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12 June 2026.
He was trying to be careful not to write a review that was longer than the stories in the book he was reviewing, but he was uncertain how he could do this. Uncertain seems more of an introspective word than careful, for some reason, and is therefore unsuitable for use in a review of a book that displays no introspection. This is not to say that the characters are not propelled by forces deep below the surfaces of their appearances, they are propelled entirely by such deep forces, unconscious compulsions, so to call them, we all have them, or similar ones, but these are not manifest in anything but action, action and appearances also, both austerely told, or seemingly so, briefly, directly, barely, or something to that effect, in each of the forty stories, he thinks it is around forty stories, told like a folk or fairy tale, without anything unnecessary, without elaboration, like a folk or fairy tale in which someone, the narrator, so to call her, is trapped in the first person. Folk and fairy tales are never told in the first person because the first person is a trap, or trapped, there in the mechanism of the story, told in the past tense, unalterable, and, like fairy tales, Scanlan’s forty stories are about the relations of power, as the title suggests, about the struggle for dominance that is the basis of all stories. All that happens happens as if by instinct, or by reflex, awareness lags, is only good for telling a story and only in the past tense, and, as with all stories, as with all relations of power, as with all struggles for dominance, everything in the past tense is at once horrible and ludicrous. Of course the same goes for the present. The horrible is ludicrous, the ludicrous is horrible, there are no other modes of being. All other modes are modes of non-being, if there are other modes, he supposed, fictional modes, perhaps, but he was not sure. That which we see in animals, the tooth-and-nail struggle, so to call it, the immediacy of all response, the inescapability of all compulsion, the way of nature, the cruelty, so to call it, what we call cruelty, is mainly true of us, he thought, without introspection he hoped, that which we affect to see in animals we see only of ourselves, is not apt of animals, who in any case have the advantage over us of seldom being capable either of deception or of self-deception. Just like objects, he thought. Scanlan gives objects the same agency as persons, not by giving agency to objects but by removing it from persons, or by recognising its absence, persons are just objects moving in rather complex ways, scudded on by some force, momentum, compulsion, whatever, but no freer to be otherwise or do otherwise than an object thrown at a wall, notable primarily through the effects of our velocity. Scanlan is master of the velocity of her prose, honed to sharpness, careful, devastating, puncturing the imposed limit of the conscious to deliver the reader precisely at the point where rationality, or what passes by that name, flounders in what lies beyond, behind, beneath, or wherever, the point where the unsayable is both revealed and annulled. Think Fleur Jaeggy, Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, he thought, these authors share a sensibility both verbal and incisive, but Scalan’s sentences are no-one’s but her own, she who ends a story, “I watched the man drive away in his glossy, valuable car and prayed he might be met with some misfortune. Due to a major failing — the pathological poverty of my imagination — I could not call to mind anything more specific than that.”
If you can resist this book, you are an expert in avoiding something thrilling. Giselle Clarkson’s excellent book about all things birds is sure to engage young minds and old. Filled to the brim with intriguing information, it’s perfectly pitched with its bite-size chunks of text, excellent diagrams and illustrations, and humorous asides. Clarkson encourages us to be avian investigators: equipped with our toolkit of omnibird knowledge and our best tool — observation. Being a bird puzzle-solver has never been more lively. From poop to feathers, to all the parts of the wing, to the different styles of wings, and tails, and heads, and beaks, you’ll be spotting birds high above you, deciphering and coming up with —It’s a gull! A blackbird or possibly a thrush! A starling! There are 18 investigator notes featuring a range of birds, including ducks, gulls, corvids, chickens, flightless birds, birds of prey, and the humble sparrow. There are beautiful eggs (spot the odd one out!), a plumology lesson, an array of different nests from the carefully woven thrush work to the scattershot style of the sparrow, and an explainer on bird names — you’ll know your gymnorhina tibicen from your griseotyrannus aurantioatrocristatus in no time! And so much more. Clarkson’s wonderful illustrations draw you in (there’s great bird attitude here), and the text is lively — so many facts, but also humour and speculation. While there are answers to bird questions you didn’t know you had, there are also questions to ask. What does it feel like to fly? What are they saying? What bird would you be? There’s a charge to use your imagination and your detective skills (observational senses). It's a book about birds and it’s a book about noticing the natural world around us — its awesomeness. Omnibird is a gem — a book that informs, inspires and delights.
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.
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $60
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. [Hardback]
”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.
>>Or order the paperback (due by the end of June).
Taharaki Skyside by Fiona Pardington $75
Brimming with beauty and loss, Fiona Pardington’s avian portraits resurrect the charisma and wildness of native birds preserved as taxidermy specimens in museum collections. On these pages, her manu are not merely replicated but reborn. Ancestral memory is brought to life under the gaze of photographer Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht). One of Aotearoa’s most powerful contemporary artists, Pardington’s practice captivates audiences with her ability to convey the intangible through exquisitely composed photographs. This new book explores the practice of an artist at the height of her career and reveals the monumental avian portraits she has created for the New Zealand Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Essays from Hana O’Regan, Maia Nuku, Andrew Paul Wood, Geoffrey Batchen, Harry Rickit, and Megan Tamati-Quenell. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
The Expansion Project by Ben Pester $38
Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing — its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work. Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees — unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with. Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was?? A dizzying, haunted satire of the late-capitalist workplace. [Hardback]
”A tour de force in surrealist comedy. Fresh, sublime and eerie. Pester is a talented writer of the surreal who could be described, in part, as a comic descendant of J.G. Ballard. A novel about dislocation that feels dislocating. It should serve as an ominous warning to us all.” —Camilla Grudova
”Surreal and unsettling. Pester's deceptively lucid prose mocks office platitudes but also gets to the crux of the loneliness and alienation bred by corporate language and spaces. With a steely commitment to its outlandish form and plot, Pester's novel is as nebulous, mind-bending and delightfully strange as the workplace it describes.” —Observer
>>On the business bus.
>>Surreal scrutiny.
