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21 March 2025
A conversation about hoarding, about collecting scraps of material and balls of wool, lead me to this delightful book. (Thank you to my colleague for their recommendation.) If you are a maker you will understand the problem of, and the desire for, a wardrobe just for fabric, wool, art supplies, and other ‘useful’ materials. You will also know the beauty of changing something from an remnant into an item; — something that has a new lease of life, whether that is practical or simply to behold. If I could do one thing, and one thing only, it would be to make. Current sewing projects include recutting a vintage velvet dress (some rips, some bicycle chain grease) into a new dress, and, recently finished, a long-forgotten half-made blouse — fabric a bedsheet from the op shop. So I felt completely at home in Bound. And I devoured it with pleasure over one weekend.
This is a book about a sewing journey, and a discovery journey. It’s about the end of things and the beginning of things. All those threads that tangle, yet also weave a story about who we are, where we come from and, even possibly, needle piercing the cloth, stitching a path to somewhere new.
Maddie Ballard’s sewist diary follows her life through lockdown, through a relationship, from city to city, and from work to study, all puncutated with pattern pieces, scissors cutting and a trusty sewing machine. Each essay focuses on a garment she is making, from simple first steps — quick unpick handy—to more complex adventures and later to considered items that incorprate her Chinese heritage. These essays capture the joys and frustrations of making, the dilemmas of responsible making (ethically and environmentally), the pleasure of repurposing and zero-waste sewing, and our relationship with clothes to make us feel good, to capture who we are, and conversely to obscure us. The essays are also a candid and thoughtful exploration of personal relationships and finding one’s place in the world. The comfort of one’s clothes and its metaphorical companion of being comfortable in one’s own skin brushing up sweetly here, like a velvet nap perfectly aligned.
The book is dotted with sweet illustrations by Emma Dai’an Wright of Ballard’s sewing projects, reels of thread, and pesky clothes moths. The essays are cleverly double meaning in many cases. ‘Ease’ being a sewing term, but also in this essay’s case an easing into a new flat; ‘Soft’ the feel of merino, but also the lightness of moths’ wings; ‘Undoing’ the errors that happen in sewing and in life that need a remake. There’s ‘Cut One Pair’ and' ‘Cut One Self’. This gem of a book is published by a small press based in Birmingham, The Emma Press, focused on short prose works, poetry and children’s books. (They also published fellow Aotearoa author Nina Mingya Powles’ Tiny Moons.) Bound: A Memoir of Making and Re-Making is thoughtful, charming and a complete delight. What seems light as silk brings us the hard selvege of decisions, the needle prick of questions, and the threads that both fray and bind. Bravo Maddie Ballard and here’s to many more sewing and writing projects.
From adventures across untamed landscapes, to shapeshifting creatures, to kids finding their way and their culture, here is a selection of best-sellers from VOLUME for 9-14 year olds. These engaging books light the fire of the imagination. They encourage curiosity, understanding and empathy. Some are standout adventures, while others quietly reveal.
Award-winning author Stacy Gregg won the Margaret Mahy Book of Year at last year’s children’s book awards for her superb Nine Girls. This was an important book for Gregg and was a departure from her highly polished pony club titles. Here the author has skin in the game; — it’s her childhood, and her journey in te ao Māori which resonates on every page giving this adventure story that extra bite. But it is the protaganist, Titch, who will stay with you. It’s the late 1970s and Dad has been made redundant. It’s time to pack up and move from Remuera to Ngāruawāhia — a culture shock for TItch and her sister, but also the stuff of holidays and relatives with tall tales. One tall tale takes hold: Gold!
Nine Girls is a coming-of-age story about family, culture and friendship. It takes on big issues like racism, the emotional challenges of illness, and facing death. And with the brilliant Titch at the centre and Gregg’s masterful story-telling this is an absolute winner.
I can’t stop recommending Brown Bird by Jane Arthur. I love this book. Rebecca is the best timid character and Brown Bird has flown straight into the realm of a VOLUME Favourite. Why? One: there’s a map! Two: there’s the wonderful Rebecca and the delightful Chester. Three: Brown Bird is a story about friendship. Four: It’s a spot-on depiction of that moment in childhood — Rebecca is eleven — when things change, emotionally and physically. Five: It deals with emotions with honesty and care. Rebecca’s anxiety and frustration is all there and well articulated, but so too is her kindness and tenacity. Six: I love the quietness of Brown Bird. It’s a book that draws you in, lets you think, and also makes you smile. And Seven: It’s sweetly written. Brown Bird is an excellent book for anyone who’s taken a while to believe in themselves.
The Mapmakers’ Race by Eirlys Hunter is a superbly well-paced adventure. Meet the Santander family - explorers and mapmakers. When Ma misses the train, Sal, the twins Joe and Francie, along with young Humphrey, are on their own, making their way to Grand Prospect as entrants in the Great Mapmakers' Race, a competition to map a railway route through the uncharted wilderness from Grand Prospect to the port at New Coalhaven. The fastest team wins the prize, and the best map, the grand prize, will become the new railway. And all this needs to be done in 28 days!
A highly enjoyable read-aloud or keep-to-yourself. The Mapmakers’ Race will have some children reaching for ink and paper to become wondrous mapmakers, and others out in the wilderness, exploring and making tracks. Charming, exciting and just a little dangerous.
And there’s a sequel! The Uprising brings us more daring;—this time high up in the mountains of Cruxcia with villians and unlikely heroes, and an environmental scam to scupper!
Ella loves horses. She loves her gran Grizzly and her home in a southern rural town. She’s most at home on her pony Magpie cantering across the hills, especially at her favourite time of the day — the grimmelings — a time when magic can happen.
The Grimmelings is a gripping story of a girl growing up, of secrets unfolded, and a vengeful kelpie. Like her equally excellent previous children’s book, Red Rocks (now an exciting TV series), King cleverly entwines the concerns of a young teen with an adventure story steeped in mythology. In Red Rocks, a selkie plays a central role, here it is the kelpie. The beauty of The Grimmelings lies in its adventure and in the courage of a girl and her horse, who together may withstand a powerful being, and maybe even break a curse! Laced with magical words, intriguing mythology, and plenty of horses, it’s a compelling and emotional ride.
When Han Kang was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, the judges said: “Han Kang’s intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Her empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” In Han Kang’s new book, the protagonist travels to her friend Inseon’s house on the Korean island of Jeju, to save Inseon’s bird after Inseon has been airlifted to hospital following an accident. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird — or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting.
