guide to Rocks is excellent story-telling; employing humour as well as heart and opens doors to conversations, understanding, and empathy.

From the pen and brush of the excellent Bomb and Dazzlehands, comes A Guide to Rocks. This is the best picture book I’ve come across about feelings and how to unpack them.
Charlie has a rock. It’s a beautiful pink crystal, but there’s something about it which worries Dad. As Dad tries to instruct Charlie on the way to deal with his rock — hide it, ignore it, deflect attention from it — it just keeps getting bigger! Eventualy the rock gets so heavy and large it joins with many others and pushes Dad and Charlie apart. It’s going to take some effort to turn this rock over, but possibly together they can do it. This is a stand-out picture book. The text is great, Dad and Charlie are excellent characters, and there’s plenty of heart and humour. The illustrations are delightful, full of the same energy and humour as the award-winning Bomb. Clever, funny, honest, and also useful. A Guide to Rocks lets children (and parents) knows it’s okay to vulnerable, to express your fears and doubts, and that you are not alone.

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This week the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults winners were celebrated, and Read NZ Te Pou Muramura launched its inaugural New Zealand Children’s Book Week. These things matter.

Firstly, book awards. They highlight the best in children’s writing and illustration in Aoateroa. Congratulations to Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan for taking out the top prize with their excellent A Guide to Rocks. (You can read our review here). The judges said: “With A Guide to Rocks, Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan have created a book that tackles a serious topic and yet maintains a sense of humour and joy, without a hint of glibness. This captivating book belongs in every home, school and library in Aotearoa.” And congratulations to local author Mat Tait for Kupe me te Wheke Nui a Muturangi, taking out two awards: for a book originally written in te reo, and the esteemed Illustration prize (you can see some internals here). With its punchy graphics this is excellent illustration, typography and story-telling. The judges said: “This is a skilfully designed and engaging book that maximises use of vibrant colour and illustration to make the story pop off each and every page.”

Secondly, they place books and reading for children front and centre. The theme of this year’s book week is Reading Around Aotearoa. There have been activations, media, resources, and events during the week encouraging ‘parents, teachers, caregivers and whānau to make reading a priority for children in their lives’. These campaigns happen for a reason. Children’s literacy is declining (in line with literacy generally). This is something we all should be concerned about. I think the single best thing you can do to turn this around, is to read to children and give the book a visual presence in your home. Studies show that having books in the home, even a few, makes a difference to education and life outcomes. Whether you own the books, find them in your community’s Little Libraries or borrow them from the public library, engaging with books is vital.

In a world where there are many distractions from the news feed to gaming to what’s happening on instagram, or the general pressure of trying to keep up or pay the bills, carving out a niche for reading can seem daunting. Yet making reading a daily habit can take as little as a few minutes, and reading aloud with your children can be the activity in your day that will be the most rewarding. Here’s a selection of some of our favourite children’s books. Warm-hearted Brown Bird by Jane Arthur – we keep recommending this one. The always excellent Kathrine Rundell’s Rooftoppers (and all her other books). You know the His Dark Materials series from Philip Pullman, but you may not be aware of the feisty Victorian detective Sally Lockhart in The Ruby in the Smoke. And great as a read-aloud or read on your own, the story of Ping and some fiery dragons, all set in the Han dynasty should be on everyone’s reading pile. Start the series with Dragonkeeper. And for children who enjoy words and image on the page, try these cat detective graphic novels– adventures told with verve in Miss Cat from French duo Jean-Luc Fromental and Joëlle Jolivet, and plenty of fun in Detective Beans from New Zealand comic artist Li Chen.

Not sure what to read next, or to give to the children in your whānau? Just ask. We can find the right book for the child and for your storytime reading. If you would like to expand reading horizons further, explore our reading subscriptions.

Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

THAT WAS NOT MY INTENTION by Frances Pavletich $30
A scathing and satisfying look into the relationships we build and what sometimes happens to them. Inspired by: being a great friend, being a terrible friend, being too self-important to tell the difference, failing to get a person to desire you, using dishonest means to get a person to desire you, making a fool of yourself, the people we loved at first, the people we despised later, and the people we can never look in the eye again. Aotearoa fiction reflecting the caustic mood of a generation.

SAID THE DEAD by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
Blending detailed research with the sensitvities of a novelist and poet, Said the Dead breaches the boundaries that contain the past to resuscitate the voices of women who were inmates in a now-derelict Victorian mental hospital in the city of Cork. As the narrator follows their traces through the archives and through the corridors, she finds in the murmurings of these women much that resonate with her own life and experiences. Join our online discussion in September!

THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris 

FACING UP TO OUR FUTURE: Challenges and choices for New Zealand edited by Peter Davis $35
21 prominent writers in their fields on climate change and the energy transition, demographics, the cost of living, housing and home ownership, health, environmental decline, fiscal sustainability, infrastructure, transparency and democracy, race relations and the Crown–Māori relationship, and the future of Pacific communities in Aotearoa. Published by the Helen Clark Foundation.

THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY by Elizabeth Strout $38
”One of the most profoundly moving books I have read — I envy anyone reading it for the first time. Elizabeth Strout is one of those rare novelists whose books leave you a little wiser, open and more compassionate than you were when you began reading. Her best novel yet.” —Rachel Joyce