Women Without Men: A novel of modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (a new translation from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh) $40
A powerful and essential tale of female freedom. This long-suppressed Iranian novel traces the interwoven destinies of five women — including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher — as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on recent Iranian history and transcendent elements of Islamic mysticism, Parsipur's unforgettable novel sees women escaping strict confines of family and society. It is still as pertinent and discerning today as it was when travelling secretly from hand to hand upon its first publication in 1989. Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
”Women Without Men is the best feminist novel I know. It's thrilling, beautiful and hilarious, filled with weird women in transformation and the violent little men desperately trying to control them. I am convinced this novel is in fact a magic trick. Reading it feels like being invited to the rebellious unveiling of an age-old secret. It is both deeply mysterious and clear as water, filled to the brim with undeniable truth.” —Johanne Lykke Holm
"Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer." —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis
>>Read an extract.
>>An interview with the author and the translator.
>>The book was made into an astounding film by Shirin Neshat.
Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s hidden places and lost memorials by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson $28
A moving meditation on memory and the preservation of Palestinian heritage. Forgotten uncovers the hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine — now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories — and what they might tell us about the land and the people who live on the small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. From ancient city ruins to the Nabi Ukkasha mosque and tomb, writers and researchers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson ask: what has been memorialised, and what lies unseen, abandoned, or erased — and why? Whether standing on a high cliff overlooking Lebanon or at the lowest land-based elevation on earth at the Dead Sea, they explore lost connections in a fragmented land. Shehadeh and Johnson grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba but also with the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration today. [Now in paperback]
”Shehadeh is engaged, forensic, alert to history's weight but unwilling to let it crush him. Shehadeh's books are like beacons held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression. Forgotten is perhaps the brightest light of all.” —Observer
”Again and again, I thought of W.G. Sebald as I read Forgotten. The resemblance lies not only in the mournful elegance of the prose but also in its method: a meditative excavation of history embedded in the landscape.” —Guardian
Nostalgia: A history of a dangerous emotion by Agnes Arnold-Foster $30
Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from seventeenth-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illness that could, quite literally, kill you) to the present day (when it is co-opted by advertising agencies and politicians alike to sell us goods and policies). It is a fascinating, compelling story of a social and political emotion, vulnerable to misuse, and one that reflects the anxieties of the age. It is also a clear-eyed analysis of what we are doing now, how we feel about it and what we might want to change about the world we live in. [Paperback]
”This absorbing exploration of nostalgia raises questions about its slippery nature, and shows how it has been chillingly deployed in politics, from the cold war to Trumpism.” —Guardian
”Beautifully compact, wide-ranging and enjoyable.” —TLS
”Illuminating.” —Vogue
”With its juicy readability and historical wanderings, Nostalgia evidences the flaws of memory, and how it cherry picks the pleasant elements of the 'good old days'.” —nb.
>>On nostalgia.
Ballot by Anjali Enjeti $23
Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organizer, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one of the most tumultuous political eras in US history, and recounts the astonishing events leading up to the 2024 presidential election. Enjeti lays out the growing challenges for voters in battleground states, where rightwing legislatures have introduced staggering numbers of voter suppression bills and redrawn district lines, all to disenfranchise as many Black and other marginalized voters as possible. As her account of the history and stakes of election integrity shows, the aftershocks of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021 have manifested most egregiously on the four corners of the ballot. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ballot packs detailed information and emotional resonance into few words, and at the same time, the book conveys important and timely insight into the democratic process in the United States. The well-crafted sentences and punchy paragraphs are crucial for emphasizing the importance of voting and the precarious state of the ballot.” —Chicago Review of Books
”Enjeti examines what it means to vote today, and how endangered some of our votes truly are in an era of rising voter suppression, partisan redistricting, and disenfranchisement. Brilliant, humane, and useful.” —Boston Globe
”It is so easy amidst so much of talk of voting to forget what it is to vote. What the right to vote means to you personally and to the country in which you live. Anjali Enjeti has written a moving and brilliant autobiography of her vote that intersects with the history of the right to vote, speaking all the while to the subtext of the times: that bound up in our vote is our lives, and what we mean to each other, our future and our past, our possibilities. I felt a renewed commitment to democracy, and I will reflect on how I didn't know I needed that for some time. I want this book everywhere.” —Alexander Chee
”Anjali Enjeti makes an essential and timely case for voting as a tactic. She welcomes in both skeptics and believers to explain what's at stake when we go to the ballot box and what happens when voting rights are curtailed. A necessary text at this point in human history, I hope that young people especially will read it and that elders will join them.” —Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Bibliophile: Diverse Spines; 500-piece jigsaw puzzle by Jamise Harper and Jane Mount $40
This 500-piece puzzle features art from Bibliophile: Diverse Spines by Jamise Harper (founder of the Diverse Spines book community) and Jane Mount (author of Bibliophile). With over 60 books colorfully illustrated, this puzzle comes with a handy "Where to Start" reading checklist, so you can be inspired to go on your own literary adventure. Puzzle size: 40cm x 61cm. [Served in a book-shaped box]
>>See the completed puzzle.
The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare (translated by Barbara Bray and Jusuf Vrioni) $30
At the heart of the Sultan's vast but fragile empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams: the most secret and powerful Ministry ever invented. Its task is to scour every town, village and hamlet to collect the citizens' dreams, then to sift, sort and classify them, and ultimately to interpret them, in order to identify the ‘master-dreams’ that will provide the clues to the Empire's destinies and those of its Monarch. An entire nation's consciousness is thus tapped into and meticulously laid bare in the form of images and symbols of the dreaming mind. Kadare's ‘Palace of Dreams’ stands as the symbol of the thought-police who have, through history, been the most effective instruments of oppression at the service of dictators. [Paperback edition]
”Kadare's most daring novel, one of the most complete visions of totalitarianism ever committed to paper.” —Vanity Fair
”If there is a book worth banning in a dictatorship, this is it.” —Guardian
Inside the Box: How constrainst make us better by David Epstein $39
We live in a world that gives us seemingly infinite choices and values freedom above all else. We have an unprecedented number of options regarding what to do, who to be and how to spend our time. All that choice is wonderful; it is also overwhelming. The irony is that total freedom can be paralysing, and unlimited resources don't necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, overvaluing complete freedom can be disastrous for everything from starting a company to harnessing creativity to finding personal satisfaction. David Epstein argues that all of us — individuals, businesses, institutions, even societies — can benefit from narrowing our options. He dives into the science and practice of constraints, exploring exactly when and how guardrails can be beneficial, whether we're working with limited resources or using self-imposed boundaries to tap unexpected wells of focus and innovation. Epstein celebrates the surprising potential of hard deadlines, boring goals, and unexpected obstacles. [Paperback]
The Fluffy Futon by Yuichi Kasano $30
Grandma spreads her newly washed futon to dry in the sun. The futon is so soft and smells so clean! The cat can't resist nestling down for a snooze. Instead of chasing it away, Grandma settles in alongside, soon followed by the hen and her chicks, a little boy, the dog, the goat, and the pig family. Soon the whole household is taking a nap! Until Grandma starts to find the futon so comfy that no one else can fit. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Cosy sleepers!