Come down to earth with a book! A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
In the Yolŋu language, it seems, there is a fourth tense, which conveys the reality that something that has happened is still happening now and will always be happening. (I suppose, by extension, something that happens is also always just about to happen.) Certainly whatever it is that assails us through what we call our memory is not something that no longer exists. Whatever happened in the past cannot cease to exist, even if we somehow manage to shrug our contact with it. Certainly whatever it is that we call literature, or story, exists perpetually outside the usual tenses we impose upon ourselves for shallowly practical reasons. For some reason, although often composed in the past tense, a story clutches us in a perpetual now, endlessly accessible but itself unaffected by our access. Richard Flanagan’s remarkable book Question 7 is an interrogation of the ways he has responded, voluntarily or otherwise, or could perhaps respond, to the elements of his life that have affected him through experience or memory, that are affecting him now through experience or memory, and will always affect him, it seems, through experience or memory. Some of these elements are undeniably traumas in themselves: his near-drowning in a whitewater canoeing accident, or the enslavement of his father as a prisoner of war and the nuclear bombs that marked a new access of death and yet saved his father’s life, enabling the author to be conceived; and yet it is not only the traumatic and the dramatic that persist in the fourth tense: small, subtle, beautiful, and tender moments also always exist outside our transactional notions of time. How do all these evers make the experience of our life, and how do these experiences make literature? Flanagan’s writing loops and roves around the unassimilable aspects of his life, returning and returning to the key elements and yet never resolving or anaesthetising them. He writes of his grandmother Mate withstanding the taunts of the baker’s children about her family’s convict heritage: “Mate sat in the dray, eyes averted from the dust kicking up behind it and the baker’s children running alongside. She sat in the dray, she sits in the dray, and even now, long after her death, she is sitting there still, straight, looking past them and towards the future, reinventing herself by reinventing her past, not knowing the past stays with us, that was was, is and shall be, as the baker’s children chant, Crawlers … crawlers, through time and space haunting her and haunting Tom and haunting us all, unable to be unheard: Crawlers … crawlers … crawlers.” Later he writes, “Though it happened then it's still happening now and won't ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can’t be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can ever have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it…” I wonder, though, is it literature’s purpose to communicate experience and perpetuate it and explore it, as we like to think, or to neutralise, at least a bit, the threat that experience has for us, a threat that could seem for us an unwithstandable threat were we not able withstand it by the articulation of an ersatz version of this experience, a story, a representation that stands in for the experience and provides at least some relief from the clutch that experience has upon us, an editable representation even, a replacement that brings the details of our lives in from the raw and the wild, into the safer mundane refuge within the pale of grammar? And does not memory perhaps work similarly? Do we not replace experience by an account at least to ourselves of this experience, and replace this account with an account of the account and so forth, until all we have is a little story, an artefact, a tame work, that we could as easily forget as remember? Do we crave nothing more than anaesthesia? Whatever process is occurring, Question 7 is a compelling account of the author grappling with the elements of the past, so to call it, that press themselves so forcefully against him. If he survives this pressure, what will he become and how will these elements arrange themselves around him in whatever form he allows or compels them to resolve? For those who write, writing is both the arena and the product of the assimilation of experience, whatever this does to experience itself. After a period of mystical dissolution in the Tasmanian wilderness that followed his drowning, Flanagan returned to the world of the partial and the incomplete, the world of entities and fracture, the practical world, the world of human congress: “Somehow the confusion, the falseness, the incomprehension not only of others but of myself, and all the pain that these things brought, somehow this was also the very condition of living that would soon return.” That’s life.
Replenish your reading pile with these new arrivals, still fresh from their cartons! Books can be sent by overnight courier or collected from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Changing My Mind by Julian Barnes $30
"We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater truthfulness to our dealings with the world and other people. It puts an end to vacillation, uncertainty, weak-mindedness. It seems to make us stronger and more mature. Well, we would think that, wouldn't we?" In this engaging and erudite essay, critically acclaimed writer Julian Barnes explores what is involved when we change our minds: about words, about politics, about books; about memories, age, and time. [Paperback]
”Provocative and entertaining.” —Independent
Bookish: How reading shapes our lives by Lucy Mangan $50
As a child, Lucy Mangan was reading all the time, using books to navigate the challenges and complexities of this world and many others. As an adult, she uses her new relationship with literature to seize upon the most important question — (how) do books prepare us for life? This account of Mangan’s reading life starts at the cusp of teenage, when everything — including the way we read — undergoes a not-so-subtle transformation. Here, Mangan vividly recounts her metamorphosis from young bookworm to bookish adult, from the way school curricula can impact our relationship with literature to the growing pains of swapping the pleasures of re-reading for those of book-hoarding. Revisiting the books of all genres — from thrillers and bonkbusters to historical sagas and apocalyptic zombie stories — that ferried her through each important stages of life — falling in love, finding a job, becoming a mother and navigating grief — Bookish is a coming-of-age in books. It's also an ode to our favourite bookish spaces — from the smallest secondhand bookstalls to libraries, glorious big bookshops and our very own book rooms — and a love story to how books not only shelter our souls through hard times and help us find ourselves when we feel lost, but also help us connect with the people we love through shared stories. [Hardback]
Paris 1935 by Jean Follain (translated from French by Kathleen Shields) $36
Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 is an intimate, multi-layered portrait of the capital where he has been living for ten years, a celebration of what a city is at a point in time: priests and prostitutes and poets, shop assistants and shoplifters, immigrants and war-wounded invalids, royalists and revolutionaries, women, men and children all work and play and dream in these streets. [Paperback]
” ‘It is good to cross Paris as though it were a village,’ Jean Follain writes in the opening section of this book. And that is exactly what he goes on to do, refusing ever to see the city in terms of grand abstraction or civic ‘projects’, but always from intricate, surprising detail, the Paris of the petites gens. The unnamed wanderer encounters the city in its teeming particulars, not without irony, but always with compassion, and a strange intimate knowledge of the poor office workers walking with bowed heads, the little cobbler, the black-aproned watchmaker, the old servant woman weeping quietly in a public garden. Whether in poetry or prose, Follain is one of the great modern French writers, a secret garden waiting to be discovered by the curious. The publication of the first English edition of Paris, so nimbly translated by Kathleen Shields, is cause for joy.” —Stephen Romer
