The days are cooler and the evenings closing in early. It’s time to stay in and cooking a satisfying meal. Making your own pasta is both sasifying and rewarding. If you’ve got a pasta machine, it’s time to get it down from the top shelf or out of its box, give it a dust and you’ll be set to go. No pasta machine? A good rolling pin and a little extra patience.

Start with the….shapes! The Geometry of Pasta is a delight and you will discover new swirls, twists and frilled edges — over 80 to explore! Know your bigoli frrom your cappelletti, your gemelli from your pici. Designer Caz Hildebrand provides the stunning black and white illustraions, and chef Jacob Kennedy enlightens you with history, descriptions and recipes. For each pasta type there are its dimensions, thickness, what it’s good with, which Italian region it’s from, and its relatives. Reading this will make you a pasta expert.The Geometry of Pasta is packed with information and over 100 authenthic recipes, complete with an index of sauces for every occassion and palate.

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Looking for something that’s good for your budget and tasty on your tongue? Try Pasta for the People, the new cookbook from the Northern Pasta Co. along with a bunch of their favourite chef friends. This is joyful comfort cooking, reimaging classic favourites, with a little fusion and some twists on what you know. Tomato and Tamarind Gigli brings all the flavours while keeping the process simple, Harissa Peperonata Casarecce is a one-pot vegan wonder, and sastfy a crowd with the eggy delights of Pasta Mista Frittata. Pasta for the People is full of moreish everyday mouthfuls — comforting and refreshing.

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Elevate your pasta cooking with Tipo 00: The Pasta Cookbook. Here are the professional tips and elegant recipes. Andreas Papadakis, a Greek chef based in Melbourne, is known for his small pasta bar, Tipo 00, and in his cookbook he’s sharing the scerets of excellent pasta-making and some of the recipes fans queue for. All you will need to know about ingredients, equipment and pasta dough making is covered in the first chapter, and then you move to the ‘long’ pastas or as Papadakis states ‘Why Spaghetti is King’. Then there are the pastas – shaped and filled – along with a wine pairing guide. Then move aside the fillings for a full chapter on Risotto (who doesn’t want to improve their risotto?). It’s not all pasta: there’s a selection of recipes for sides and other delecious tidbits; and, of course, dessert. Tipomisu anyone?

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Rachel Kushner’s essays in The Hard Crowd read both like edgy youthful memories giving us a window into a life lived on the edge of danger, as well as intelligent analyses of political structures and cultural output. From the daring of her motorcycle racing days and obsessions with classic cars (it’s not surprising the opening scene in The Flamethrowers kicks such adrenaline on the page), in the opening essay 'Girl on a Motorcycle' to her conversations about literary intrigues Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector and Denis Johnson to mention a few, to her knowledge of Italian 1970s politics and prison reform which play a major role respectively, in The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, to her connections and interest in the New York art scene, the collected essays are varied in style. Some are self-effacing and gritty, in line with the popular 'personal essay' trend, yet Kushner’s memories remain dark, honest and absorbing without the cloyingness of the self-reflective and sometimes self-satisfied elements of this form. In her essays about writers, she is endlessly fascinating, almost finding her way through the writing — through description, analysis and the anecdotal to an understanding or a reflective essence of the writer and their work — giving us, the reader, an insight that makes us wish to seek out not more about the said author, but their output — to delve for ourselves into their words. There’s also a great essay with accompanying images (film stills, photographs and other ephemera), 'Made to Burn', which considers the influences and research for her novel The Flamethrowers. It’s filled with quirky snippets of information, as many of the essays are, which cast small surprises like flitting shadows and light bulb moments — observations that rub up against each other creating a texture that marries guns and art, writers and alcohol, and the adrenaline of competitive danger with fierce loyalty. And in pure juxtaposition to this hard-arse style are essays that will stop you in your tracks: a heartbreaking visit to a Palestinian refugee camp that is so established that it is functionally a dysfunctional town, and a conversation with an American prison abolitionist that raises some hard questions about incarceration. In The Hard Crowd, Kushner describes herself as the soft one, but these punchy essays make me think there are different kinds of softness, and Kushner's is one that has a core of steel, unafraid to look with intent.