“All writing is about walking ghosts. Or perhaps the ghosts walk the writer. Towards our parents or something like them. Towards our sibling and lovers and friends or something like them. Towards the unknown. Towards the edge of a cliff.” As Paris sweeps the narrator of Levy’s latest fiction along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks about what we have to lose to become modern, about navigating anxiety, about living with uncertainty, about angry fathers, about making a new life in another country, about art and language — and how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century. This is a novel about how we put ourselves together and about living with other people, but it is also crashes through genre to create a portrait of Stein herself — a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and writing, and new way of looking at the world.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Please join us our upcoming online discussions of these interesting, well-written books.
Attendance is free if you have bought the book from us (otherwise tickets are $10). Books can be sent to you by overnight courier or collected from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
11 August 2026: TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King). Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize.
Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we’ve been reading (put the coffee machine on).
5 June 2026
All attempts to understand the world involve the assembly of fragments into forms.
We feel threatened by experience so we anesthetise ourselves to it through representation.
Story may strive to comprehend experience but more importantly story’s purpose is to make us safe.
Story relieves us of experience by replacing it with narrative.
Memory is a species of narrative. Probably a native species.
Through memory, experience is neither reached nor left behind.
Story has a natural tendency towards schmaltz and is rendered in much the same way.
It is hard for story to resist cliché. But it might be possible.
The search for the particular results in the disintegration of forms.
Experience moves counterclockwise to understanding.
A trauma is misrepresented by forms. Trauma cannot be understood. Trauma is not tragedy.
Trauma is respected only by fragments.
Democracy of detail is preserved in the absence of form. Even though there is no such thing as the absence of form.
Everything is infected by whatever touches it. Could this give rise to a form?
[I found these fourteen notes scrawled on a piece of paper in what seems to be my handwriting in the back of my copy of Erin Vincent’s 14 Ways of Looking. Plausibly, they might be notes I made when reading the book, perhaps intended towards a review. The book, composed of fragments, demonstrates how the death of Vincent’s parents when she was fourteen invested that number with such associative trauma that she still cannot help finding everywhere examples of misfortune connected with it, sometimes directly, sometimes more tenuously. Maybe fourteen is just a bad number. It is impossible to tell how many of these misfortunes are only found by looking.]
If you’re ready to discover new biscuit recipes and fill your tins, then Crumbs: Cookies and Sweets from Around the World will extend your knowledge and please your taste buds. Filling our tin right now are a batch of Maltese Christening Cookies/Biskuttini tar-Rahal. Both delicate and robust these aniseed and caraway seed mouthfuls are perfect with coffee in the evening and the light lemon icing makes them a refreshing choice for morning or afternoon tea. Organised geographically, this book is packed with 300 authentic recipes from 100 countries, from Azerbaijan to Laos to Wales. There are Scandanavian and Middle Eastern treats, Belgian biscuits and shortbread goodness. The introduction sets out what is a cookie, all the tools for making good biscuits, and tips and hints that will take your baking to the next cookie level. While there are American cup measurements, there are also metric weights and following these makes for the best biscuit dough (useful when using our slightly heavier flour). The food photography is reassuring. This is home cooking. The recipes are easy to follow, and while there are some recipes that might require a special ingredient, most are pantry staples. I’m ready to explore Stuffed Maghrebu Loaf Cookies from Tunisia and the ‘Snow White’ Crescent Cookies from Indonesia, as well as perfect sesame rings from the Levant which are packed with fennel or anise seeds. So whether you enjoy cinnamon spiced biscuits, crisp biscotti or chocolate-dipped morsels, there’s a world of choices and plenty of tins to fill or gifts to share. Crumbs unites the world with its similarities across borders and highlights the specific ingredients and particular methods that give each biscuit a home.
In an East London housing office, a frustrated local government employee spends his days trying to figure out what the latest policy announcement means for both himself and the migrants he works with every day. As a favour to a friend, he finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. But it is not until his life collides with Ghiyath’s death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who’ve fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy, but mitigates systemic failure with humanity and courage.
Winner of the 2026 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Judges’ citation: “The panel praised the book’s sensitive yet subversive portrayal of immigrant life in London and the banal cruelty of the British state’s treatment of asylum seekers under austerity. We loved its distinctive narrative voice, which continually wrongfoots the reader’s assumptions, and were impressed by its skilful combination of British and Egyptian literary sensibilities, especially a shared affinity for the satirical and absurd. Lewis is a master of tone, shifting with apparent ease between the poignant and the comic, with the book’s mercurial qualities rendered capably into English in Halls’s wonderful translation.”
”I was riveted and charmed by this funny, humane and poignant novel. It's written in a voice that is as ardent as it is sensitive, one marked by history and yet managing to remain beautifully unruly and independent.” —Hisham Matar
”Shady Lewis makes fun of everything and everyone with great humanity: we become attached to these characters who are more lost than crazy, who do what they can keep going. Lewis, with scathing humour and a healthy lightness of touch, examines everything: from the god Khnum to Margaret Thatcher via Karl Marx, freedom of expression, Facebook, romantic breakups, colonization, identity and religious tensions — nothing escapes his acerbic and lucid gaze. A delicious tragicomic novel about contemporary society.” —Nina Chastel, Orient XXI
”This introspective novel delights with its finesse and depth, and invites us to look at reality from the author's sensitive perspective. In painfully beautiful, funny and tragic prose, Shady Lewis skilfully and accurately expresses the difficulty of being excluded and stigmatised because of their difference.” —Nadia Leila Aissaoui, l'Orient litteraire
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.