”Within Follain’s diorama, thirty-two individual scenes are divided not only by the usual places (‘Department Stores’, ‘Cemeteries’, ‘The Left Bank’), but people (‘Girls’, ‘Women’) as well as the more abstract (‘Solitude’, ‘Paris Spirits’, ‘The Elements’). They do not trace the terrain of a standard map but one where the eye and the mind lead each other gloriously astray with no fear of becoming lost. Kathleen Shields’s translation captures an important aspect of the Parisian diorama, that of the rhythm of prose. It is never enough to merely describe, no matter how detailed. In fragments of lines such as ‘girls with small ears and vast sad cinemas’, and ‘women who sigh as they lace up their high boots but no longer tremble when regiments go by’ the city sings and cries, whispers and moans, layering its longings and memories like masonry. What makes this such a jewel-like niche within literature is the sense we are being told part of an epic more than travelogue as we are guided through the city. Somewhere, above the buildings and parks, looking in through windows at lovers and quarrels, is someone who views every scenario with an innate understanding that bad and good, Paris simply would not be without each exposed human fragment. Their telling will be bound with the next person’s telling, and the next throughout time to create a complete but ever-changing narrative of Paris.” —Tomoé Hill, 3:AM
The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine by Mario Levrero (translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter) $35
Widely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th-century Latin America, Mario Levrero's writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination. In none other of the author's books is this imagination so clearly on display as in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, his 1970 debut collection of stories. It gathers a variety of Levrero's earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro-fictions à la Donald Barthelme to adventurous Lewis Carroll-esque tales of forty pages' length. From the shocking surreal twists of 'Beggar Street' to the Escher-like grammatical maze of 'The Boarding House', via the pseudo-fairy tale classic 'The Basement', this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility. [Paperback with French flaps]
"These stories contain Levrero's most secret side and, in a way, 80% of the DNA that made him an extraordinary writer." —Fabian Casas
"One of Latin American literature's most balanced and well-constructed books." —Elvio Gandolfo
And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing $40
When the celebrated Swedish writer Johanna Ekström found out that she was dying from an eye melanoma she asked her closest friend, Sigrid Rausing, to finish her last book. Rausing transcribed and edited the thirteen handwritten notebooks left by Ekström. The result is a memoir of exceptional depth and intensity, published to critical acclaim in Sweden in 2023. The work showcases Ekström's vivid imagination, writerly precision, and psychological insight, interwoven with Rausing's spare and sober reflections. And the Walls Became the World All Around is a literary experiment, a testament to friendship, and a deep meditation on grief. [Hardback]
”Johanna Ekström's prose towards the end is clear as glass. The last notebooks are amongst the best things she has ever written. Sublime, devastating.” —Dagens Nyheter
”Dreambook, poet's journal, diary of a love lost and an illness that is in part perceptual, this is a book like no other I have read. Intertwined in its very making, there is also a story of friendship and grief. Hypnotic and haunting, the whole is bathed in a northern light that had me reaching for a Bergman classic.” —Lisa Appignanesi
Toward Eternity by Anton Hur $38
In a near-future world, a new technological therapy is quickly eradicating cancer. The body's cells are entirely replaced with nanites — robot or android cells which not only cure those afflicted but leaves them virtually immortal. Literary researcher Yonghun teaches an AI how to understand poetry and creates a living, thinking machine he names Panit, meaning Beloved, in honor of his husband. When Yonghun — himself a recipient of nanotherapy — mysteriously vanishes into thin air and then just as suddenly reappears, the event raises disturbing questions. What happened to Yonghun, and though he's returned, is he really himself anymore? When Dr. Beeko, the scientist who holds the patent to the nanotherapy technology, learns of Panit, he transfers its consciousness from the machine into an android body, giving it freedom and life. As Yonghun, Panit, and other nano humans thrive — and begin to replicate — their development will lead them to a crossroads and a choice with existential consequences. Exploring the nature of intelligence and the unexpected consequences of progress, the meaning of personhood and life, and what we really have to fear from technology and the future, Toward Eternity is a gorgeous, thought-provoking novel that challenges the notion of what makes us human — and how love survives even the end of that humanity. [Paperback]
"Hur is first and foremost one of our best writers. This chilling gem of speculative fiction is written with the restrained elegance and dazzling precision of an expert who can bend, tone, and ultimately alchemise language into a truly singular storytelling experience. You'll never look at the intersections of poetry and biology, and art and technology, the same again. What a delight to witness a writer in complete control of his craft, to experience the thrills of invention as unforgettable as the most canonical cautionary tales of the genre." —Porochista Khakpour
Crypt: Life, death and disease in the Middle Ages and beyond by Alice Roberts $55
The history of the Middle Ages is typically the story of the rich and powerful, there's barely a written note for most people's lives. Archaeology represents another way of interrogating our history. By using cutting-edge science to examine human remains and burials, it is possible to unearth details about how individuals lived and died that give us a new understanding of the past — one that is more intimate and inclusive than ever before. The seven stories in Crypt are not comforting tales. We meet the patients at one of the earliest hospitals in England and the victims of the St Brice's Day Massacre. We see a society struggling to make sense of disease, disability and death, as incurable epidemics sweep through medieval Europe. We learn of a protracted battle between Church and State that led to the murder of Thomas Becket and the destruction of the most famous tomb in England. And we come face to face with the archers who went down with Henry VIII's favourite ship, the Mary Rose. [Hardback]
”A gripping set of tales. Roberts demonstrates how the disciplines of osteoarchaeology, palaeopathology, osteobiology and, newest of all, archaeogenomics, are increasingly used to modify, amplify and even correct written records with all their slant and spin. Fascinating.” —Guardian
One Day: A true story of courage and survival in the Holocaust by Michael Rosen and Benjamin Phillips $30
A poignant and ultimately uplifting picture book based on a true story of an escape from a convoy to Auschwitz. “Get through one day and then on to the next. One day at a time. One day after another.” Eugène Handschuh was a Jewish member of the Resistance in occupied Paris. After he was captured by the Nazis, he was placed on a convoy to Auschwitz. Against all the odds, with the help of strangers and fellow members of the Resistance, Eugène and his father escaped the convoy and survived — when so many others did not. Michael Rosen was inspired to tell this story after discovering his father’s uncle and aunt were on the same convoy as Eugène, but never returned. The remarkable illustrations are by Benjamin Phillips, who also did the wonderful Alte Zachen. [Hardback]
Against Progress by Slavoj Žižek $22
What does 'progress' mean? Can things get better? And how, when we are constantly battered on all sides by deepfakes, doomers and disorienting relativisms, can we make any headway at all in the face of unprecedented ecological, social and political crises? In this collection of iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Zizek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. In a whirlwind tour that takes in everything from gentrification to the theory of relativity, Lacan to Lenin, Putin to Mary Poppins and Taylor Swift to the end of the world, these essays never stop asking hard questions of imagined futures. Nor does Zizek shrink from the hardest question of all: How do we free ourselves from the hypocritical, guilt-ridden dreaming in which we're enmeshed, and begin to build a better world? [Paperback]
Zest: Climbing from depression to philosophy by Daniel Kalderimis $40
Zest is a personal account of how we can seek meaning and joy by facing and accepting our imperfections. Daniel, a Wellington King’s Counsel, describes his journey of depression with humour, wisdom, and philosophy — he sought more than wellness platitudes to manage these struggles. His book connects strands of philosophy from Stoicism and Buddhism, and draws from writings by George Eliot and Iris Murdoch. This is not a manual for how to ‘get well’. It’s for the many people in careers like Kalderimis: the high-fliers and the driven who don’t stop to smell the flowers, then hit the wall and wonder how to get over that wall. Kalderimis’s book can help people see there is no ‘cure’ as such, that they need to embrace this part of them to understand they can still live an enjoyable and successful life. [Paperback]