There is nothing more nauseating than admiration, he said. I want neither to admire nor be admired. Not much danger, though, he thought, of either. When he said, There is nothing more nauseating than admiration, he was perhaps, he feared, performing an act of admiration. He was not certain that Thomas Bernhard had not said exactly those words, or written words in German that could be translated into exactly those words or into words very like them, depending on the translator. I do not admire anyone, he shouted, but, he admitted, if I were to admire anyone it would perhaps be Thomas Bernhard, or rather his writing, that I would admire. His denial seemed unconvincing, he thought, until, at least, my denial is affirmed when I consider a book like Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes, an account of the circumstances of the nine literary prizes that Bernhard accepted between 1963 and 1980, pretty much against his will, or so he says, before developing the strength of will not to accept any more. Strength of will or, maybe, financial security, for, so he says, he accepted these nine literary prizes only for the money and despite the indignity of receiving them. Though, better to accept the indignity of receiving the prize, along with the money, than have that indignity and that money being awarded to a lesser writer, Bernhard writes several times. Eventually he became successful enough not to accept any prizes. That is, if being successful is not a nauseating prize in itself, with all the hazards of every other sort of nauseating admiration. A writer who admires struggles to find their own voice behind or beneath the voice that they admire. Either behind or beneath, the metaphor is unspecific and spatially imprecise. I will tell you what is wrong with metaphors another time. And the writer who is admired struggles to free their own voice from the burden of admiration that their voice or so-called voice has received and which now cannot easily be ignored. It is better to be nobody, he shouted. It is better to be nobody than to be colonised by admiration, either by being like someone else or by being like your idea of someone else’s idea of yourself. Anyway, much as I may run the risk of admiring many others of Thomas Bernhard’s books, he has been careful that I will not admire My Prizes, other than the risk that I might admire the idea of a book written deliberately to avoid admiration. The Thomas Bernhard portrayed in My Prizes is grumpy and misanthropic, he is petulant and unreasonable, as are most of the grumpy, misanthropic, petulant and unreasonable narrators or focal characters of his other books, but in My Prizes there is no deep countercurrent in the text gradually altering our reading and subverting our understanding. In My Prizes there is just Thomas Bernhard on the surface, buying a suit and then taking it back after the prize ceremony, buying a new white Triumph Herald with his prize money and then writing it off in an accident, using his prize money to buy the first rotten old Austrian farmhouse he is shown by the land agent. Rather than the sublime and complex nested clauses, recursive sentences and perilous washes of philosophical inversion that I am most in danger of admiring in many others of Thomas Bernhard’s books, the sentences in My Prizes are crisp and direct and light, and rely for their success on comic timing. These pieces are self-satires, really, character auto-assassinations or deflations, prickly, sometimes tiresome, but relatable (there must be a better word than that, he thought), anecdotes of a life just as irritating as your own, all told like jokes. I have, in a previous sentence, revealed several of the punchlines of these jokes, but no matter. A punchline always spoils a joke and dissipates its energy. Receiving official recognition puts Thomas Bernhard in a bad temper, especially if the prize is an Austrian one. Thomas Bernhard scorns admiration, it is true, and he scorns prizes, but, I ask myself, is a literary prize actually an institution of literary admiration or is it a culture-mill that approves the product of its grinding, softening the grain, unattached to what it grinds? Strike out that metaphor with a hard blue pencil. If the admired dominates the admirer, even when the admirer steals from the admired, or especially then, then a prize is perhaps the opposite of admiration and even more of a risk. I will never risk winning a literary prize, he thought, even though I have written fewer bad sentences than some who have won prizes for them. I will never risk winning a prize. I do not want to be admired. I do not want to be known for anything I have written. I do not even want to have written, he wrote. I want only to write. Only when the sentences are forming themselves on the page can I experience what it is like not to exist at all. The best experience. That in itself is worth living for: the loss of yourself in the liberation of the sentences you write. But if this is true, he thought, can having a good excuse for not writing be anything other than a tragedy? And to whom am I presenting this excuse? 

Listen to Thomas read from ‘Exile’ in Rosalind Belben’s wholly remarkable book Is Beauty Good (brought back into print by And Other Stories).
'So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognising a writer who can conjure an inner life and spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer's mind.' —Isabel Quigly, Financial Times

'Exile' from IS BEAUTY GOOD

Rosalind Belben

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Tree by Aya Kōda (translated from Japanese by Charlotte Goff) $30
Cherry blossom, hinoki, ezo spruce. Persimmon, maple, cypress. The trees of Japan cast a spell on those who venture to its unique landscape. As a child, Aya Kōda realised they were more than mere objects of beauty. Given a sapling by her father, she discovered that we depend on trees as much as they do on us. Markers of time passing, they clear the air and regenerate our earth — while we are responsible to care for their future. Following her travels around Japan, as she witnesses landslides, timber and forests of falling ash, Tree is a beautiful series of essays that contemplate the most distinctive and eternal features of our natural world. A modern classic translated for the first time (the essays were published in Japanese from 1971 to 1984), Kōda reminds us that trees hold a mirror to what we cherish on earth, and what we choose to leave behind. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Aya Koda's prose remains remarkably fresh today. I believe this is because she never ceased to observe keenly, listen attentively, and think for herself: surely the most vital qualities for a writer and for any human being.” —Hiromi Kawakami
”Aya Koda’s essays make me glad for every tree she visited — it's a privilege to train our gaze on these specimen, alongside her, with the wisdom of a life lived, of years accumulated. To feel the strength of the roots that do not meet our eyes, the aliveness of the wood and its scent, the sorrow of a doomed forest. With Koda, we travel to landscapes where ash falls like light rain, where cherry blossoms bloom in abundance, where cedars stand sentinel in crumbling slopes. This book is pure arboreal pleasure, and will make you want to go outside and meet, truly meet, a tree.” —Aube Rey Lescure

Event Horizon by Balsam Karam (translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $38
Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich, where mothers and daughters, banished from society, make their living — without rights, access to care, or legal status. But Milde refuses to accept the order of things and, together with some friends, she revolts against the government's injustice. Arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, Milde is eventually presented with a final choice: to be executed publicly or, as part of an experiment, to be launched into space, into a black hole called the Mass. She chooses the Mass, opting to face its fathomless depth and loneliness rather than hurt the morale of her weary allies back home. Collapsing and expanding myth and reality, Event Horizon is an exquisite existential work of speculative fiction, dark as deep space, woven with reflections on exile, oppression, solidarity, trauma, and loss. [Paperback with French flaps]
‘If you ever wonder why fiction matters, read this radiant and defiant book. Nothing confronts the realities of our world more powerfully than a story willing to imagine and extrapolate them so fully. That this vision is readable – bearable, even – is only because it is written with such love, care and formal brilliance in both voice and structure.’ —Samantha Harvey
‘Balsam Karam’s Event Horizon is a parable for our times. With the power of myth and the lyricism of an epic poem, the novel grapples with so much of what we are witnessing around us across the globe: oppression, torture, migration, division and humans having to negotiate impossible bargains. This philosophical and existential novel had me gripped from beginning to end. Karam’s voice – urgent and essential – penetrates deep and will stay with me.’ —Joanna Pocock
‘Balsam Karam writes from the fringes of space, the frothing sea, the borders of despair and state-enforced terror. Her prose shines like glass. Fabulistic and dreamy, it lingers long past first reading. Event Horizon exposes the serrated edge of girlhood, plunging into the black holes that consume rebels and outsiders.’ —Momtaza Mehri
‘Event Horizon reminds us that the revolution is always already over and has always not yet begun. It is a moving, domestic novel about how to make a home and a life while displaced and oppressed, and about what might endure when you are forced to leave it for good.’ —Samuel Fisher
>>Inside the Outskirts.
>>The exiled writer.