The Work of Angels by Anisha Sankar $35
The Work of Angels is a meditation on sex, the celestial, and the spectre of communism. These appear where history and subject don’t quite meet; here, the lover (a worker, child, philosopher of history, mystic-astronomer) speaks to her other through a language made possible by losses, thefts, and the wars that constitute politics. Desire—the etymology of which is something like of the stars—is inaugurated by these planetary negations, setting into orbit a conspiracy between romance and exploitation, mysticism and violence, prophecy and ordinary inertia. [Paperback]
Anisha Sankar is Chennai-born and Te Awakairangi-raised. She lives in Toronto, where she’s completing her PhD. She is a member of Al-Rifaq, a Pōneke-based collective that translates and publishes contemporary political analysis produced by the revolutionary currents of Palestine and the Arab world. With Emma Blackett, she is writing a book elaborating a Marxist and psychoanalytic theory of the subject. The Work of Angels is her first book of poetry.
“Like Clarice Lispector and Aimé Césaire before her, Anisha Sankar twirls history, myth, and ordinary relation into a shining wing that hovers above the void. Elegant, intelligent, and tender, this book does something that only poetry can do.” —Sholto Buck, author of Light Film (Pilot Press, 2025)
Granta 174: Therapy edited by Thomas Meaney $37
When Sigmund Freud died, Auden wrote ‘he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion’. Something similar could be said for therapy today. We live in a therapeutic age. It is generally accepted that the world of subconsciousness plays into all of our thoughts and actions, and that, in the hands of experts, it can be directed along more fruitful pathways. But as a science and a practice, therapy has always been fraught with dilemmas and crises. It has been bound up with power and manipulation, though its finest practitioners and participants counter that it contributes to human liberation. This issue of Granta explores all of these dimensions of therapy. Featuring non-fiction by Jesse Barron, Dushko Petrovich Córdova, Sheila Heti, Elfriede Jelinek, Paul Keegan and Deborah Levy. New fiction by Camilla Grudova, Benjamin Kunkel, Anne Serre and Missouri Williams. Conversations between Christopher Bollas and Granta, Juliet Mitchell and Lidija Haas, and Jonathan Lear and Benjamin Y. Fong. Art and photography by Louise Bourgeois, Rinko Kawauchi, Musuk Nolte (introduced by Guadalupe Nettel) and Nigel Shafran. Poetry by Olive Franklin, Robert Hass, Victor Heringer and Natalie Shapero. [Paperback]
>>The animal side of life.
>>Louise Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings.
What We Remember, What We Forget: A memoir in memory by Siobhan Harvey $35
”We are our memories. They are a repository of our lives.” What We Remember, What We Forget is a personal narrative and poignant meditation on the power and peril of remembering — as well as of forgetting. Moving between childhood, early adulthood, imagination and the present, Harvey writes with honest intimacy about trauma, family and queerness; harm, silence and survival. Interweaving life story with reflections on philosophy and psychology, Harvey considers how memory both wounds and sustains, and how it may be safely carried so as to create the life one wants. Elegantly written, this is a powerful work about attention, language and the hard but fruitful labour of understanding. What We Remember, What We Forget asks: how should we retrieve our memories, and how can we trust what we find? “Memory is a creative endeavour: memory, the director’s cut; memory, a book of collected poems; memory, an exhibition of curated portraits; memory, a Surrealist retrospective.” [Paperback]
”The work is less autobiography and more a mosaic of fractured glimpses that catch the light as Harvey privately studies them. The experience feels less like witnessing a final version of a story, where every word and emotion have been decisively fixed in place, but observing the process of shifting and rearranging memories, constructing meaning and selfhood, and attempts at healing in action. The result is deeply intimate, vulnerable, and painful, at times almost overwhelmingly so.” —Sara Bucher, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
Immortal Thoughts by Christopher Neve $28
”Painting exists and exults in immortal thoughts.” —William Blake. In 2020, as the spread of Covid-19 causes pandemonium worldwide, an elderly artist returns to his childhood home to watch the transcendent beauty of the seasons and reflect on the final work of the artists he most admires. It seems to him that in their final art works — their late style — that they have something remarkable in common. This has more to do with intuition and memory than with rationality or reason and comes from trying to write about painting itself. Immortal Thoughts is an anthology of these reflections. In this personal and moving account, nineteen short essays on artists are interspersed with short accounts of the cataclysmic global progress of the disease in poignant contrast to the beauty of the seasons in the isolated house and garden, narrative strands that are closely intertwined. From Cézanne's last watercolours to Michelangelo's final five drawings, Rembrandt and suffering to Gwen John and absence, Christopher Neve dwells on artists' late ideas, memory, risk, handling and places, in the terrible context of Time and mortality. As much art history as a discussion of great art in the context of the Dance of Death, Neve writes with renewed passion about Bonnard, Michelangelo, Morandi, Poussin, Soutine and many others in his distinctive style. Introduction by John Banville. [Paperback]
”Completely and utterly marvellous.” —Max Porter
”From Titian and Michelangelo to Cezanne and Soutine, from Velazquez and Chardin to Bonnard and Pissarro, Neve sketches out the final periods of artists' lives in lilting, lyrical prose. His painterly style, his eye for detail and colour, is all the more powerful for the way that he juxtaposes it with the news of the outside world. His approach amounts to a kind of emotional ekphrasis.” —Times Literary Supplement
Pepeha Portal by Ariana Tikau $30
Rooted in Kai Tahu identity, the collection chronicles a homecoming and offers a moving account of memory, place and belonging. Born and raised in Otautahi Christchurch, Tikao left the city after the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. In 2023 she was awarded the Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury and returned to live in a place that was both deeply familiar and astonishingly new. Written largely during this period, Pepeha Portal is shaped by stories embedded in the landscape - many long erased by colonialism and only recently exposed by cultural, as much as geological, shifts. Responding to suburban landscapes and tipuna places, personal memory and ancestral voice, Pepeha Portal considers how language, whakapapa and whenua act as portals to belonging. [Paperback]
”There’s breathtaking scope and emotional depth in this collection, so much whakapapa wisdom, and finely hued poetry. He taoka toikupu.” —Robert Sullivan, New Zealand Poet Laureate
”Tikao sees the world from a clear and compelling Māori perspective. Pepeha Portal is one of the most polished and forthright poetry collections I have seen for years.” —Nicholas Reid, NZ Listener
E kō, nō hea koe by Matariki Bennett $35
The debut collection of poetry from Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) is a series of goodbyes and attempts to slow the shedding. It's a group of teenagers sparking up as they watch the great Pacific garbage patch catapult into space and become a second moon, it's endless conversations with Grandmama about stars, it is the constant rebirth of whakapapa and learning that silence isn’t the best part of her. [Paperback]