Pharmacopoeia: A Dungeness notebook by Derek Jarman $26
'I planted a dog rose. Then I found a curious piece of driftwood and used this, and one of the necklaces of holey stones on the wall, to stake the rose. The garden had begun. I saw it as a therapy and a pharmacopoeia.' In 1986 artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman, bought Prospect Cottage, a Victorian fisherman's hut on the desert sands of Dungeness. It was to be a home and refuge for Jarman throughout his HIV diagnosis, and it would provide the stage for one of his most enduring, if transitory projects - his garden. Conceived of as a 'pharmacopoeia' — an ever-evolving circle of stones, plants and flotsam sculptures all built and grown in spite of the bracing winds and arid shingle — it remains today a site of fascination and wonder. Pharmacopoeia brings together the best of Derek Jarman's writing on nature, gardening and Prospect Cottage. Told through journal entries, poems and fragments of prose, it paints a portrait of Jarman's personal and artistic reliance on the space Dungeness offered him, and shows the cycle of the years spent there in one moving collage. [Paperback with French flaps]
A Northern Wind: Britain, 1962—65 by David Kynaston $33
How much can change in less than two and a half years? In the case of Britain in the Sixties, the answer is: almost everything. From the seismic coming of the Beatles to a sex scandal that rocked the Tory government to the arrival at No 10 of Harold Wilson, a prime minister utterly different from his Old Etonian predecessors. A Northern Wind brings to vivid life the period between October 1962 and February 1965. Drawing upon an unparalleled array of diaries, newspapers and first-hand recollections, Kynaston's masterful storytelling refreshes familiar events — the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Big Freeze, the assassination of JFK, the funeral of Winston Churchill - while revealing in all their variety the experiences of the people living through this history. Major themes complement the compelling narrative: an anti-Establishment mood epitomised by the BBC's controversial That Was The Week That Was; a welfare state only slowly becoming more responsive to the individual needs of its users; and the rise of consumer culture, as Habitat arrived and shopping centres like Birmingham's Bull Ring proliferated. Multi-voiced, multi-dimensional and immersive. [Now in paperback]
”Kynaston's primary aim is to document ‘a ceaseless pageant as, in all its daily variousness, it moves through time’. This he achieves with a breathtaking array of treasures: diaries, provincial newspapers, political speeches, films and novels are woven together to provide a kaleidoscope of contrasting perspectives, defying any attempt to create a neat story of progress or nationhood. This is a richly evocative, thought-provoking and, above all, compassionate study of those who lived through the much-mythologised 1960s. We can only hope that when historians write about our own times, they will extend the same generosity of spirit.” —Selina Todd, TLS
The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey $34
A previous novel from the Booker-winning author of Orbital. Fifteenth-century Oakham, in Somerset; a tiny village cut off by a big river with no bridge. When a man is swept away by the river in the early hours of Shrove Saturday, an explanation has to be found: accident, suicide or murder? The village priest, John Reve, is privy to many secrets in his role as confessor. But will he be able to unravel what happened to the victim, Thomas Newman, the wealthiest, most capable and industrious man in the village? And what will happen if he can't? Moving back in time toward the moment of Thomas Newman's death, the story is related by Reve — an extraordinary creation, a patient shepherd to his wayward flock, and a man with secrets of his own to keep. Through his eyes, and his indelible voice, Harvey creates a medieval world entirely tangible in its immediacy. [Paperback]
”Beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful.” —New York Times
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar (translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches) $33
Mammoth's protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian, inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work — all in pursuit of life in the raw. This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar's wild voice. [Paperback]
”A surprising slim novel that trembles with the force of an approaching stampede. Baltasar's sharp and forthright prose (adeptly translated by Julia Sanches) demonstrates how much can lie within one person, through the boiling, enraged voice of the narrator. Baltasar's novel howls to ask: What is a life made according to one's own rules? A quiet but hard-staring fighter of a book, Mammoth is, in a world doomed to end, one woman's strange and powerful cry against her own extinction.” —Mary Marge Locker, New York Times
This Fiction Called Nigeria: The struggle for democracy by Adéwálé Májà-Pearce $37
In this groundbreaking work the essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria's crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous country in Africa was fabricated by British colonisers at the turn of the twentieth century. When Nigerians went to the polls to vote in the 2023 elections, they had experienced a quarter century of democracy, after a similar period of almost unbroken military dictatorship. Yet the blessings of self-rule are unclear to many, especially among the more than half of the population living in extreme poverty. Buffeted by unemployment, saddled with debt, rent by bandits and Islamic fundamentalists, Nigeria faces the threat of disintegration. Maja-Pearce shows that recent mobilisations against police brutality, sexism and homophobia reveal a powerful undercurrent of discontent, especially among the country's youth. If Nigeria has a future, he shows here, it is in the hands of the young, unwilling to go on as before. [Paperback]
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie $38
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until — betrayed and brokenhearted — she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve. In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, and on our interconnected world. [Paperback]
”Dream Count reads like a feminist War and Peace. Suffused with truth, wit and compassion, this is a magnificent novel that understands the messiness of human motivation and is courageous enough to ask difficult questions. It made me feel frustrated about the world but very good about the state of fiction.” —Sunday Times
”This is a complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. It is deeply and richly feminist. It explores big themes - misogyny, masculinity, race, colonialism, cultural relativism, the abuse of power, both personal and institutional - but it does so subtly, almost imperceptibly ... Dream Count is an extraordinary novel. Please let it not be another decade until Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns once more.” —Nicola Sturgeon, New Statesman
Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa $25
Palestine, 1948. A mother clutches her baby son as Israeli soldiers march through the village of Ein Hod. In a split second, he is snatched from her arms and the fate of the Abulheja family is changed forever. Mornings in Jenin is a devastating novel of love and loss, war and oppression, heartbreak and hope, spanning five countries and four generations of one of the most intractable conflicts of our lifetime. [New paperback edition]
”A powerful and passionate insight into what many Palestinians have had to endure since the state of Israel was created. Susan Abulhawa guides us through traumatic events with anger and great tenderness too, creating unforgettable images of a world in which humanity and inhumanity, selflessness and selfishness, love and hate grow so close to each other.” —Michael Palin
”Abulhawa looks into the darkest crevices of lives, conflicts, horrendous injustices, and dares to shine light that can illuminate hidden worlds for us, who are too often oblivious. A major writer of our time, to read Abulhawa is to begin to understand not simply the misinformation we have received for decades about what has gone on in Palestine and the Middle East, but to come to terms with our own resistance to feeling the terror of our own fear of Truth.” —Alice Walker
Violet and the Velvets #1: The Case of the Missing Stuff by Rachael King (with illustrations by Phoebe Morris) $19