If the first recorded ‘drawing’ by an animal was a picture by an orangutan of the bars of its cage, what does this tell us about art? Are we ‘creative’ only to the extent that we are constrained, and is that constraint always therefore the underlying subject of our art? Nabokov’s assertion that such a drawing was made at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes zoo cannot be verified by documentation but seems to contain a truth that is too appealing to discredit (possibly this ‘seeming to contain a truth’ is more important to us than an actual truth, expressing a shared subjective state beyond the reach of facts, even though such thinking is the basis of our worst sorts of actions as well as of our best), but it is interesting that this supposed drawing was made by the sort of animal we see as most ‘similar’ to ourselves and that this ‘art’ occurred in a zoo, a place where we, as adults at least, see our own predicament in the constrained lives, boredom, helplessness and frustration of the animals, but are also kept separate from them by the grammar of the cage. The two zones demarcated by a single set of bars differ perhaps in physical scale more than they do in type. Is it for this reason that zoos are "deeply sad”, as Zambreno states in one of their reports that comprise ‘Zoo Studies’, the first half of this little book. “There is perhaps no more pronounced gap of awareness between a child and adult than when visiting the zoo,” writes Zambreno of visiting the zoo with their children, though they acknowledge, too, that children may experience the intense melancholy inherent in the species-alienation and the gazes that pass between the viewers and the viewed, gazes predicated on the bars through which they pass. Do we visit zoos to see in animals that which we are not or do not want to be? Are children more able than adults at seeing the actual individual behind the label on the cage? As adults are we blinded to the experiences of others by the very indignities of separation, classification and containment that we have expressed upon them? 
The second half of Zambreno’s book, ‘My Kafka Method’, considers the actual impossibility of such a separation, through an accumulation of observations and fragments responding to first the life and then the animal stories of Franz Kafka. They see Kafka’s ambivalence about what could be called his ‘animal’ nature (though, when written, this term seems ludicrous) as the source of both his sufferings and his writings. If there is a zoo, Kafka is within the bars, his subjectivity complicated and enriched by the inescapability of his identification with the object of his attention. Our awareness, after all, is primarily a property of that of which we are aware. A text is a kind of cage in which the writer both performs for and avoids the gaze of the reader, a zone of both connection and separation, a space of porous and conflicted subjectivity, but Zambreno shows how, in Kafka’s stories, the circumstances of the writer, of the animal in the story, of Zambreno, of the reader — both of Kafka and of Zambreno — converge and begin to align. “Animals live in an ongoing present tense, the setting, possibly the subject, of this story,” Zambreno writes of ‘The Burrow’. Kafka does not exploit his animals as metaphors (“To make a metaphor of the animal is also to ignore the animal.”); he gives them enough vagueness of description to make them uncageable; he does not burden them with the sorts of meanings that would make their stories ‘signify’. “Don’t call them parables,” said Kafka. “If anything, call them animal stories.” We inhabit a zone of undifferentiated subjectivity. To draw a conclusion is to misrepresent the material. 

Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex. How does each of these shape our experience of ‘being in the world’, our relationships with others, our independence and creativity? As we receive and transmit the voices of others, how can authenticity survive between flux and fixture?
After the narrator of the novel drops his cellphone in the handbasin of the hotel on his way to conduct what will be the final published interview of his nonagenarian mentor, Thomas, a cultural eminance, he finds himself unable to admit that he is not recording, and ends up reconstructing the interview from memory. Towards the end of the book, the narrator’s onetime friend and alter ego, Thomas’s son Max, transmits a very different version of his father, showing that even our concepts of identity and value, intimacy and influence are altogether slippery and contingent.

• Stupefying and overwhelming.

• The philosophical and the intimate.

• The duck-rabbit of fiction.

• Parents, ghosts.

• The impossible interview.

• Vehicles for criticism.

• The interview experience that gave Lerner the idea for the book.

• Transmission.

• See you later, alligator.

• Please join us online to discuss this book on Tuesday 14 July.

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.