The Typing Lady, And other fictions by Ruth Ozeki $40
A story collection about the lives we almost lived, the people we can't quite forget, and the stories that shape us. A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches with tenderness and unease as the ghost of his wife's ambition roams the woods outside their home. A long-deceased Beat poet hijacks the mind of a young publishing assistant during a sales meeting, railing against the state of modern literature. A curious grandmother creates a fake online dating profile to spy on her granddaughter's romantic life — and sets in motion a deception she can't control. Spanning eras and geographies, The Typing Lady is a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we become. [Paperback]
”Delightful, moving, and profound, The Typing Lady is a book of love stories of every kind. It is a book of great treasures.” —Lily King
Tupaia, Captain Cook, and the Voyage of the Endeavour: A material history edited by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll $74
Centring priest and navigator Tupaia and Pacific worldviews, this richly illustrated volume weaves a new set of cultural histories in the Pacific, between local islanders and the crew of the Endeavour on James Cook's first 'voyage of discovery' (1768-1771). Contributors consider material collections brought back from the voyage, paying particular attention to Tupaia's drawings, maps, cloth and clothes, and the attending narratives that framed Britain's engagement with Pacific peoples. Bringing together indigenous and Pacific-based artists, scholars, historians, theorists and tailors, this book presents a cross-cultural conversation around the concepts of acquired and curated artefacts that traversed oceans and entwined cultures. Each chapter draws attention to a particular material, object or process to reveal fresh insights on the voyage, the societies it brought together and the histories it transformed. Authors also explore animal iconography, instruments and ethnomusicology, and performances and rituals. This work challenges colonial museum collections and celebrations of Cook's voyages, using materials old and new to make connections between past and present, whilst reinforcing Tupaia's agency as both a historical figure and a contemporary muse. Tracing overlapping folds of symbolism, this book draws together a picture of the diverse materials and people at the centre of cultural exchange. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
”The book provides an enlightening alternative prism through which we can rediscover the Pacific agency in Tupaia, beyond the gaze of the dominant colonial history, which often revolves around Captain Cook's view of the world. It is a must-read collection of narratives woven together into an intellectually illuminating tapestry of cultural history with a strong Pacific flavour. A highly recommended text.” —Steven Ratuva, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury
”This rich and wonderful book exemplifies the explosion of research, reflection and creative practice around European maritime exploration over the last thirty years. Building especially on the work of Anne Salmond, commemorative studies of celebrity navigators such as Captain Cook have been succeeded by critical inquiry into cross-cultural voyaging, the deep histories of collecting, projects to return artefacts from institutions such as the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge to Australia, Aotearoa and Tahiti, and art practices that re-imagine encounters towards postcolonial futures. The Society Islands priest, artist and navigator Tupaia has been at the heart of these studies. This book offers a key set of debates and contributions that will be widely valued.” —Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK
”This set of essays does not result in a history, nor in a re-evaluation of previous histories but instead it is a tapestry of relations, of conversations and reflections on the Ra'iatean navigator Tupaia. This contemporary engagement with Tupaia redresses thin colonial understandings of his role with layers of social fabric that emerge from the multivocality of the volume's authors, including established and emerging artists, scholars, filmmakers and composers. From multiple vantage points, the authors reveal that the strength of material culture, in this case the cloaks of Tupaia and Cook, is in their relationship to the intangible, the cross-temporal, the sonic, the performative, and how these make kin of all involved.” —Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Director of the Bill Holm Center, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and Associate Professor of Native Art, University of Washington, USA
The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: a history of collaboration by Stephan Malinowski $50
The disappearance of the Hohenzollern family from the history of Germany in November 1918 as the Kaiser fled into Dutch exile is one of the most startling, rapid instances of a once all-powerful royal family becoming almost overnight irrelevant and marginal. Except this is not exactly what happened. Stephan Malinowski's book is an extraordinary work of recovery. It suited both the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich to view the Hohenzollerns with contempt, and yet the royal family's hatred of the former and approval of the latter were for millions of Germans a significant factor in their own view of their country and its government. With forensic and often shocking detail, Malinowski shows that, far from being ridiculous, marginal figures the Hohenzollerns lay at the heart of Germany's ongoing nightmare. Despite formally losing power, the members of the royal family remained prominent, catastrophically allowing many other conservative Germans to stay distanced from the new republic and to eventually betray conservative traditions and values. Battered from both left and right, the Republic collapsed in 1933 in part because conservative forces, fearful of both Communism and Fascism, had abandoned their own principles just as much as the leading members of former royal family had, who were themselves beguiled by and fooled by Hitler. This is an important and shocking book, as well as a devastating picture of an inadequate and trivial royal family painfully underequipped to fulfil its role. [Paperback]
”A highly detailed and scrupulously researched book. Malinowksi's work is a near-masterpiece, relating a story not synthesised in this way before, and about which any number of self-serving myths exist. He presents a devastating case why, with regards to their conduct during the Third Reich, the Hohenzollerns were the authors of their own misfortune.” —Simon Heffer
Lipstick by Eileen G'Sell $23
From Revlon to Glossier, from Marilyn to Gaga, lipstick is as shape-shifting and unwieldy as femininity itself. Who wears lipstick today as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world's most conspicuous and contentious tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Brilliant, biting, and irresistibly stylish, Lipstick treats beauty as the serious subject that it is. With deep insight, lyrical precision, and humor, Eileen G'Sell examines how painted lips expose the tensions between conformity and self-expression, beauty standards and personal agency. Less a book about makeup, and more about what we make of ourselves, this is cultural criticism at its most relatable and relevant.” —Zahra Hankir
”What if pigmented wax was one of humanity's oldest technologies of honesty? In this homage to the form, Eileen G'Sell gives us a lipstick for all. Her elegant book not only lays out the cultural evolution of the object, but points to the expansively feminist ethics and latently utopian politics of colorful mouths. Pucker up, dive in, and dispel your femmephobia today.” —Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.