Meet Violet Grumble: a music-loving, guitar-toting tween whose dream is to compete at BandChamps. The problem is that none of her friends can play an instrument. Violet won't let that stop her! But things get tougher when the band's gear starts to go missing — what's going on? Can Violet solve the mystery and harness her ADHD powers? Can she help the Velvets overcome stage fright AND beat The Alphas at the final showdown? After all, you only need three chords to play a song ... how hard can it be? [Paperback]
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14 March 2025
How does a word reveal its meaning at the same moment as it becomes strange to us, he wondered. Or should that be the other way round, how does a word become strange to us at the same moment as it reveals its meaning. Same difference, though he was a little surprised. No closer to an answer in any case. Words, experiences, thoughts, the same principle seems to apply, he thought, or certainly its inverse, or complement, or opposite, or whatever. Familiarity suppresses meaning, he thought, the most familiar is that for which meaning is the least accessible, for which meaning has been obscured by wear until a point of comprehensibility has been attained, a point of dullness and comfort, a point of functional usefulness, if that is not a tautology, a point of habituation sufficient for carrying on with whatever there is to which we are inclined to carry on, if there is any such thing to which we are so inclined. Perhaps ‘meaning’ is not the right word. Or ‘strange’. Or the others. I should maybe start again and use other words, or other thoughts, or both, he thought. All philosophical problems can be solved by changing the meanings of the words used to express them, he had somewhere read, or written, or, more dangerously, both. All that is not the same or not exactly the same as to say that the simplest thing carries the most meaning but is too difficult to think about so we complicate it until we can grasp it in our thoughts, at the moment that its meaning is lost, the moment of comprehension, he thought. Again this strange use of the word ‘meaning’, whatever he meant by that, he was no longer sure. The everyday is that to which we are most habituated, that of which we are the most unaware, or the least aware, if this is not the same thing, to help us to survive the stimulation, he thought, a functional repression of our compulsion to be aware, but this comes at the cost of existing less, of being less aware, of becoming blind to those things that are either the simplest or the most important to us or both. Our dullness stops us being overwhelmed, awareness being after all not so much rapture as terror, not that there was ever much difference. Life denuminised, that is not the word, flat. How then to regain the terrible paradise of the instant, awareness, without risking lives or sanity? How to produce the new and be produced by it? These are not the same question but each applies. They are possibly related. Perhaps now, he thought, I should mention this book, Bordering on Miraculous, a collaboration between poet Lynley Edmeades and painter Saskia Leek, as there appear to be some answers here or, if not answers, related effects that you could be forgiven for mistaking for answers even though there are no such things as answers. Near enough. Poetry seems sometimes capable, as often here, of briefly reinstating awareness, as does the discipline of painting, as does the presence of a baby as it simultaneously wipes your mind. And alters time. What a relief, at least temporarily, to lose what made you you, he thought, or remembered, or imagined that he remembered. What a relief to be only aware of that which is right now pressing itself upon you, or aware only, though only aware is the more precise choice. “Which is more miracle: the things / moving through the sky or the eyes that move / to watch them” asks the poet, looking at a baby looking, he assumes. Such simplicities, the early noticings of babies, infant concepts, are the bases of all consciousness, he ventured, all our complexities are built on these. The first act of comprehension, he thought, is to divide something from that which it is not. “A border is / as a border does.” This book, the poems and the paintings in this book, continually address this primal impulse to give entities edges or to bring forth entities through their edges. All knowledge is built from this ‘bordering’, he thought, but it is always fragile, arbitrary, subject to the possibility of revision, more functional than actual. The second act of comprehension is to associate something with something that it is not (“One cannot help but make associations,” the poet writes), but it is never clear to what extent such associations are inherent in the world or to what extent they are mental only, the result of the impulse to associate, he thought. Not that this matters. Everything is simultaneously both separating and connecting, it is too much for us to sustain, we would be overwhelmed, we reach for a word, for an image, for relief. We pacify it with a noun. To some extent. To hold it all at bay. But also perhaps to invite the onslaught, he wondered, perhaps, he thought, the words release what the words hold back, perhaps these words can reconnect while simultaneously holding that experience at bay. Not that that makes any sense, or much. “One / cannot help but make / nouns,” the poet writes, but there is always this tension, he thinks, between accomplishment and insufficiency in language, never resolved, the world plucking at the words and vice-versa: “Something is there that doesn’t love a page.” “It is this kind of ordinary straining / that makes the margins restless.” The most meaningful is that which reaches closest to the meaninglessness that it most closely resembles. He has thought all this but his thoughts have not been clear, he has lost perhaps the capacity to think, not that he ever had such a capacity other than the capacity to think he had it. He feels perhaps he has not been clear but this beautiful book by Edmeades and Leek is clear, these poems and these paintings address the simplest and most difficult things, the simplest are the most difficult, and vice-versa, this conversation, so to call it, between a poet and a painter, reaches down to the bases of their arts, he thought, to the primalities of consciousness, have I made that word up, a gift to us from babies, perhaps the babies we once were. It is not as if we ever escape the impulses we had as babies. A baby comes, the world is changed. “Goodbye to a future / without this / big head / in it.”
Beautiful production, beautiful concept, and beautifully executed. The sixth book in the Kōrero series is a standout. You Are Here is a journey, a journey in language, a going home, a seeking of one’s place in a physical external space, and also in one’s interior self. Where do you belong? How do you go home when time and place have been disrupted? You go home by looking towards your land, your whenua. You find your culture in language, in pattern — in mark-making both literal and metaphorical. Reading Whiti Hereaka’s text, looking into Larkin’s drawings and paintings is mesmerising. Questions are provoked and thoughts step one to the next, building connections between the words and images on the page and the concepts they embody. Here there is a conversation between cousins who share whakapapa, through their words and images. As Hereaka cleverly uses the restrictions of the Fibonacci sequence in her text, Larkin’s work also has a pattern set down. Her drawings precise on the graph paper — pen-to-paper, point-to-point — building intricate relationships in space and on the page. In her artwork you see the conversation with weaving, tāniko, whakario and tukutuku patterns. The patterns building a language of connection, moving in unison with Hereaka’s text as she spirals, doubling her words and her thoughts, as she reaches for the elusive and the sure. As anger surfaces, along with shame, passion and determination. And as the language condenses in line with the sequence’s rules, you follow the pattern out and away to the end. Open this book and find on the first page, three words. “You are here.” They sit quiet, small and a little timidly in this white space. End this book and the same three words appear. “You are here” at the centre and determined, held firmly in a Larkin drawing. But the end is no end, it is another beginning, ready for what comes next. You Are Here is also, like the other books on this series, a place where excellent book production meets the content with purpose and care. (Kudos to Lloyd Jones and Massey University Press for this excellent series.) From the subtle embossed letters on the front cover to the paper stock, it is a tactile object — a book you want to enjoy and hold. You Are Here is both intense and lyrical. It is personal and universal. It is a journey of discovery and a work of strength.