Outsider Everywhere: Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina by Mercedes Halfon (translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery) $33
In August 1939, a ship flying the Polish flag docked in Buenos Aires. On board was a delegation of businessmen, diplomats and journalists. Days later, the captain received orders to return home with all crew and passengers in light of the imminent outbreak of the Second World War. But one man, fascinated by the city, chose to stay at the very last minute. Thus began the unexpected twenty-four-year Argentine exile of one of the twentieth century's major writers: Witold Gombrowicz. Drawing on his writings and interviews with surviving disciples, writers and scholars, Mercedes Halfon's Outsider Everywhere traces Gombrowicz's Argentine years in elegant, pared-back prose, and composes a vivid account of mid-century bohemia in Buenos Aires. Outsider Everywhere is a gripping portrait of a literary figure on the margins who rose to prominence late in life to become 'one of the greatest novelists of our century' (Milan Kundera). [Paperback with French flaps]
‘In the 143 lively pages, adroitly translated by Rahul Bery, and divided into short chapters, [Halfon] intertwines two threads. The first is Gombrowicz’s life in Argentina, one of the oddest exile stories, even by the standards of the 20th century. The second is how Argentina received him. For those familiar with Gombrowicz, Halfon’s book is a quirky postscript to his legend. For readers who have not yet discovered him, it can serve as a way into his work.’ —Magdalena Miecznicka, Financial Times
>>A shadow that walked behind him.
>>Hardly speaking.

Vanishing Point by David Markson $35
An aging writer (identified only as Author) sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with notecards into a novel — and in so doing will dazzle us with an astonishing parade of revelations about the trials and calamities and absurdities and often even tragedies of the creative life — and all the while trying his best (he says) to keep himself out of the tale. Naturally he will fail to do the latter, frequently managing to stand aside and yet remaining undeniably central throughout — until he is swept inevitably into the narrative's starting and shattering climax. [Paperback]
>>Spouses and lovers. Critics.
>>Address unknown.
>>If you’re a dentist you know dentists.
>>T.S. Eliot was afraid of cows.

Long Wave by Daisy Johnson $38
Close to the shore is the island — uninhabited, wild, with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip on reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel, opening a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become. Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth's mother, Edith, locks her daughter away — first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free. Told with mythic power and lyrical precision, Long Wave is an extraordinary novel of longing and loss. [Paperback]
”Long Wave, Daisy Johnson's best novel in an already spectacular career, uncovers heart-rending truths in a multi-generational story of secrets, obsessions, and love. Hopeful, tragic, beautiful, captivating, consuming. A remarkable achievement — such depth, but also what a page-turner!” —Jeff VanderMeer
”An astonishingly beautiful novel with an unearthly sirenic power that remains grounded in the knotty, ambivalent and profound relationships between its characters — mothers, daughters, lovers, the lost. Long Wave is a triumph.” —Kaliane Bradley
”The power of Johnson's storytelling is elemental, fundamental, irresistible. Long Wave has the gravity of an epic and is her greatest achievement yet: a gripping mystery, a series of impeccable character portraits, and an unflinchingly observed treatise on the maelstrom of motherhood. Masterful.” —Kiran Millwood Hargrave
”Johnson writes of motherhood as a ferocious toppling, family as lightning that brachiates and crackles through a life. This is a novel of startling force. Readers will feel Long Wave in their teeth and bones.” —C Pam Zhang
”An extraordinary, masterful, magnificent book. Daisy Johnson has been away, plumbing the river's depths, and brought us back something magical. I read it in a kind of trance, profoundly moved, held aloft by its strange currents. It took me places I never expected; the best novel I've read all year.” —Helen Jukes
”I was gripped by this haunting story of mothers and children pushed right to the edges. Daisy Johnson's world feels painfully real, and yet bristles with magic.” —Becky Barnicoat

The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones $40
Witty, surprising and sparkling, this anthology is an essential exploration of Polish literature. Its thirty-nine stories run the length of the literal and imaginative creation of Poland, from 1918 (when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of colonisation by the neighbouring empires) to the present.
The stories include 'Miss Winczewska', by the acclaimed twentieth-century writer Maria Dabrowska (1889--1965), based on her experience of helping to establish a library for soldiers at the Citadel military base in Warsaw in the interwar period; and 'In the Shadow of Brooklyn' by Stanislaw Dygat (1914--1978), the comical tale of a young man's envy of what he imagines to be his father's success with women. At the contemporary end, it includes a story by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk (1962), 'The Green Children', a historical story set in 1656, narrated by a Scottish doctor who, as the Polish king's physician, travels about the wilds of Poland and encounters two feral children. Introduction by Olga Tokarczuk. [Paperback]
”Though several Nobel prizes have spotlighted Polish literary achievements, only a small part of the rich repertory of Polish literature is known to the wider world in translation. The Penguin collection gives us a sense of how much we have missed.” —TLS

The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani (translated from Italian by Geoffrey Brock) $35
'On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I've changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I've erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They've been the best ten years of my life.' A son is celebrating a bittersweet anniversary. It is a decade since he saw his parents — the father who ruled through petty acts of intimidation and fear, the mother who silently accepted it, fitting herself in the spaces around others' lives. As he looks back, he recalls the airless family home, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, or a visitor who was soon rejected. And he remembers how he became possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free, to live his own life. But can you ever escape the grip of your origins? At once unflinchingly honest and razor sharp, The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation which dismantles the tyranny of the family. It becomes a mirror in which we glimpse something that, even if we have not known it, affects us all. [Paperback]
”Written with wisdom and coiled passion, The Anniversary dramatizes the struggles of a wife and a mother for freedom, autonomy and self-realization against the forces of repression. It is a brilliant portrait of a single soul and her interior life, but also of a society in flux, in the process of change, in the process also of staying the same. Bajani's novel is intense, sharply imagined and fascinating.” —Colm Toibin
”On one level, this provocative novel constitutes a critique of patriarchal society and the Roman Catholic teaching that families must stay together even if it kills them. On another, it's about the narrator's use of fiction to reconstruct a contentious past. That the book succeeds on both levels is a function of the author's freshness of perception and to the quality of his spare, limpid prose. A superb translation by Geoffrey Brock.” —Irish Times
>>The tyranny of family.