Pasta for the People: A joyful cookbook for pasta lovers by Imogen Royall $45
Pasta is comfort — easy, familiar, endlessly satisfying. But too often we get stuck in the loop of the same recipes: a trusty bolognese, a jar of pesto, the reliable carbonara. What if pasta could be more? This book is an invitation to rethink pasta: to explore fresh flavours, global influences, and unexpected pairings that bring new joy to the table.This cookbook shares many of Imogen Royall’s recipes alongside favourites from celebrated chefs and food creators, including: Max La Manna's Zesty Radiatori Summer Salad, Olia Hercules's Rigatoni from Napoli via Genoa & Odesa, Izzie Cox's Miso Gochujang Pumpkin Rigatoni, Helen Graham's Tomato & Tamarind Gigli, Tom Jackson's Slow-cooked Courgette Casarecce, Saliha Khan's Desi Meema Rigatoni. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Try a few of the recipes.
A selection of books present on our shelves. Click through to find out more:
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.
Dog Days by Emily LaBarge $48
Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident's aftermath. Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences — from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch — LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative. Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving. [Paperback]
"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous, and totally original." —Olivia Laing
"Emily LaBarge renders trauma as a lived experience, and so Dog Days is not merely a trauma study, of which there are many, but also a unique literary experience. Dog Days is rich in ideas. A fascinating work, unusually conceived and written, disturbing, honest, and profound." —Lynne Tillman
"Dog Days is a book about the relentless presentness of the past and the philosophical vertigo that follows a harrowing life-altering event. What emerges is a profound and necessary inquiry into how we assemble a self from the fragments of what we've read, what we've seen, and what we've survived." —Anne Boyer
"Emily LaBarge is always intellectually agile and emotionally capacious." —Deborah Levy
"Embracing disorientation as a formal strategy, Dog Days locates a sympathy between traumatic experience and the practice of writing itself. LaBarge demonstrates that trauma entails its own mystical mode of reading, in which words and images become imbued with supra-rational connection and significance.” —Daisy Lafarge, Frieze
>>What narrative can and can’t do.
>>Refusing ‘The Good Story’.
>>The ordinary extraordinary event.
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) $38
Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nestled in a mouthwatering exploration of food, language, history, and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of its cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. [Paperback]
Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize.
”With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>On food, power and structure.
>>Listen to translator Lin King.
>>A Reading.
>>Read an Extract.
>>Author Q&A.
>>The Meta Process.
>>Also available in this edition.
Ghost Stories, A memoir by Siti Hustvedt $40
Siri Hustvedt's most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster. It is a patchwork book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between early November 2023, when Paul first became ill, and 3 May 2024, the day of his funeral; e-mails Siri sent to friends during Paul's cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son. The book also contains Paul Auster's last ever piece of writing — the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri's and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1st January 2024. The result is the story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster's life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday. Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, Ghost Stories is unflinching, tender, and wise. It is a story of a woman haunting her own life, and the ghosts that inhabit us even as we carry on. [Paperback]
”She's a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf.” —Literary Review
”All love stories must end as ghost stories. So we are reminded in Siri Hustvedt's tremendously moving portrait of a man, a marriage, and the joys and sorrows of a shared artistic life. Love and grief lie, inseparable, on every page. This is essential reading from an all-time great.” —Sara Collins
”Both a work of intimate reflection and a moving tribute to the 43 years she and Auster shared: a profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature. For now, in dark times, we have Ghost Stories. Some will see it as a love letter to Paul Auster. Actually, more interesting than that, it's an account of a widow falling in love again, but with a ghost.” —Robert McCrum
”Hustvedt is a writer of astonishing range and depth. It seems necessary to give something of the background of these two writers, yet there is no need to know any of this to find solace and deep delight from the intelligence and humanity of Ghost Stories, its portrait of a marriage of true minds. Auster comes across here perfectly as he was: smart, funny, caustic, loving, idealistic — exasperated to the last by the politics of his native land. Hustvedt (who always looks so cool in her photographs, even when not dressed in a jumpsuit) reveals the nerves that co-exist with her grit and wisdom. The delight to be found in Hustvedt's book arises because so much of the landscape revealed is one of love: love of life, love of the world, love of family. Ghost Stories deserves its place among the enduring accounts of sorrow and survival. It will console you for the losses you have suffered, and for the ones you know — we all know — are yet to come.” —Erica Wagner, Observer
>>Double tragedy and diagnosis.
>>What exactly is a self?
>>Writing in the first person seems to be therpeutic.