There are new children’s books arriving at VOLUME every week. Here are a few we think you might like.
You will love Clive. He’s adorable. Friendly and gentle, Clive loves playing with his friends and exploring the world. It’s all about hats and plenty of imagination in this boardbook, Clive and his Hats. A sunny yellow hat for wearing in the sandpit, a pointy black magic hat for showing his tricks to Moshi the cat, or out in the rain in his best red fire-hat-and-coat set complete with red gumboots! There’s dress-ups and party hats, a special hat for the art gallery, and delightful tall-eared hats for when you being a rabbit. The Clive books by Jessica Spanyol are gentle and affectionate. They avoid gender stereotypes and celebrate diversity, encourage sharing and the joy of play.
A goodnight book about dreaming and the wonders of a world at night. With its atmospheric colour palette of bluey green with little flashes of contrasting orange, Mr Moon Wakes Up captures a warm gentle night with a full moon perfectly. Here are the long shadows and soft shapes, here are magical creatures in the garden and in the sky. A child bemoans the fact that Mr Moon is always asleep. Too sleepy to do puzzles, play hide-and-seek, or hear exciting adventure stories. But what if Mr Moon is awake when you’re asleep? And so begins a wonderful night of magic and mazes, and of seeing the world anew. This charming story, written and illustrated by Jemima Sharpe captures a similar mood as the classic The Moon Jumpers — it is dreamily illustrated and sweetly written.
How to be a champ when you’re not like the others? Iranian author Payam Ebrahimi started writing stories when he was five, and kept writing through school and study, and work, and various occupations, and luckily for us still keeps writing stories. And luckily for us this one, Champ, is ably translated by Caroline Croskery and illustrated by internationally recognised artist Reza Dalvand. Abtin is the misfit of the Moleski family. Every single member of the family is a champion obsessed with sports and winning. Their portraits hung on the wall, medals adorn their chests. They eat heartily and train all day. Abtin isn’t interested in winning, and his dreams are quite different. The excellent illustrations by Davland add further layers to the humour and pathos of Ebrahimi’s text. This is a powerful story about being yourself in the face of adversity and the pressure to conform. Perfect for the champ in us all, and when we need a little courage!
Jan Medlicott Acorn Fiction Prize winner Whiti Hereaka and artist Peata Larkin, cousins who share the same whakapapa, collaborate in a project based on the Fibonacci number sequence. In a feat of managed imagining, Hereaka's words spiral out to the centre of the book and then back in on themselves to end with the same words with which the text began. As the pattern spools out and then folds back, Peata Larkin's meticulous drawings of tāniko and whakairo and her lush works on silk weave their own entrancing pattern. 'It is my hope that by the time you have walked that path that you are now a different reader and will read those words in a new way,' Hereaka says. You Are Here is a beguiling and important addition to the ‘kōrero’ series.
Each volume in this exquisite series is a collaboration between a writer and an artist, and a discovery (for both readers and participants) of new creative potentials. The series is exemplary publishing — each volume is beautifully produced and a pleasure to read and to own.
Get all six volumes (so far) and get one of these free (6 for the price of 5)!
High Wire — Lloyd Jones x Euan Macleod >>Find out more
Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde — Paula Morris x Haru Sameshima >>Find out more
The Lobster's Tale — Chris Price x Bruce Foster >>Find out more
Bordering on Miraculous — Lynley Edmeades x Saskia Leek >>Find out more
Little Doomsdays — Nic Low x Phil Dadson >>Find out more
You Are Here — Whiti Hereaka x Peata Larkin >>Find out more
These new books are keen to get onto your shelf. We can have them dispatched by overnight courier or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Tony Fomison: Life of the artist by Mark Forman $60
In a career spanning three decades, Tony Fomison (1939- 1990) produced some of Aotearoa's most artistically and culturally significant paintings and drawings, the backdrop of which was a life — inseparable from his art — of enduring intrigue. A man of multitudes and a self-perceived outsider, Fomison was a son, sibling and lover; activist, archaeologist and scholar; trickster, addict and disrupter; and — above all else — an artist who shed light on the human condition and reimagined life in Aotearoa. In this compelling biography, developed over more than a decade, Mark Forman draws on archival material and interviews with more than 150 people including Fomison's family and close friends, leading contemporary artists, political activists, and art professionals. The result is a comprehensive yet lively and accessible biography that reveals the man and his art to a new generation of readers. [Hardback]
”As a boy Tony had drawn maps and diagrams and medieval battle scenes. He' d read fairy tales and been enchanted by local sites of Maori history. As a young man he was a vagrant on the streets of Paris, was twice imprisoned, spent time in a mental hospital, battled destructive addictions, and experienced unrequited love and loneliness. All of this would become the underworld of his art, the subterranean realm where he could dwell so as to create work that expressed something of the human condition. But it was always far wider than just his own story. Endlessly curious about Pacific and Maori history and art, and enchanted by European Renaissance art, he wanted to find a new visual language for what it meant to live in the Pacific; he wanted to make room at the back of our heads.” —from the author’s introduction
”I had been convinced that someone who had not known Tony personally, who was not party to the secret painting cultures of that time, was not the right person to write Tony’s life. I was quite wrong . . . Mark Forman’s understanding of Tony’s painting is profound and insightful, and his research is remarkable, as he recovers the memories of the survivors of the art scenes that Tony was part of with intelligence and sensitivity. You get a window that opens onto an Aotearoa rarely glimpsed. Yes, the interviews are telling, but Mark keeps his focus on Tony’s paintings: Tony’s pursuit of the exact technique to express his passionate hunger for transcendence through seeing. That way Tony could find redemption. Best image? Shirley Grace’s ‘Tony at Williamson Ave’. Brilliant. The first image, the all-too-human Tony, magicking himself into a best-version Tony, the role he so aspires to, the Tagaloa of the visually inspired.” —Jacqueline Fahey, artist and friend of the artist
You Are Here by Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin $45
Jan Medlicott Acorn Fiction Prize winner Whiti Hereaka and the artist Peata Larkin, cousins who share the same whakapapa, collaborate in a project based on the Fibonacci number sequence. In a feat of managed imagining, Hereaka's words spiral out to the centre of the book and then back in on themselves to end with the same words with which the text began. As the pattern spools out and then folds back, Peata Larkin's meticulous drawings of tāniko and whakairo and her lush works on silk weave their own entrancing pattern. 'It is my hope that by the time you have walked that path that you are now a different reader and will read those words in a new way,' Hereaka says. You Are Here is a beguiling and important addition to the ‘kōrero’ series. [Hardback]
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda) $37
In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the species depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings — but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world. Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human. [Paperback]
”Haunting. Less experimental fiction and more fiction on the human experiment — what kinds of new approaches to mating, community and family will allow people to survive? Kawakami finds humour and warmth in the puzzles of existence and extinction." -Hilary Leichter, The New York Times Book Review