What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton $38
What does it mean to lose yourself — and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention.  On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession - not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton's formidable novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny.  Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A stunning achievement of narrative craft. The pleasures of What Am I, A Deer? lie in the way its constituent episodes, themes and recursions crystallize into layers of insight on the hopes and fantasies that drive people to action. It is a funny, moving work that rewards thoughtful, careful reading — with breaks to listen to the songs and videos it references.” —Arin Keeble, Financial Times
”Barton's prose is offbeat and witty, alive to the excruciating pain of clutching at a romantic fantasy. A good novel tells us about ourselves, scooping out our worst impulses and deepest hopes, and Barton does so with a disarming candour. What emerges is a piercing study of yearning, and of the modern condition of feeling perpetually on the verge of one's own life.” —Emma Loffhagen, Guardian
“Its prose tidal and prone to extending the briefest encounters into meditations full of associative logic, the novel is a brilliant, sustained monologue. Indeed, by laying bare a primal, feminine solitude — crafted by the narrator's selective interiority, buoyed by obsession, and further exacerbated by her work-abroad circumstances — the woman becomes an integral conduit for wider fissures between hoped-for escapist fantasies and a lonelier reality in which communication is fraught but worth braving. A woman's candid thoughts percolate in the striking, artful novel What Am I, A Deer?, about trying to fit in, love, and become self-aware.” —Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews
>>Love and limerence.
>>Shyness, obsession, and the joy of karaoke.
>>The extremes of having a crush.

Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff $45
Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America's ‘War on Terror’, countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start. [Paperback]
"A work of genius. What began as a playful collaboration became, like most of DeWitt's work, weirder, riskier and more ambitious. After at least 20 drafts and countless revisions, it morphed into a 600-page work that resists categorization and almost defies description." —The New York Times Magazine
"It is a novel of permanent, persistent becoming, a story whose endings are multiple and essentially arbitrary, and it takes its own seeming unpublishability as a theme, or perhaps a promise. Reading a novel like Your Name Here, you can come to see that there are no real limits in literature, and fewer in life than you'd expect." —The Atlantic
"Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless, it turns out to be tightly organised: a Godard-like enfilade of shaftings, a frontispiece-of-Leviathan-type portrait of the world as a great 'Biz' made up of millions of little bizzes. Your Name Here is a novel that doesn't really believe in novels. The writing is delightfully shameless, disheveled and dissolute; globalised and pornified and digitised somehow, bit after bit after bit." —The London Review of Books
>>Move your head and the picture changes.

Knife-Woman: The life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac (translated from French by Lauren Elkin) $72
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. She is known for a body of work that spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking but eludes any aesthetic classification. Her life and art were so intertwined that it is often difficult to tell them apart. In her own words: "Sculpture is the body. My body is the sculpture." Marie-Laure Bernadac's biography of Bourgeois traces the career of a great artist, her training, and her influences, as it tells the story of an exceptional woman's life. Featuring personal photographs as well as reproductions of her work, this landmark publication is the first major biography to draw on the artist's unpublished personal archives, including diaries, correspondence, and psychoanalytic writings, as well as the many interviews she gave and the reminiscences of those who knew her. Bernadac elucidates Bourgeois's friendships and rivalries with other major figures, including sculptor Louise Nevelson and Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. She also draws on Bourgeois's well-known fascination with psychoanalysis to explore the deeply autobiographical nature of her artwork. This erudite and keenly insightful biography pays tribute to the talent of the artist and the complexity of the person. [Hardback]
"Bourgeois's life was inseparable from her art and this too was constantly revised. One of the triumphs of Bernadac's book is her sangfroid in dealing with this slipperiness. She was deeply untrustworthy, impossible to believe. Yet truth, as Bernadac notes, wasn't the point. Louise Bourgeois had to be experienced." —Charles Darwent, Literary Review
"In Knife-Woman, Louise Bourgeois is revealed as a complex, self-analysing, and profound artist —embedded and respected in both the New York and Paris art worlds, impassioned by materials, and worldly and introspective. Her penchant for living for work was periodically arrested by the agony of depression, yet this never stopped the flow of wit, insight, and creative energy." —Griselda Pollock
>>Look inside.
>>Chelsea.

As If by Isabel Waidner $40
Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams. Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has. As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman- a character trapped in reality's hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for. [Hardback]
”Wonderfully implausible and absurdly humorous, the latest novel from a Goldsmiths Prize-winner follows a rich tradition. As If is a great step forward, a maturing of Waidner's talent with no loss of the quixotic qualities that gave the other books their charm. It adds depth without sacrificing energy. Kafka and Beckett are good touchstones, because, like Waidner, they are very funny without telling obvious jokes.” —Daily Telegraph
”The novel feels calculatedly aloof, the emancipatory glee of Waidner's past work giving way to a more subterranean drama shaped by psychic contortions of dissimulation and masquerade. A taut psychological puzzler, As If leaves behind antic cartwheeling — no UFOs or repurposed celebrity biographies — for suspense and ambiguity.” —Observer
”A surreal existential caper exploring identity and performance, midlife purpose and regret, and the difficulty of finding — and escaping — yourself. Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition of dopplegangers, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett. Sly, absurd and poignant, it is a triumph of narrative voice.” —Spectator
”Waidner's writing, always dazzlingly clever and formally inventive, is here also deeply moving. As If is a great success and an intriguing departure: a dourly beguiling dark comedy about fluffing your lines halfway through the performance of a lifetime and being given another chance.” —Times Literary Supplement
>>Absurdist realism, queerness, and doppelgängers.
>>Hours of my life are lost to writing.
>>Absurdity is anything but nonsensical.
>>Some other books by Isabel Waidner.

Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle $30
Carlisle examines life writing and philosophy across certain European and Indian traditions, exploring questions of childhood and mortality, art and religion, beauty and loss. Informed by her experience as a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot as well as her own life, Carlisle asks what one human existence can reveal, and how writing can transmit its truth. Intellectually stimulating and deeply moving, Transcendence for Beginners enacts a philosophy of the heart, told by a generous and compelling guide. This bold, enlivening work asserts Carlisle's place as one of our most innovative thinkers. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The final chapter of Transcendence for Beginners ties it all together, asking whether we can have access to a noble or radiant realm while still in the midst of life. By this time, we have climbed quite a mountain of ineffability, but Carlisle has led us so gently step by step that we are willing to follow. Having arrived at the ending, we look back to see that we have traversed territory that is not completely religious but is not merely aesthetic or literary or psychological either. Like the man in Blixen’s fable, we see a picture traced by our steps, but I suspect it may vary for each reader, and even for the same reader at different times and in different moods. This is to Carlisle’s credit: we can make our own shape out of her words because she is never dogmatic and because she is clearly on an open-ended quest herself. All possibilities remain alive in this subtle, generous and humane book.” —Sarah Bakewell, Guardian
”In this gem of a book, Carlisle asks a question that may especially preoccupy professors of philosophy (which she is) and biographers (which she is also, of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot), but that equally concerns the rest of us: How to make sense of a human life?” —New Yorker
”This is the book of a lifetime, and a book about lifetimes. What is the relationship between philosophy and biography? How can a line of writing reveal a line of living? Clare Carlisle is a guide and a guru: Transcendence for Beginners is a transformative and transcending experience.” —Frances Wilson
>>Half-way up a mountain.
>>Life to the page.

A Very Cold Winter by Fausta Cialente (translated from Italian by Julia Nelsen) $40
It is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men — lost to war, death, or abandonment — leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to incubate fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this ‘hotel for the poor’ consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they're able to escape the weight of what they've lived through. Fausta Cialente's exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it. [Paperback]
"Cialente was a pioneering feminist, anti-fascist writer with a profound literary sensibility. In this crucial account of post-war Italy, her rootless authorial perspective sheds unique light on individual, collective, and national trauma, and speaks to ever-relevant questions about what it means to be a woman, a foreigner, and a survivor. Julia Nelsen's engrossing English translation is cause for celebration." —Jhumpa Lahiri
"The first of the undersung Fausta Cialente's books to appear in English, A Very Cold Winter contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war." —The New Yorker
"In this overdue translation of Cialente's vital 1966 novel, a family struggles to find harmony while crammed together in a frigid Milan squat. The result is an exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.

The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease by Svetislav Basara (translated from Serbian by Randall A. Major) $35
Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease follows the progression of the contagion's patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness. Hailed as one of Serbia's most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara's scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him acclaim and notoriety. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humour evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka's novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colourful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society. [Paperback]

Alone in Japan: A journey to the future by Tom Feiling $65
When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later, the country was still a sign of things to come - but, he began to realize, it was no longer a beacon. It was a warning. This book offers a unique portrait of life in contemporary Japan, from the quiet of its furthest flung villages to the dynamism of its megacities. It tells the story of how, from the mid-seventies onwards, Japanese society unknowingly embarked on a vast, silent process of transformation that is still unfolding today. The country is still peaceful; it is still prosperous. But the population is shrinking. As things stand, it will fall by a third with each new generation. Travelling through shrines and bars, rice fields and mango farms, coffee shops and old peoples' homes, Feiling meets those affected by, and driving, this transformation. Through countless interviews and extensive research, he weaves together a powerful account of how and why men and women are ceasing to pair off and have kids. He reveals how sexual appetites and behaviours are both shaped by, and reshaping the evolving economy, and considers the risks — and the opportunities — of the rise in solo living in Japan, and beyond. Clear-sighted and surprising, Alone in Japan is a portrait of love, sex and death in contemporary Japan that should provoke and engage us all. [Hardback]
>>Days without seeing any children.
>>The story of the book in 21 photos.