Picasso the Foreigner: An artist in France, 1900—1973 by Annie Cohen-Solal (translated from French by Sam Taylor) $45
Before Picasso became Picasso — the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France's leading figures — he was constantly surveilled by the French police. Soon after his arrival in 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services — the first of many entries in an extensive case file. Though he became increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide, Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades. The genius who conceived Guernica in 1937 as a visceral statement against fascism was even denied French citizenship three years later, on the eve of the Nazi occupation. In France, Picasso faced a triple stigma — as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist. Picasso the Foreigner approaches the artist from an entirely new angle, making use of long-overlooked archival sources. In this groundbreaking narrative, Picasso emerges as an artist who ignored national modes in favor of contemporary cosmopolitan forms. Annie Cohen-Solal reveals how Picasso strategized and fought to preserve his agency, eventually leaving Paris for good in 1955. He chose the south over the north and craftspeople over academicians, while simultaneously achieving widespread fame. The artist never became a citizen of France, yet he dynamized the country's culture like few other figures in its history. [Paperback]
"In Picasso the Foreigner the French writer Annie Cohen-Solal cuts through the usual fluff about Parisian bohemia (goodbye absinthe) and takes us instead north of the city, to the archives building of the French police. Consulting yellowed documents, she tracks the xenophobia that followed Picasso in his adopted homeland, where the police branded him an alien." —Deborah Solomon, The New York Times
"This inspired and innovative biography demonstrates that Picasso's visionary approach to art was fundamentally shaped by his experience of being a 'foreigner' in France. Once you have read it, you'll never see his work the same way again." —Lauren Elkin
>>What makes an artist?
>>Unfathomable, uncontrollable.
>>Remember the story of Pablo Picasso.

The Flying Classroom by Erich Kästner $23
Martin's school is no ordinary school. There are snowball fights, kidnappings, cakes, a parachute jump, a mysterious man called 'No-Smoking' who lives in a railway carriage and a play about a flying classroom. As the Christmas holidays draw near, Martin and his friends — nervous Uli, cynical Sebastian, Johnny, who was rescued by a sea captain, and Matthias, who is always hungry (particularly after a meal) — are preparing for the end of term festivities. But there are surprises, sadness and trouble on the way — and a secret that changes everything. The Flying Classroom (first published in 1935) is a magical, thrilling and bittersweet story about friendship, fun and being brave when you are at your most scared. (It also features a calf called Eduard, but you will have to read it to find out why). From the author of the multigenerational favourite Emil and the Detectives. [Paperback]
"Originally published in 1935 and charmingly illustrated by Trier, Kastner's pleasingly sentimental tale of early 20th-century boarding-school life gets the opportunity to reach a new audience, courtesy of Bell's new translation." —Publishers Weekly
”'A little masterpiece. Read it and you will be happy.” —Maurice Sendak
”Marvellous.” —Philip Pullman
”My favourite book as a child — funny, exciting and very atmospheric.” —Michael Rosen

Daily Rituals: Women at Work: How great women make time, find inspiration, and get to work by Mason Currey $36
Barbara Hepworth sculpted outdoors and Janet Frame wore earmuffs as she worked to block out noise. Kate Chopin wrote with her six children 'swarming around her' whereas the artist Rosa Bonheur filled her bedroom with the sixty birds that inspired her work. Louisa May Alcott wrote so vigorously — skipping sleep and meals — that she had to learn to write with her left hand to give her cramped right hand a break. Filled with details of the large and small choices these women made, Daily Rituals: Women at Work is about the day-to-day lives of some of the world's most extraordinary creative minds who, whether Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Nina Simone or Jane Campion, found the time and got to work. [Paperback]
”An admirably succinct portrait of some distinctly uncommon lives.” —Meryle Secrest

The Other Side by Philip Bunting $29
How are you enjoying your holiday here on Earth? It must be nice, being alive and all! Join the Grim Reaper on a whistle-stop tour of some of the ways different people have thought about what happens on 'the other side' — from Valhalla to Vodou, Heaven to Hades's Underworld. That is, of course, after you've finished up your holiday on the best planet this side of Pluto! Have a great trip — and I'll see you on the Other Side. A fascinating and fun illustrated guide for children (and non-children) to a stupendous range of beliefs and ideas about what happens to us after we die. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:

The Fate of the Land

You Shall Leave Your Land

The Land of Smoke

Borrowed Land

I Will Die in a Foreign Land

Shining Land

Stranger in My Own Land

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

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14 August 2026

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Novels and parenting are both traditional but unstable technologies of transmission. Neither are ‘resolvable’; both are technologies in which the ‘definitive’ is impossible and in which any attempt at the ‘definitive’ interferes with the transmission. Both progress in a single direction, as a series of moments, but in each moment multiple times are present simultaneously, layered, both present and absent, creating nodes of attention and possibilities for realisation and invention. Both novels and parenting privilege us to the experiences of others (for good or for ill) and through them the experiences of others again and so on, linking the influences of the past to the possibilities of the future. Each technology is a vector for the development of the characters to which it is applied but the more conforming the characters to external parameters the less interesting the result. Novels and parenting are both technologies of transmission, but the measure of their value lies entirely in the reader or child who either receives or resists the transmission according to their needs and in the way most suitable for them. Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription explores the possibilities and limitations of the novel as a technology of transferral while addressing the possibilities and limitations of parenting (both biological and metaphorical or ‘cultural’) as another technology of transferral, all the while contrasting both to the new attention-hungry technologies that are embedded for instance in a cell-phone, and charting how these new technologies have impacted the types of transferral addressed by the novel or by parenthood (biological or metaphorical). The new technologies in their most widely consumed mode tend to provide experiences that are temporally flat, a scrollable inescapable present, even though the moments that comprise that ersatz present are necessarily captured in the past. The ‘present’ of the new technology is discontinuous, uninhabitable, spaceless, compounding, and generally over-literal, inherently disjunctive and competing for attention with the other modes of experience that may be suggested by the actual location or circumstances of the rightful ‘owner’ of that attention. A novel, traditionally embedded in the codex as a hand-held device, offers one way in which attention may push at the limitations of its moment and enlarge its circumstances through an experience of simultaneity; scrolling social media on a cellphone — skimming — allows attention to push at — or be drawn through — the edges of its moment through an experience of algorithmically determined disjunctive seriality (this is not inherently a bad thing (but may (or may not) in effect be a bad thing)). Regardless of the content transferred, the medium is shaping and patterning our experience, though the medium itself is unseen as the transference occurs (which is what makes it a medium). When the narrator of Transcription drops his cellphone into the handbasin at the hotel on his way to conduct what will be the final published interview of his nonagenarian cultural mentor, Thomas, he finds himself unable to admit that he is not recording, and ends up reconstructing the interview from memory. When he admits this at a symposium in the second section of the novel, he is castigated, not unreasonably, by the attendees but it could also be said that Thomas’s voice, especially since his death, now speaks through or inhabits the narrator in a way that would not be possible if that voice was contained by and limited to forensically verified data. The new technologies are technologies of cumulative capture before they are anything else, performing literality and definitivity (even when they are wrong or fake). If the conversation between the narrator and Thomas written for us by the narrator in the first section of the book is an accurate reconstruction of the actual conversation (we play along with the author that there might be such an actual thing so that we can then speculate on the reliability of narrator’s account of it), it would have made a very poor written interview as Thomas is exhibiting post-Covid cognitive decline and the narrator is comically distracted and dense. Fortunately for Thomas’s legacy perhaps, there is no definitive recording of the interview and the narrator has therefore had to use a combination of memory and imagination to construct Thomas’s final interview for publication (of course, we as readers do not get to read this (novels are potentised by what they leave out)). Where a technology of capture literalises what it captures and presents it as definitive, memory and imagination allow the voice to live and change in those it inhabits, to use its force for further and yet further acts of nuance and transmission. Whether we think of this living-on-in-others (especially when the original personage can no longer contribute to or ‘own’ the idea of themselves) as colonisation, theft, or haunting, it demonstrates the transpersonal nature of what we think of as personhood: the idea of us continues to vibrate in others, diminishing but never completely disappearing even when it is no longer consciously noticed. We both receive and transmit; we ourselves are media of transference. The narrator's cultural relationship with Thomas, his mentor, privileges him to Thomas’s voice and to the thoughts it expresses but it also overwhelms the narrator’s own less certain voice. The narrator is the admiring cultural son, dominated by his father, hoping to live up to his standards, too frightened even to admit a misfortune. The narrator’s relationship with Thomas is contrasted, especially in the third section of the book, with that of Thomas’s biological son, Max,who was a university friend of the narrator’s and his double for the purposes of the novel (even Thomas confounds the two). Max’s experience of Thomas and of his shortcomings as a father contrasts with that of the narrator both on matters of fact and of perspective. Their experiences are often co-extensive both in time and space, but are very different. Max sees clearly from his position as the overlooked son, and his longing for and attempts at connection with Thomas are poignant. The narrator and Max each have young daughters who are exhibiting refusals that their parents find distressing and confusing: the cultural son’s daughter refuses to go to school; the biological son’s daughter refuses food. These refusals are also each refusals of transmission, disarming reactions by the otherwise powerless to systems that derive their power from their capacity to withhold. That each of the girls’ problems are ‘overcome’ by means of new technologies is both disconcerting and somehow plausible: the vacuous unboxing videos that enable Max’s daughter Emmie to start to eat again are effective precisely because of their vacuity: with irrelevant content, the underlying pattern of expectation, discovery and satisfaction resonates deeply and reassuringly in a world where expectation, discovery and satisfaction are unstable, undermined and uncertain, especially for the young. What then, though? Do the new media pattern our attention so that they appear to assuage the very problems they exacerbate? We are of course and as always asking the wrong question or only part of the right question. As with any medium we must ask not so much whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but: in which direction does the power flow, and to whom? 

James Cook is one of the most contested figures in Aotearoa New Zealand’s past. Today, his name evokes not only exploration and scientific endeavour but also the violence of first encounters and the enduring legacies of colonisation. Tony Ballantyne examines how stories about Cook have changed over time — and what these shifting narratives reveal about the making of national identity. From Cook’s death through to Tuia 250, Ballantyne traces three major phases in collective understandings of Cook. The first, imperial memory, is centred on British authority and benevolence. This gives way, by the late 1950s, to a distinct national history, marked by J. C. Beaglehole’s influential scholarship and a growing emphasis on New Zealand’s own place in the imperial world. Postcolonial memory follows, bringing Māori perspectives to the fore and reframing Cook as a deeply contested figure in public debate, scholarship and artistic expression. The book shows how Cook’s afterlives continue to shape New Zealand’s historical consciousness and political culture, offering a deeply perceptive account of how imperialism persists in national memory. This is an absorbing and beautifully presented book, illustrated with a wide range of artworks.

• Watch the trailer.

• Contested empire.

• Conscripted into the ‘culture wars’.

• Discovery and rediscovery.

• Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook.

• Cook’s Ark.