Men in the Sun, And other Palestinian stories by Ghassan Kanafani (translated from Arabic by Hilary Kilpatrick) $27
First published in 1962, Men in the Sun is both a classic of Arab literature, and of what Kanafani himself would term 'resistance literature'. Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Their driver, a jaded, fat, former freedom fighter, living with his own compromises and contradictions, makes for a garrulous if cavalier companion. Both the indifferent brutality of border bureaucracy and the blank aggression of the sun see that things grow steadily more stark. The author's ardent politics are apparent throughout, but the novella's characters are their own beings — ambivalent, conflicted creatures of context. While breezily conversational, with disarming, dreamy strokes of lyricism, this short novel delivers a shuddering and grounding dose of true horror. As well as the titular novella, the book features six short stories, including the timelessly resonant 'Letter From Gaza' , Kanafani's first published work, written when he twenty, and the essential 'The Land of Sad Oranges'. [Paperback]
”One of Palestine's foremost intellectuals and leaders. Kanafani's universalism and commitment to Palestine will eternally serve as a model.” —Ilan Pappe
”Every now and then in a reading life you pick up a book that leaves an inexpressible imprint on your head and heart. Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories is one.” —The Irish Independent
Landfall Tauraka 251 edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
Alongside the finest new writing, art and reviews from across the motu, Landfall Tauraka 251 announces the winner of the Landfall Tauraka Young Writers' Essay Prize, an annual competition that encourages emerging writers to explore the world around them through words. ART: Megan Brady, Julian Hooper, John Reynolds, Deborah Smith; FICTION: Molly Crighton, Heather Holdaway, Sam Keenan, Cait Kneller, David Large, Jemma Richardson, Grant Smithies, Cora Tate, Pearl Tuohy, Tarn Wright; NON-FICTION: Cian Dennan, Uzair Khan; POETRY: Tunmise Adebowale, Hannah Rose Arnold, Nick Ascroft, Izzie Birnie, Cindy Botha, Hana Buchanan, Nathaniel Calhoun, Kim Cope Tait, Brett Cross, Brandon de la Cruz, David Eggleton, Craig Foltz, Alison Glenny, Eliana Gray, Jackson, Erik Kennedy, Fiona Kidman, Brent Kininmont, Leonard Lambert, Jessica Le Bas, Carolyn McCurdie, Kirstie McKinnon, Alice Miller, Anuja Mitra, Janet Newman, Grace Nottingham, Gregory O’Brien, Jilly O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Harriet Prebble, Joanna Preston, Hope Rännäli, Vaughan Rapatahana, Richard Reeve, Holly Ruth, Will Salmon, Regan Solomon, Jillian Sullivan, Stacey Teague, Dunstan Ward, Andrew Paul Wood, Nicholas Wright; REVIEW Sally Blundell, John Gereats, Michael O’Leary, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Paddy Richardson, Elizabeth Smither, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb. [Paperback]
“In an age where we are channeled content via the overlords of the internet, picking up a print copy of Aotearoa’s Landfall Tauraka right now feels like an act of subversion. It’s a quiet act of participation against the dopamine delivering machines we clutch. Somehow, nearly 80 years on from its inception — in today’s testy climate of eyeball harvesting — Landfall’s spring edition, edited by Lynley Edmeades (with a new name Landfall Tauraka) not only pulls this off, but it does so very well. It is dense. It is modern. It contains some of the best of Aotearoa’s new and not so new writers.” —Claris Harvey, Kete
The Odyssey by Homer (a new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn) $38
Setting aside the streamlining, modernising approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn reproduces the epic's formal qualities — meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance. His expansive six-beat line, closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer's verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. The result conveys the original’s oral poetics while also bringing to life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer's work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. [Paperback]
”Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek. Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically. The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus's heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I've ever read.” —Edith Hall, The Telegraph
”Readers, especially students of the poem, looking for a version of the Odyssey with a learned introduction, insightful notes and a scrupulous adherence to the sound and sense of the original will find here the Mentor they they are looking for.” —A. E. Stallings, The Times Literary Supplement
>>c.f. Emily Wilson’s translation.
Childish Palate by Shariff Burke $32
Childish Palate follows a cast of outsiders in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, searching for hope in a country caught in an identity crisis. A philosophy student makes a striking proposal to the imam of the Kilbirnie mosque; flatmates ignite a flame over a bowl of chicken ginseng soup; an office worker finds a sense of purpose in the brightly lit aisles of Thorndon New World. Across eleven stories, Shariff Burke wrestles with possibility, ignorance and the ways we compromise in order to survive. Childish Palate savours the richness and warmth of community, rejecting easy answers about whose tastes should define our world. [Paperback]
>>Charmed from the very first sentence.
>>This is the real red pill.
The Baker’s Percentage: The simple formula for making perfect sourdough bread at home by Mara Ripani $55
The Baker's Percentage is a formula developed by bread bakers to allow them to create any bread. From a pure white sourdough to a hundred per cent whole wheat loaf. With it, bakers can scale up or down, from one loaf to many and can choose to speed up or slow down fermentation according to their daily commitments. It is completely liberating, yet most home bakers have never heard of it. Unlike making a cake, sourdough bread recipes do not require a strict list of ingredients with precise measurements. It is a process that can be 'felt'. It is malleable. Enter the baker's percentage: a simple set of parameters that allow you to bake bread using one of multiple pathways. With chapters on Flour, Starters & Leaven, Mixing & Kneading, Bulk Fermentation, Dividing, Shaping & Proofing, Baking, and more, this is a thoroughly comprehensive guide to baking bread, whatever way takes your fancy. The Baker's Percentage is unlike any other cookbook. There are no recipes (except fot in a section at the end!). Instead, it encourages the reader to bake bread with confidence, according to their own needs and schedule. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest $38
They were coming back to life. They were free and getting freer. Rothko Taylor has washed up with the tide, back in their hometown, Edgecliff. Fifteen years since they left it behind. The past is accelerating towards them- the skateboard kids on the high street that remind them of their teenage years, the splintered benches looking out to sea, where their mum Meg clutched her cans. The nice bit of town, where their dad Ezra tried and failed to build a happy home. And Dionne's block. Beautiful, extraordinary Dionne, the only person who had ever looked at them and seen what was there. Back then, overwhelmed and full of fear, they sank beneath the surface into chaos. But they made it out alive. And this time, Rothko is determined that things will be different. Tempest's first novel in a decade, Having Spent Life Seeking is about family and forgiveness; redemption and atonement; desire and abandon; selfhood and community. The things we seek when we are hiding, and what finds us, if we can let ourselves be seen. [Paperback]
”Kae Tempest brings into the literary realm that which others choose to leave outside. This is a remarkable act of literary bravery. If books can still change the world, this one most likely will. Narrative-driven, stuffed with soul, brimming with brokenness, rife with repair, this is a book for our splintered times. In Tempest's hands, redemption travels faster than the speed of light.” —Colum McCann
”An authentically soothing, powerful thought-provoker.” —Matt Haig
”A truth-speaker.” —Max Porter
”Powerful and merciful.” —Ali Smith
Childhood: A memoir of growing up, parenting, teaching, and discovering what children need most by Brendan James Murray $38
Brendan Murray redefines memoir in this haunting excavation of his own experiences as a child, teacher and parent to discover why imagination is so important throughout our lives. Brendan James Murray's childhood was one of stark contrasts: vivid imaginative adventures but also disadvantage, fear and the shadow of a school he spent months refusing to attend. When a silhouette on a freeway overpass forces him to confront the ghosts of his own childhood, he has a defining realisation about the extraordinary power of imagination to transform lives, and the degree to which it has been neglected. Childhood is a deeply personal investigation into how we can help children find their place in the world, drawn from Murray's perspective as a child, teacher and parent. This haunting, uplifting memoir is a must-read for everyone seeking to understand how the crucial and overlooked absence of a rich inner life in childhood echoes through all our adult years. [Paperback]
Remarkable Animals: 1000 amazing algamations by Tony Meeuwissen $30
One of the most ingenious mix-and-match books ever devised. Based on ten real-life animals, each described in words as well as pictures, it offers 1,000 fantastic variations. Just flip the split pages and see ten remarkable animals become 1,000 crazy creatures, taking on new names and astonishing new identities as their heads, bodies and tails are swapped around. Huge fun. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>It goes like this!