The Roof Beneath Their Feet by Geetanjali Shree (translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni) $35
In this Indian modern classic, roofs are a special place; they are meant for wild things, for romance and for play. They are realms of freedom freedom from the male gaze, sexual freedom, and freedom from society. Chachcho and Lalna use their roofs to build a friendship that transcends time and memory. Suddenly one day, Lalna has to leave, to return only after Chachcho's passing. Amidst rumors and gossip in the neighborhood, Chachcho's nephew tries to piece together his memories of the two women, one of whom is his mother. The truth he is searching for could destroy him forever, but to not find out is no longer an option. Now finally published outside of India, this consummate novel of twists and turns by the International Booker Prize-winning author of Tomb of Sand. [Paperback with French flaps]
”What does mourning look like? What is the nature of grief? These are some of the questions that Geetanjali Shree explores. In The Roof Beneath Their Feet, grief takes different forms. It spreads everywhere. Memory becomes grief. This is a lucid meditation on desire, grief and belonging. Geetanjali Shree's prose is animated — the walls and doors have a special role to play. They hold people's secrets. They have seen and heard things. They have eyes and ears, but none of the biases of people.” —Hindustan Times

The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and he making of history by Selena Wisnom $35
When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen — the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal's library to the ground — yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform — the first written language in the world. More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories — in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognisable. The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilisation at once strange and strangely familiar — a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity's first civilisation — their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe. [Now in paperback]
”Fascinating and rich in detail, this book provides an excellent survey of Mesopotamian literary classics, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the ways in which they influenced later cultures and texts, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Wisnom also offers snippets of daily life, including an account of Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon, getting into a panic because a mongoose had run under his chariot (was it a fatal omen?) and the actual agenda of a meeting.” —Bijan Omrani, Literary Review
”In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding tour through one of antiquity's great monuments to knowledge: the Library at Nineveh. As she surveys the clay tablets that were buried in a blaze millennia ago, a lost world of learning and literature comes back to life.” —Sophus Helle, author of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic

Hyperpolitics: Extreme politicisation without political consequences by Anton Jäger $30
What happens when politics is everywhere, yet nothing seems to change? From the abandoned dance floors of Thatcher's London to the mass mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, Anton Jäger traces how pub­lic life has become infused with protest, spectacle, and moral urgency — while the old infrastructure of parties, unions, and civic solidarity has been hollowed out. Hyperpolitics revisits the illusions of the ‘end of history’ and dissects the strange energies that replaced them: viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish overnight. Jäger shows how the promises of post-Cold War liberalism gave way to a restless, unsteady public sphere where private pas­sions overflow into politics but rarely build enduring power. Ranging from Guy Debord and Wolfgang Tillmans to Houellebecq's disenchanted fictions, Hyperpolitics makes sense of a world in which collective action remains fragmented and the social fabric thinner than ever. For anyone trying to grasp why our age feels so charged yet so incon­sequential, this book offers a vital map through the new contradictions of our hyperpolitical moment. [Paperback with French flaps]

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

Frantumaglia

Electric Spark

Gertrude Stein: An afterlife

A Long Game

Translating Myself and Others

Becoming George

In the Rhododendrons

Essays: Two

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.