"An accomplished mosaic novel spanning thousands of years, it investigates change on the grandest scale: the evolutionary fate of humanity. The power and the pain of the novel lies in its ability to bridge between humanity as an abstract and humanity as a characteristic, to pick out moments from a vast sweep of time and show their insignificance and their simultaneous, ultimate importance. The novel ends with a plea from a speaker who doesn't know if they will ever be heard: I wanted to reach back into the page and say, you are." —Niall Harrison, Locus Magazine
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes) $40
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life — and the life of Berlin itself — begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, "the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same." Perfection — Vincenzo Latronico's first book to be translated into English — is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late? [Paperback with French flaps]
”Perfection gave me the gift of being able to hold a long span of time — in a relationship, in a city — and the experience of being young, and the experience of being not so young — all in my head at once. I could hold it there the way you hold a parable or fable, but with all these tiny details, too. It also functioned like a kind of murder mystery: what slowly killed the magic? Was it their values, was it aging, was it... was it...? It's such a beautiful, thoughtful, impeccably crafted book.” —Sheila Heti
On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer (translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott) $43
Noenka is a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America's tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society's expectations. Newly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer's classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. [Paperback]
”A modern classic set in Suriname and lyrically rendered into English for the first time, On a Woman’s Madness is a testament to both the resilience of queer lives that exist everywhere and everytime and the alchemy of literary translation where a perfect book meets its perfect translator. Through its heightened understanding of character and history filtered through a lush and enriched language, Astrid Roemer draws from suffering, heat, and imprisonment to create a story of love, survival, and freedom that translator Lucy Scott expertly reweaves into English with an empathetic, artistically accomplished touch.” —International Booker judges’ citation
Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan $30
Clay Eaters traverses a network of fault lines diverging and converging at unexpected angles: a mysterious jungle island, military reconnaissance training, the spirits in the trees and abandoned temples, old family homes, the echoes across rooms, the dining table set for the archetypal feast. Here the author asks what it means to write the self, and what it is the living must carry. [Paperback]
”Kan is a sophisticated and accomplished poet and he creates a unique tone in his poems, using simple language in a sort of alchemy to make emotional depth. The poems come together to create a feeling of an unhurried, loving and honest gaze at his family, himself and his world. Clay Eaters is an original and significant collection.” —Lynn Jenner
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $35
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all — the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Her response? An indecent proposal... Written by the first disabled author to win Japan's most prestigious literary award and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is an extraordinary, thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity's edge. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Filled with unforgettable insight.” —Sayaka Murata
”Written with guts and wit, Hunchback is a tender and defiant story which forces readers to think far beyond ableist concepts of who gets to desire and be desired.” —AnOther Magazine
”Uproariously funny, unflinching, and merciless. It's not very often you encounter this provocative and yet so refreshingly honest a read.” —Mariana Enriquez
Makeshift Seasons by Kate Camp $25
The failings of the body
can be a form of company
a trapped nerve ringing in the night
like music.
Kate Camp's poetry has been described by readers as fearless, affable, and containing a surprising radicalism and power. In her new collection, she is ever alert to the stories unfolding all around us and inside our own bodies. As she is striding away from hope, she is also holding on tightly to the promise of morning. The poems move between distant planets and Chappies Dairy, between Mont-Saint-Michel and the lighthouse in Island Bay, with every moment, every feeling, every conviction on the edge of becoming another. Like the plumber who can hear water running deep underground, Makeshift Seasons is a book of extraordinarily sharp sensing and knowing. [Paperback]
”These magical, knotty works react to a fragile world, and Camp navigates the light along with the dark.” —Paula Green
”Each poem’s like a bumper ride in a fairground, crashing into obstacles, at once jarring and exhilarating.” —David Eggleton
”Here is ‘the so-called outside world’, and here is its wonderfully sensitive, fluently understated poet.” —Stephanie Burt
Pātaka Kai: Growing food sovereignty by Jessica Hutchings, Jo Smith, Johnson Witehira and Yvonne Taura $45
We face a biodiversity crisis and a climate meltdown. Our food systems are broken, our soils are depleted and our seeds are owned by global corporations. Colonial capitalism dictates the mainstream response to these crises, drowning out Indigenous perspectives and solutions, yet Indigenous practices and understandings of kai (food) offer important pathways to ensuring ecological, cultural and socio-economic sustainability as well as greater connection to kai in our everyday lives. This book salutes Indigenous food heroes from across Aotearoa and neighbouring islands in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa who take a holistic approach that considers the interconnectedness of people, land and food. Their inspiring stories show how change begins locally and on a small scale. Written by verified hua parakore farmers, activists, Indigenous researchers and Indigenous food sovereignty leaders Jessica Hutchings and Jo Smith, Pataka Kai encourages a return to Indigenous values and practices to achieve kai sovereignty and well-being. [Flexibound]
A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts $40
From the author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia comes a new book tracing the contexts and implications of a forgotten colonial folly in the Congo. In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa's resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants — if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants. Following in the footsteps of the four elephants, Roberts pieces together the story of this long-forgotten expedition, in travels that take her to Belgium, Iraq, India, Tanzania and Congo. The storytelling brings to life a compelling cast of historic characters and modern voices, from ivory dealers to Catholic nuns, set against rich descriptions of the landscapes travelled. She digs deep into historic records to reckon with our broken relationship with animals, revealing an extraordinary — and enduring — story of colonial greed, ineptitude, hypocrisy and folly. [Paperback]
”History and travelogue combine wonderfully in this tale of colonial plunder and hubris. Sophy Roberts' luminous new book is a journey through Africa from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika and back, retracing the steps of a long-forgotten expedition. Reflective, watchful, calm, Roberts is such a vivid travel writer that you forget what a brilliant historian she is. She has the water-diviner's gift for stories in unlikely places.” —Guardian
over under fed by Amy Marguerite $25
perhaps the good things
that come to those who wait
are the leftovers
of those who have
already waited.