This week at our Talking Books session we disucssed the 2026 International Booker winner Taiwan Travelogue. The conversation was wide-ranging: we talked about the content, themes of colonisation and power imbalances, the love story, language and translation, and the novel’s structure. Initially published in Taiwan in 2020, disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text of a Japanese writer from the late 1930s, its premise rests on the experiences of a writer touring Taiwan in 1938 and the relationship they develop with their translator. Aoyama Chizuko is a young woman, famous for her semi-autobiographical novel, a work that has captured Japan in print and in film. She’s in a position of privilege, able to live an independent bohemian life. She’s free to choose her own path. She heads to Taiwan to write about the place, the people and, in particular, the food. She loves to eat and has a furious appetite. Her initial assigned government interpretator is not to her liking, and, not very long after she arrives, her host introduces her to Ông Tsian-hóh (Ō Chizuru). This young woman will be pivotal not only in Aoyama’s experiences of food and culture in Taiwan, but also her emotional development, although one can not be sure just when Aoyama to recognises her lack of awareness. Aoyama is as demanding as Chizuru is accommodating. Through their travels on the island, the foods consumed (many) and their conversation, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ reveals much about Taiwan’s history, the Japanese empire's desire to colonise Taiwan as a gateway to the south (they arrived in 1895 and left in 1945 when Taiwan was handed to the Republic of China), and the many layers of power within society at the time. While Aoyama becomes increasingly enamoured with Chizuru, attempting to convince her to forgo an arranged marriage and move with her to Japan, she is blind to the reasons the young interpreter refuses this offer. Playing detective, Aoyama bullishly keeps questioning the young woman trying to unpick the story. How does Chizuru know so much about all the different foods ? How come she speaks multiple languages? Why does she insist on walking miles when she could just stay at Aoyama’s lodgings? What she doesn’t think to ask is: What does Chizuru want. Aoyama forgets that whatever she asks for will be attended to — Chizuru is her employee. Here is a situation of taking and giving, one where Aoyama is blind to the fact that her position, in spite of her obvious care for and love for this woman, makes the situation impossible. In this way, these characters carry the perspective of opposing forces within their psyche, much like the roles enforced by colonisation. Read Taiwan Travelogue for the history, the food, and to gain a little insight into how the past informs the present in this interesting country. Read it for its enjoyable structural play. There are footnotes from translators, there are notes at the back ‘fictionally’ responding to the ‘fictional’ publication of the rediscovered classic. The English edition is excellently translated by Lin King.

Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

ALL HER LIVES by Ingrid Horrocks $35
”Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations and constraints of womanhood. … Emotionally intelligent and historically alert, this book is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf of New Zealand fiction.” —Ockham New Zealand Book Awards judges’ citation on awarding All Her Lives the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

THE ORIGINAL by Nell Stevens $35
Nell Stevens’s enjoyable novel queers our usual understandings of authenticity and fakery, with all the dramatic vicissitudes and complexities of plot of the type of Victorian novel that it both imitates and remakes. Grace shows a prodigious talent at copying and forging paintings, presented here as a virtue because “the value of the copy is in the copyist’s powers of empathy”. But are our social interactions enabled by just the same species of empathy? Isn’t it by copying others that we gain fulfillment and love, and become ourselves?

BORROWED LAND: A Highland story by Kapka Kassabova $55
In the Scottish Highlands, centuries-old connections between the land, nature and people have been, and continue to be, shaken by the forces of colonialism, industry, depopulation, and private property speculation.
”Combines the detail and intimacy of boots on the ground reportage with the universality of a dark fable. This is a Highland story, but also a global story — a poetic and haunting anatomy of what happens when a world is addicted to extraction.” —James Crawford

CAPTAIN COOK AND THE UNSETTLED AFTERLIVES OF EMPIRE by Tony Ballantyne $60
James Cook is one of the most contested figures in Aotearoa New Zealand’s past. His name evokes not only exploration and scientific endeavour but also the violence of first encounters and the enduring legacies of colonisation. Ballantyne examines how stories about Cook have changed over time — and what these shifting narratives reveal about the making of national identity. From Cook’s death through to Tuia 250, Ballantyne traces three major phases in collective understandings of Cook.

SAID THE DEAD by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
Blending detailed research with the sensitvities of a novelist and poet, Said the Dead breaches the boundaries that contain the past to resuscitate the voices of women who were inmates in a now-derelict Victorian mental hospital in the city of Cork. As the narrator follows their traces through the archives and through the corridors, she finds in the murmurings of these women much that resonate with her own life and experiences.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

kluge by pip adam $38
If you and I are in the same =‘entertainment venue’ for this =‘stand-up comedy special’ and I am =‘my body’ and you are =‘my audience’ I run to you and shout your name into the dark, in the hope you are there. Yes, you =‘dear reader’ =‘attentive listener’. This is a story about the end days of a tech company and its all-powerful owner, told in the style of a stand-up comedy special. Prophetic, propulsive and absurdly entertaining, kluge is a workplace satire about artificial intelligence and the value of a body. [Paperback (published in 4 differently coloured covers)]
”An audacious, dazzling masterpiece. I love you, pip adam, put me on a leash and drag me to Hell.” —Hera Lindsay Bird
”Utterly unmooring. A work of outrageous genius.” —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Night Night Fawn
”Meticulously crafted. A mind-bending and chilling artefact.” —Kerry Donovan Brown, author of Lamplighter
>>I run to you and shout your name in the dark.
>>Writing in three dimensions.
>>Keeping faith in the project.
>>What it means to be inhuman.

Zombie Proust by Jérôme Prieur (translated from French by Nancy Kline) $40
“Marcel Proust passed away on the 18th of November. It was 1922. One day, I could no longer resist: I went in search of him. I prowled about, I visited the rooms where he had lived, I caught glimpses of abandoned châteaus and haunted places, I walked in his footsteps. I wanted to see what his eyes had seen. I looked at his photographs, I uncovered relics and little treasures. I tried to find out who he had been in life, what he had really been like. I interrogated those among the dead who could still reply: his friends, his confidants, those who had crossed paths with him. Who was he? The dandy who set out for salons as though on a foreign expedition? Or the invisible man who flinched from the light, the character in a thriller? The brilliant writer was concealing a doppelgänger, and I pursued him as though tracking down a missing relative.” — Jérôme Prieur
What is a writer’s life, and above all, what is left of it? This book is not a biography, but a quest; an expedition to unearth what remains of the author of Remembrance of Things Past. What was it like to be in his remarkable presence? What was it like to be inside his skin — especially during his final years of intense reclusive absorption in the writing of his great book? Haunted places and abandoned sets, rare photographs, tinpot relics, half-erased fingerprints, flashes of light, piles of little memories serve as talismans through which Jérôme Prieur materialises the eponymous writer’s body and spirit in short, vivid chapters which resemble prose poems. Rich in detail, wry humour and quirky erudition, Zombie Proust brings back to life the invisible being, recalling his image as one summons a ghost.
“Prieur has succeeded magnificently in bringing his portrait of Proust to life.” —Le Monde
“Prieur explores places, questions traces, lingers on moments of Proust's life, sentences from In Search of Lost Time, images - again and again - like those words, haloed in mystery, which open wide the doors of imagination.” —Télérama
Every page is shot through with the feeling of overwhelming, enthusiastic, affectionate gratitude that readers of In Search of Lost Time feel for Proust the writer and Proust the man.” —Le Matricule des anges
“Scarcely any other book on Proust evades with such effortless skill the classic dilemma of whether to relate everything to the work or to the man. Prieur resurrects them both as a single phantom, in the night time favoured by Proust, perfectly conjuring up scents and tastes, with a love which owes nothing to neurosis.”
—Journal du Dimanche
>>Possessing other eyes.
>>Allure and menace.