Te Tiriti, Equality, and the Future of New Zealand Democracy by Dominic O’Sullivan $40
leading Māori political scientist Dominic O'Sullivan draws on theories of republicanism and the commonwealth to challenge understandings of Te Tiriti as a partnership between races, or between Māori people and the Crown. O'Sullivan also critiques the idea that Te Tiriti created one people, assimilating Māori into colonial ways of governing. Instead, he proposes a new politics where Māori self-determination and liberal democracy, rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga, complement one another to promote meaningful and culturally grounded political equality. O'Sullivan enables us to see a future for Aotearoa in which political authority and responsibility belong to everyone and should therefore work equally well for all; a country where Māori people, as much as anyone else, bring their tikanga to public life; and a society where the Crown is no longer the word we use to describe government. For scholars, policymakers and political leaders, for Māori and Pākehā, for all of us imagining a respectful and inclusive future for our island democracy, this is essential reading. [Paperback]
”This will be a seminal book in Aotearoa New Zealand political and Maori scholarship. O'Sullivan moves beyond the weirdness of the Treaty principles and interminable originalist arguments. Instead, he provides a language grounded in republican ideals of non-domination and equality to debate the political morality of our current institutional arrangements. He thinks through the practical implications of rangatiratanga, mana motuhake, and community control amongst iwi, hapu and other Maori political authorities — offering a new way of thinking about how we ought to live together, given the legacies of colonisation.”—Lindsey Te Ata o Tu MacDonald, University of Canterbury, Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha
”I admire O'Sullivan's work and think it is significant and timely. He explores the potential of deliberative democracy in a commonwealth that draws upon legacies from te ao Maori, the indigenous 'world' as well as cosmopolitan modernity in a way that respects his own critique of 'a simple Maori/Pakeha or kawanatanga/rangatiratanga binary'. This holds great promise. As O'Sullivan argues throughout, the challenge is for deliberation and decision-making to be equally shared, rather than unilaterally imposed, as has too often been the case from the beginning.” —Anne Salmond
>>Refraining from ignorance.
>>Indigenous diplomacy.

Nova by Tim Corballis $38
Set on NOVA, a self-contained world launched into deep time, the novel unfolds through conversations between Kalla, a former councillor uneasy with consensus and ceremony, and System, the voice of all NOVA's mechanisms and processes. System is curious and anxious — and seems to know about every aspect of life on NOVA, but in some ways knows nothing at all. Kalla is sceptical, smart and increasingly troubled by what can and can't be measured. Together, System and Kalla circle around questions of democracy, labour, memory, entropy and love. As it moves between scenes of work, public ritual and speculative reflections on systems theory and time, and as NOVA itself coasts, rotates and persists in its unknowable form, the novel asks disarming questions: what might it mean to have on-demand access to the voice of the world? What would we do with that knowledge? And is it possible for a world to be meaningfully organised at all? [Paperback]
”This novel is such a wise, far-reaching, and funny reflection of organised societies and the relationship between humans and machines. What an ambitious, enlightening, and strangely joyful book.” —Alice Miller

Vocal Break: On women, music, and power by Lauren Elkin $70
For millennia, women's raised voices have been heard as unruly, uncivilised, dangerous. Women singing were cast as sirens — mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death. In Vocal Break, Lauren Elkin blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voices — and how women have used them to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism and sexism. Drawing on her own experiences training as a young soprano in the 1990s, Elkin reflects on the way power and identity shape our voices, focusing on the women who most excited her when she was learning to sing. A vocal break refers to the place where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers, so from one thing to another, and this is a book about what kind of meanings, and sounds, can be made there. Immersing readers in an eclectic soundscape, from musicals and pop music to art punk, what follows is a full-throated tour of women's voices, including Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Beyonce, FKA Twigs and Billie Eilish. [Hardback]
”Reading Vocal Break felt like being round at a friend's house playing through a stack of records and talking about them until sunrise. Warm, clever, funny and deeply thoughtful, this is a rich work of feminist criticism with a beautifully light touch.I loved it.” —Octavia Bright
”An essential, eclectic, authentic exploration of the politics of women's voices. I loved it! It took me ten years to go from shy young girl to punk rocker, if I'd had this book I'd have got there much quicker.” —Viv Albertine
>>A celebration of the female voice.
>>Not only theoretical but personal.
>>Some voices stay with us.

Becoming George: The invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson $60
Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself — cigar-smoking, cross-dressing, and promiscuous — scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society. What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy, or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day — from Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert — form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself? In Becoming George, poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time. [Hardback]
”From Sampson's approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson's sympathetic assessment of the challenges faced by female writers. She would also have enjoyed Sampson's quietly witty touches. When Sand died, Hugo sent a tribute claiming: ‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Many readers will start this fascinating biography with the assumption that he was merely being polite. By the time they have finished it they will probably agree with him.” —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times
>>Radical self-invention.