Read out latest newsletter.
29 May 2026
Frank doesn’t like the dark. He’s not so keen on annoying little brothers and not great at sports. He likes books and he likes Alice, his next door neighbour. Apart from Alice and her sweet dog Woof, Frank doesn’t have any friends. He’s shy. So there aren’t many guests at his birthday party, but something unexpected happens when Frank offers the small dog some cake. Woof nips Frank’s finger. The cake is devoured, despite the single drop of blood spreading through the icing. Later…Frank has a dream that he’s runing through the forest on all fours! Waking up he sees muddy footprints all over his bedroom floor. Strange! And things get stranger. Frank’s the monster. A very sweet shaggy white furry monster. One that expands in the mind of the townsfolk to a sharp-toothed, massive-clawed howling terror. Things come to a head one day when Frank heads for the beach sniffing out some delcious food and you guessed it, he’s in his monster form. A part of Frank knows he’s heading towards danger. The townsfolk are ready to capture the ‘terrible monster’, but Frank makes an escape with the help of some unexpected new friends. Here’s where the story takes an unexpected turn. There are new friends to be made, and a watchful owl to meet. A golden key and a library of surprises are sure to play a bigger part in the next two books in this charming series. Mats Strandberg is a writer of horror and mystery for adults and children, and the story moves along with pace when action demands it and as well as quiet interludes for Frank’s reflective thoughts on his situation. There are familar settings as well as the unexpected underworld, humour to keep a young reader hooked and just the right amount of ‘scary’. For anyone feeling awkward, they are sure to feel right at home. The illustrations by Sofia Falkenhem are both whimsical and detailed, and she captures the characters perfectly. Her depicition of Frank as nine year old boy reveals his awkwardness and hesitation, while Frank the shifter in his animal form is all bounding cuteness (i.e. not scary at all). Translated from the Swedish by Julia Marshall. This is a delightful ‘read to’ for 5 to 7, or ‘read alone’ up to 9. And with two more books in the series out this year, Frank the Monster is sure to become a new favourite.
“What are we going to do with all those cats?” Hrabal’s wife asks throughout Hrabal’s book, All My Cats, for there are, over the years, a varying but large number of cats at the Hrabals’ country cottage in Kersko, near Prague, some of whom just arrive and start living there but most of whom are the offspring of other cats already living there, as desexing cats does not seem to have occurred to Hrabal or to Hrabal’s wife, or perhaps was not common practice in Czechoslovakia in the period about which the book was written. Hrabal’s love for the cats is immense and respectful, he is a perceptive and sensitive companion for the cats, he seems to feel greater affinity for the cats than for humans, especially than for his neighbours, but Hrabal is a man who is easily overwhelmed, a man also constantly resisting the urge to hang himself from the willow tree beside the stream, as the fortune teller had told him he would, and he succeeds in this: he died falling from a hospital window, after he had written this book, obviously. The greater Hrabal’s love for all his cats, the greater Hrabal’s feelings of guilt about those times when he has taken certain of his cats and killed them in the old mail sack in the shed, killed them for there being too many of them, for their demands being too great for Hrabal, both practically and emotionally, and Hrabal’s capacity to love ensures that his guilt will never be assuaged, his guilt grows more intense over the years, so much so that he even buys a brown car. How lucky you are, say Hrabal’s friends and acquaintances, to have this cottage at Kersko, bought with the income from your literary success, this cottage at Kersko to which you can go and write, to which you can go and enjoy the mental space and the mental time, the same thing, in which thoughts reveal their clinamen and collide with other thoughts to make that writing happen, but for Hrabal the mental space and the mental time spent in his cottage in Kersko are entirely filled with his cats, with his love for his cats and his guilt about killing his cats, and his time and his space are a torment, Hrabal could have made a torment of anything, the cats are central and everything else, from his accident in his brown car to his attempts to rescue a swan frozen into the river, gain their meaning for Hrabal from their relationship to the love-guilt axis he has with his cats. All of Hrabal’s writing is an elaboration on this love-guilt axis, or on the love-guilt axis of the characters in his books, a love-guilt axis that draws its authenticity from the love-guilt axis of their author. Hrabal shows how the mental space and mental time required for writing is also the mental space and mental time that runs what could be termed a constant existential risk, why else would we construct our normal lives, so to call them, our cultural and social and practical lives, so carefully to minimise our mental space and our mental time, if not to avoid the realisation of an underlying existential void, if not to avoid what we might call, offhandedly, a Kierkegaardian moment of enlightenment, an intolerable recognition of the meaningless, purposelessness and ennui that assail us from all sides and at every moment but which we avoid thinking about by deceiving ourselves. Thank goodness for love and guilt. Do I have enough of either?
“Why do you write?” the organiser of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews — all of them unsatisfactory to the organiser — reveals new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She realsies she has been keeping up a decades-old internal correspondence with her sister, using her writing to fill a silence she barely understands. Inventive yet controlled; wrenching and joyful, in A Truce That Is Not Peace Toews remakes her world and invents an astonishing new literary form to contain it.
A very few of all the books on our shelves. Click through to find out more:
LAND by Maggie O'Farrell, author of the award-winning bestseller Hamnet, is landing ON June 2. We're offering you a special pre-order price: 15% off until the first of June only. Use the code LAND and check out through our website or email us to secure your pre-order copy.
Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.