Twilight in Musashino by Seichō Matsumoto (translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood) $40
Musashino, 1959. A young Japanese flight attendant is found strangled on the icy banks of the river. The police suspect foul play — but the deeper they dig, the more they collide with a wall of silence. At the centre of it all stands a foreign priest and the Guglielmo Church, a charitable Christian mission. The dead woman's connection to the church is undeniable. But what begins as a routine investigation quickly turns into something far more treacherous, entangling together narcotics, post-war relief schemes and the delicate web of international diplomacy. As the story moves from back alleys to diplomatic sanctuaries, following the twists and turns of Detective Fujisawa's investigation, Seichō Matsumoto masterfully constructs a slow-burning procedural where truth is clear but justice is not permitted. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Seichō Matsumoto's books are packed with lean prose and twists yet they're also educational. If you want to understand Japan, Matsumoto is a disquieting place to start.” —Tim Stanley

Weimar: Life on the edge of catatrophe by Katja Hoyer $75
Weimar looms large in German history — a crucible of democracy and dictatorship. This ancient town nestled in the heart of the country was home to some of Europe's greatest thinkers, Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and Nietzsche among them. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out of a beech forest. Weimar shows us a town and its people on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on a wealth of new archival research, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer takes us from 1919 to 1939 as she tells the stories of the men and women who lived through the new republic and Hitler's regime. We encounter cast of characters, from bookbinder Carl Weirich and hotel owners Rosa and Arthur Schmidt, to Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth. Here are fascists and socialists, artists and workers, politicians and citizens, who, as the events of history swept them up, became witnesses, perpetrators, victims and bystanders. [Hardback]
”A leading historian offers the definitive account of Weimar, a city that is central to Germany's literary tradition — as well as to the darker chapters of its history.” —New Statesman
”Most histories of interwar Germany focus on Berlin (sleaze, cabarets, expressionist art) or Munich (beer, Nazis in lederhosen), so it's clever to tell the ill-starred story of the Weimar Republic through the 35,000-strong town of Weimar itself, home to Goethe and so many parks. Katja Hoyer weaves her story using the lives of various locals — book-keepers, hoteliers, party activists — to show what it was like to live on ‘the edge of catastrophe’ and show why so many Germans succumbed to Nazi fever.” —The Times
”There has been a renewed uptick in books about the Weimar Republic, with many observers worrying about possible contemporary parallels. Historian Hoyer opts for a different tack, going to the picturesque Thuringian town that gave its name to Germany's first ill-fated experiment with democracy to explore, via a collection of individuals, how the home to many of Europe's cultural giants became an early Nazi stronghold.” —Financial Times
”Hoyer's book confronts us with troubling ambiguities. Understanding why ordinary, even likeable, people turned away from democracy is, she argues, essential to safeguarding freedom. That task could scarcely be more urgent.” —Guardian

It Gets In Your Blood: Lives of a racecourse by Marty Smith $40
It Gets In Your Blood is a work of memoir and portraiture that takes the reader deep into the life of a racecourse community. 'Come for a ride with me, and see what I see, down in the dirt and sweat and horseshit, right in the belly of the work of a racing stable. These are my real people, and this is the life I would lead if I hadn't been looking out for my father, a child of the Depression. Be a teacher, he said, or a nurse, people always want those people. I only just started riding work when he was lying in a coma; could I tell him how much I would love to be a jockey? I could not.' —Marty Smith. In 2015, having always loved horses and riding, Marty Smith set out to immerse herself in the world of thoroughbred horse racing — to 'talk to people at every level' and spend time in the stables and training grounds of the Hawke's Bay racecourse. The project is as much about the people as the horses, and it turns out to be harder — and more surprising, funny and drawn-out — than she'd ever expected. She's not the kind of person who can write a book in a year: this book took ten, and in the process became a portrait of people and an industry as they changed over time. Across that decade, as people in the stables get to know and trust her, the many lives of the racecourse began to open up. This is a life of hard work and constant risk, as well as community and love. And horses. [Paperback]
>>Read Stella’s review.
>>Listen to Stella’s radio review.

Ngā Kākahu Māori o Mua by Hirini Moko Mead $65
Starting with identifying the range of garments present during the Classical Period of Māori traditional clothing (1769–1800), their function and the ways they were made, this book then explores how clothing of Māori has changed in style, function and construction. Hirini Moko Mead makes a detailed analysis of the materials used, construction techniques, patterns, garments produced and the ways they have changed over time. The text is accompanied by photographs and illustrations of feather cloaks, dogskin cloaks, piupiu, rain capes and many other garments as well as details of the decoration and methods of making. This is an authoritative exploration of Māori traditional clothing and its evolutions from 1769 to the 1960s and is accessible for a general readership. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!