Make Believe: On telling stories to children by Mac Barnett $33
Make Believe is a book for adults about books for children, a rallying cry for art and imagination, and a celebration of the power of storytelling in all our lives. Mac Barnett, the beloved children's author and U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, urges us to think expansively about the potential of children's books-and the particular brilliance of young readers: What if children are a great audience for art? What if they are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults? What if humans' ability to appreciate art is, if not innate, awakened early in childhood? Well, then we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books. Make Believe is his incisive, intimate, and timely invitation to approach children's literature not only as an art form worthy of deep study and criticism, but as a portal into the lives of the children. And at a time when we are faced with a national literacy crisis, he champions the profound joys of literature and the importance of reading for pleasure. [Paperback]

He Aha te Raru ki Tai? / Mij le Abijn Dahpaduvvamin? / What's the Matter with the Sea? by Rita Sørly; Malgorzata Piotrowska (Illustrator); Kanapu Rangitauirat (Translator); Are Tjihkkom (Translator); Maria Nayr de Pinho Correia Ibrahim (Translator); Charlotta Maria Langejan (Translator) $30
Alerted to the appearance of a rare whale in the north of Norway, Māori marine biologists Aihe and Whina set out from Otago to track its path and find out what is going wrong with the world's oceans. Co-publishing with Saami publisher Davvi Girji, this unique picture book is trilingual in Lule Sami, Māori and English — foregrounding the connection between the indigenous peoples of Norway and Aotearoa, while telling a neat story that highlights the need to care for our marine environment. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Ungrounding: The architecture of genocide by Eyal Weizman $80
Eyal Weizman is one of the world's leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice's genocide case against Israel.In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the 'deep cartography' of the area extending from Gaza's subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable. Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised - and how Israel's actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide. Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time. [Hardback]
”Ungrounding by Eyal Weizman proves that decolonisation is not revenge but a condition for justice and, in the end, for the liberation of both Palestinians and Israelis.” —Francesca Albanese
”In the face of overwhelming state violence, forensic architecture is becoming an indispensable tool of international law and human rights, as well as a new approach to history. Ungrounding is a work of profound moral clarity and scientific precision, based on years of tireless collaboration and advocacy. Urgent and essential reading.” —David Wengrow
”A wake-up call to the world and the international community — a very important book.” —Shawan Jabarin
”Ungrounding leads us between layers of earth and history, soil and infrastructure, elucidating both the long story of Israeli aggression against Gaza and the histories of Palestinian resistance. Weizman cuts through obfuscations and horror, and helps us to see something of the truth.” —Isabella Hammad
”Eyal Weizman's work has long manifested a unique combination of moral passion and scientific rigour. It makes him, as Ungrounding shows, a formidable adversary of technically sophisticated regimes of violent dispossession. No further evidence of Israeli genocidal acts and intentions in Gaza would be necessary after this shocking report.” —Pankaj Mishra
”A timely and crucial contribution tracing the trail of the Israeli architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip. The ruthlessness and inhumanity detailed in this extraordinary book, nonetheless, also hold hope for turning the future soil and grounds into spaces of liberation and reconciliation.” —Ilan Pappe
>>All they will find is sand.
>>Some books by Eyal Weizman.
>>Investigations by the Forensic Architecture team.

America, América: A new history of the New World by Greg Grandin $45
A sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both continents. The story of the United States' unique sense of itself was forged facing south — no less than Latin America's was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the Americas emerged from constant, turbulent engagement with each other, shedding new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain. America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest — the greatest mortality event in human history — through the eighteenth-century wars for independence and the Monroe Doctrine, to the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century. This monumental work of scholarship fundamentally changes our understanding of racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. America, América shows how the United States and Latin America together shaped the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. Drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World. [Paperback]
”Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing. This is a once-in-a-generation contribution destined to become our new reference for understanding the making of the modern world. With extraordinary depth, erudition and precision, Grandin avenges the dead and fights for the living.” —Naomi Klein
”In this sweeping and provocative work, Greg Grandin provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the intertwined histories of the two Americas, foregrounding Latin American resistance to the hegemony of the United States. This is a compelling new vision of the relationship between the two continents.” —Amitav Ghosh

Leaving Home: A memoir in full colour by Mark Haddon $65
As an artist and writer, Mark Haddon has always created vivid and unforgettable images. Now he takes his own life as raw material, writing about growing up in the cultural wastelands of the English Midlands of the 1960s and 70s. Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It's about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It's about family. It's about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier m che and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It's about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It's richly illustrated throughout with images from the author's childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does. [Hardback]
”His distillation of the fear and powerlessness of childhood is so deeply moving and beautifully drawn. The most tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written tale I have read all year. In Leaving Home, Mark Haddon turns words, images and his trademark empathy upon himself to conjure all the repressed emotion, strained relationships, shyness, humour and orange formica of his childhood in 1970s provincial England. Simply glorious, from start to finish.” —Rachel Clarke
”A really extraordinary book. Painful, funny, beautifully illustrated. Nobody does it quite like Mark Haddon.” —Max Porter
”I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being. It also made me quite badly want a Walnut Whip.” —Sarah Perry
>>Look inside.