I Hear a New World (‘Long London’ #2) by Alan Moore $38
It's 1958. A time of Rock and Roll, of protest, riot and change... and London is full of danger. Dennis Knuckleyard is finally growing up, and above all he wants to leave the Great When in the past. For nine years, he's avoided so much as thinking about the magical shadow version of London, managing even to palm off what should've been his last souvenir of that experience — an iron key he secretly brought back. But while Dennis may believe he's done with the Great When, it's not done with him. The unsuspecting rube now in possession of the key has discovered its magical properties, bringing forth mythic, occult beings into Dennis's London and sparking riots in the capital. Worse still, Dennis hears his first love Grace has returned to the Great When to investigate strange happenings in both cities. Desperate to keep Grace safe and return London to normal, Dennis follows her back into the hidden city. But once it has him back, The Great When will not let him go away again so easily. He and Grace must fight to set things right or forever lose everything. [Paperback]
'Extraordinary.' —Susanna Clarke
'A breathless time-travelling classic. Savage, humane, comic, terrifying.' —Iain Sinclair
>>Read The Great When first.

Facing Up to Our Future: Challenges and choices for New Zealand edited by Peter Davis $35
New Zealand's traditional “she'll be right” optimism is no longer adequate to the challenges facing the country. Facing Up to Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand brings together 21 of the country's leading thinkers to confront the long-term pressures shaping the nation's next decades. Edited by Emeritus Professor Peter Davis, the collection ranges widely, covering issues as diverse as climate change and the energy transition, demographics, the cost of living, housing and home ownership, health, environmental decline, fiscal sustainability, infrastructure, transparency and democracy, race relations and the Crown–Māori relationship, and the future of Pacific communities in Aotearoa. Its central argument is that these are not passing storms to be ridden out on the country's traditional “she'll be right” optimism, but decades-long structural challenges that no single government can solve alone. Our different governments are failing to take effective action on the long-term economic, social, governance and environmental challenges New Zealand faces. In this book some of our best policy thinkers offer options for practical, feasible and longer-view solutions.  Tackling the challenges our nation faces is vital for a better future.
Structured around the four themes of Economy and Wellbeing, Society and Culture, Governance and Government, and Environment and Place, the book moves beyond diagnosis to an equally broad slate of practical reforms. Its contributors propose, among much else, a cross-party housing accord, an independent fiscal watchdog, a Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations, a broader tax base, binding environmental limits, stronger competition and lobbying rules, a simpler welfare system, sustainable funding for public-interest journalism, and a renewed commitment to multilateralism and Pacific climate leadership. With forewords by the Rt Hon Helen Clark and Professor Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, it sets out the kind of evidence-based, long-term policymaking New Zealand needs — solutions built on collaboration and consensus that endure beyond any single electoral cycle. Contributors: Matt Nolan, Toby Moore, Tim Maloney, Jon Duffy, Michael Johnston, Peter Davis, Jonathan Boston, Robin Gauld, Dylan Mordaunt, Stuart McNaughton, Peter A. Thompson, Jemaima Tiatia-Siau, Seiuli Angel Timali Tiatia-Siau, Chris Finlayson KC, Morgan Godfery, Philippa Yasbek, Lucy Cassels, Greg Severinsen, Rod Carr, Kali Mercier, and Mark Thomas [Paperback]

The Witch in the Tower by Júlia Sardà $30
Carmela's older sister, Franca, has stopped playing with her and she cannot help but feel sad and left out. No one can make her feel better, not even her little sister. So she decides to play a game: she will walk until she can’t anymore and then ... she will walk a little more. Carmela suddenly arrives at a strange tower where she meets a witch who, it seems, has been waiting for Carmela all this time. She welcomes Carmela into a world far beyond the limits of her imagination, where Carmela visits libraries teeming with ancient books; rooms where worms and spiders weave intricate dresses; a wonderful dome of crystal prisms and, finally, Carmela takes flight — her worries shrinking, her mind expanding. Carmela discovers a magic and power within herself – to see beyond the hurt and pain of growing up, to find her own place in the world. [Hardback]
”Sarda's intricate artwork reflects Carmela's inner journey as much as her outer one, truly letting loose as Carmela gleefully unlocks her own free-spirited magic. A wild rumpus of sorts and a love letter to the outcasts, ‘the lonely, the lost, and the different ones’ — and that is a beautiful, empowering thing. —Booklist
”Sarda has struck gold. Both narrative and aesthetic ooze style, coolly occupying the intersection between cautionary folktale and coming-of-age fantasy epic. The result is singular, not merely a modern classic but one for the ages. Utterly spellbinding.” —Kirkus Reviews
>>Look inside!

Griefdogg by Michael Winkler $40
Meet Jeffrey Watson-Johnson hydrologist, husband of Martine, father of Bern, model citizen of Mildura. But after he inherits a small fortune from an obscure aunt and has a disconcerting encounter with his cousin Pam, Jeffrey decides it's time to change everything. He tells Martine he wants to live as if he were the family pet. Sleeping through the day or wandering beside the river, he discovers a new power — he can sense secret grief in others. What to do with this gift? Or with his awareness of the endless streams of water flowing unseen beneath the earth? [Paperback]
”Reading Greifdogg us like running close along a wall Winkler has built — is still building up ahead — water seeping from between the stones. There’s a pit in the centre of the book that we circle, and a serene view off in the distance. An impressive book about connection, being, and dissolution.” —Jen Calleja
>>Life as confidence trick.
>>Start late, avoid late style.

Peacock by James Hynes $38
A second volume of Hynes’s historical epic set in the last days of a dying Roman empire. Sparrow has flown from the confines of the Roman brothel where he was raised. Now older and smarter, and having learned the arts of deception and enticement from the women who raised him, he vies to become a player in the internal politics at Arcadia, the home of his new master, a man who is himself playing with political fire. Sparrow soon realizes that the key to survival in this turbulent place is information, and he must gather it at any cost. As the dangers mount for Sparrow, he is forced to choose where his loyalties lie and which of these powerful Romans is most likely to ensure his survival. [Paperback]
”Utterly engrossing, vivid, and honest, this coming of age story reaches across millennia to grab us by the throat.” —Emma Donoghue
”A bleak and brutal story, vividly told by Hynes, who has created a truly unforgettable character in the resilient Sparrow.” —Daily Mail 
”A stunning work of historical imagination, masterful in its portrayal of love, sex and friendship.” —The Observer
”Sparrow feels like an entirely authentic portrait — James Hynes renders this hidden world so powerfully and vividly.” —The Times
>>Sparrow.

A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:

Septology

The Notebook Trilogy

As If

Transcription

The Double

The Book of Guilt

Nothing to See

Sublimation

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7 August 2026

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