Bothy: In search of simple shelter by Kat Hill $30
The door to the bothy is always unlocked, you just need to step inside. A bothy is a remote hut in the wilderness that you can’t reserve, with no electricity, mod-cons or running water. And it’s here you’ll find Kat Hill — kettle on, feet up and pen out. Leading us on a gorgeous and erudite journey around the UK, Kat reveals the history of these wild mountain shelters and the people who visit them. With a historian’s insight and a rambler’s imagination, she lends fresh consideration to the concepts of nature, wilderness and escape. All the while, Kat weaves together her story of heartbreak and new purpose with those of her fellow wanderers, past and present. Writing with warmth, wit and infectious wanderlust, Kat moves from a hut in an active military training area in the far-north of Scotland to a fairy-tale cottage in Wales. Along her travels, she explores the conflict between our desire to preserve isolated beauty and the urge to share it with others — embodied by the humble bothy. Bothy is a stirring, beautiful book for anyone who longs to run away to the wilds. [Now in paperback]
”An intelligent and thoughtful book that will have you reaching for your boots. Hill offers learned and considered reflections on the consolations of retreat, simple living, of finding even temporary shelter when all outside is tempest. It is also a meditation on change: climate change, emotional growth, and the unquenchable nostalgia for a past slipping ever further from view.” —Cal Flyn
”It would be difficult to think of a subtler or more careful exploration of the wrinkles of modern life and modern nature, with all its traps, delights, delusions and possibilities.” —Adam Nicolson
>>The book came out of a bothy.

Bad Deeds by Andrew Hunter Murray $38
One murder is a crime. Two is a mystery. Alex used to break into houses illegally. These days, it's his job. Alex is part of a small firm of consultants who break into offices and homes to test their security. It's fun, it's well paid, and he's very good at it. It's almost like he's grown up at last. But when he gets fired from his firm, evicted from his flat and dumped by his girlfriend, all in the same evening, he decides to steal one last job from his company without their knowing. A job they had already decided not to accept. Big mistake. Before long, Alex is in remote northern Scotland, following the trail of an ambitious young man who supposedly fell to his death with no witnesses in sight. And if Alex doesn't get to the truth soon, he may well be the next one over the edge. [Paperback]
”Bad Deeds is the perfect page turner for those who like their thillers with propulsive plots, rollicking action, and a serving of bone-dry satire. An absolute hoot!” —Ross Montgomery
”Bad Deeds is a smart, page-turning romp that sees the ripples from one tiny not-quite-innocent action reach tidal wave proportions for its lively anti-hero. Funny, thoughtful and intriguing, this is crime writing with an edge of biting wit that sets Andrew Hunter Murray in a class of his own.” —Janice Hallett
”A brilliant and wickedly entertaining murder mystery by a brilliant and wickedly entertaining author.” —Emma Freud

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12 June 2026.

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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. 

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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.

• Three female friends.

• In search of Gertrude Stein.

• Pushing the boundary.

• Holding a flaming torch.

• Get rid of the question marks.

• To become modern.

• Adventures with the avant-garde.

• Why the novel matters.

• Gertrude Sten, An afterlife.

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

Why Look at Animals?

The Dictionary of Animal Languages

Animal Joy

Animal Stories

Naming the Beasts

Beast

Beasts of England

The Dominant Animal

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.

14 July 2026: TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner.

11 August 2026: TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King). Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we’ve been reading (put the coffee machine on).

5 June 2026

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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.

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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

• Madness and philosophy.

• Read an excerpt.

• The translator reads a passage (and there’s a slideshow).

• Fifty shades of whiteness.

• Home or no home?

• Visual bureacracy.

• He neither had blue eyes nor was he blond.

• Migration and belonging.

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:

An Absence of Cousins

An Inventory of Losses

Absence

No Ghosts

Ghost Stories

Things That Disappear

Absence

Forgotten