In her debut collection, Amy Marguerite explores the peculiar loveliness and specific loneliness of the human condition. Writing from experiences with anorexia nervosa, limerence and a particularly tumultuous situationship, these poems act as a confessional to hunger, desire and immoderation. Precise, vivid and sometimes disturbing in detail, over under fed seeks to reconcile chaos and recovery. [Paperback]
”Amy Marguerite has a completely original voice and sensibility that makes everything she writes extraordinary and compelling. This is a collection as much about desire, requited and unrequited love, and other forms of relationships — especially relationships with women — as it is about the hunger to live fully and beautifully, the hunger for beauty and intensity, the hunger for a charged, combustible life of dreams and elation.” —Anna Jackson
”In this stunning debut collection from Amy Marguerite, we are taken on an ever-dizzying but always dazzling journey of obsession and love and obsessive love that guides us through a landscape of pain, dysphoria, eating disorders, trauma, mental health and hope, with the compelling, compassionate and incisive insight of someone who has struggled in the webs of their ghosts and is weaving anew. These poems dare you to enter into the spirals and not be changed, slowly but certainly finding solace in the flux. With a masterful use of repetition, an eloquently distressed and elegantly restrained lyricism, over under fed explores the spirals of the mind in a knowing chaos of the body, asking us how we might map our way through perpetually falling as we yearn to be caught and seek to fly.” —Amber Esau
The Futures of Democracy, Law, and Government by Geoffrey Palmer et al, edited by Mark Hickford and Matthew S.R. Palmer $70
A stock-take of increasingly urgent issues underlying our collective life in Aotearoa in the form of essays by leading judges, scholars, and politicians on constitutional government; democracy and its integrity; indigenous-state relations and Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi; the environment and climate change; law reform and human rights. The papers were originally presented at a conference in honour of Geoffrey Palmer, and reflect the themes that have animated his career in public affairs. Contents include: ‘Law, politics, policy and government’ by Geoffrey Palmer; ‘Some reflections on Cabinet government: A former minister’s perspective’ by David Caygill; ‘The role of political parties in New Zealand’s democracy’ by Margaret Wilson; ‘Safeguarding democracy through prudent anticipatory governance: the case of climate change adaptation’ by Jonathan Boston; ‘Governing an unimaginable future’ by Simon Upton; ‘Legal myth-takes and the Crown’s claim to sovereignty over Aotearoa New Zealand: The implications for New Zealand’s constitution’ by Claire Charters; ‘Ultimate legal principles for Aotearoa New Zealand: The place of the Treaty of Waitangi’ by Alex Frame; ‘Constitutional legitimacy and diversity: The value of pluralism and filling gaps in the common law’ by Mai Chen; ‘Back to the future: Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s 'new public law'‘ by Dean Knight; ‘Legal change: 'reform', 'legality' and the (once?) 'political constitution'‘ by Jack Hodder; ‘The rights frame of mind’ by Helen Winkelmann; ‘Bills of rights: “Nonsense upon stilts” or an enhancement of democracy?’ by Kenneth Keith; ‘Some lessons for governance in New Zealand drawn from the global context’ by Colin Keating; ‘Normative mismatch and the failure of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’ by Jonathan Carlson. [Hardback]
Toitū te Whenua: People and places of the New Zealand Wars by Lauren Keenan $45
An accessible guide to significant places and people of the New Zealand Wars from a Māori perspective. This comprehensive guidebook journeys through the pivotal sites of the New Zealand Wars, from the Far North to Wellington, offering a unique perspective on events that shaped Aotearoa. Lauren Keenan (Te Ātiawa ki Taranaki) brings to life the key battles, influential figures, and significant locations on an essential chapter in this country's past. Complete with detailed maps and easy-to-follow driving directions, Toitū te Whenua- Places and People of the New Zealand Wars is the perfect companion for exploring these historic sites. As the only guide of its kind written from a Māori viewpoint, it is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of New Zealand's colonial history. [Paperback]
Clay: A human history by Jennifer Lucy Allan $60
People have been taking handfuls of earth and forming them into their own image since human history began. Human forms are found everywhere there was a ceramic tradition, and there is a ceramic tradition everywhere there was human activity. The clay these figures are made from was formed in deep geological time. It is the material that God, cast as the potter, uses to form Adam in Genesis. Tomb paintings in Egypt show the god Khum at a potter's wheel, throwing a human. Humans first recorded our own history on clay tablets, the shape of the characters influenced by the clay itself. The first love poem was inscribed in a clay tablet, from a Sumerian bride to her king more than 4000 years ago. Born out of a desire to know and understand the mysteries of this material, the spiritual and practical applications of clay in both its micro and macro histories, Clay: A Human History is a book of wonder and insight, a hybrid of archaeology, history and lived experience as an amateur potter. [Hardback]
“I read this book and immediately went out to buy some clay. Fascinating and powerful.” —Brian Eno
”I thought I knew a lot about pottery, but I didn't, not as much as I do now. From the earliest earthenware to the history of porcelain, along with the author's own progress working with different clays and glazes, I have loved learning from every chapter in this beautiful and affecting book.” —Vashti Bunyan
A Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: Writing systems on the verge of vanishing by Tim Brookes $70
If something is important, we write it down. Yet 85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing — not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for hundreds of years — sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of a people — is lost. This Atlas is about those writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them. From the ancient holy alphabets of the Middle East, now used only by tiny sects, to newly created African alphabets designed to keep cultural traditions alive in the twenty-first century: from a Sudanese script based on the ownership marks traditionally branded into camels, to a secret system used in one corner of China exclusively by women to record the songs and stories of their inner selves: this unique book profiles dozens of scripts and the cultures they encapsulate, offering glimpses of worlds unknown to us — and ways of saving them from vanishing entirely. [Hardback]
Read our latest newsletter. Take a ride on our Literary Carousel. Find out about the finalists in the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and the long list for the International Booker Prize. See some very lovely children’s books. Find out what we (and our cat) have been reading. And more!
7 March 2025
“The disasters that befall you are always different from the ones you imagine,” states a character in one of the stories in Ursula Scavenius’s riveting and unsettling collection The Dolls, a collection suffused with unidentifiable or unquantifiable threats, threats that leave the narrators transfixed by the mundane details of lives distorted by unbearable forces that they cannot comprehend or name. It is hard to make a case that 'real life', so to call it, operates any differently. Is it the case that the unbearable arises from the mundane, that the unbearable is inherent in the mundane but suppressed to make the mundane bearable, or, rather, is it that by suppressing the unbearable we are left with the mundane, the only evidence we have, perhaps, of the forces set against us? Is the mundane therefore the surest point of access to the unbearable? Is the most unbearable closest to the most mundane? The potentising restraint of Scavenius’s prose, the withholding of all but the most resonant details, gives great power to that which is excluded, to that which it is impossible to include. Just as the universe is, supposedly, comprised mostly of dark matter, which we cannot sense and for which the only evidence is the effect it has upon that portion of the universe that we can sense, so too literature is most effective when attending to the effects upon the mundane of forces that cannot otherwise be directly or adequately addressed. The total, comprised primarily of dark matter, cannot be expressed. Any idea of 'the total' comes at the expense of the parts, by the suppression of some parts and the magnification of other parts. Any idea of 'the total' is a distortion of that which it purports to represent. A ‘story’, a ‘development’, likewise, is a totalitarian concept. Naturalism is a totalitarian concept. Scavenius has Kafka’s gift of being able to allow her details to resonate in the spaces that surround them, echoing in spaces that cannot otherwise be delineated, intimating the complex forces seething beneath her deceptively simple prose. Her characters move about in worlds strangely sloped, the familiar becoming unfamiliar and revealed as evidence of the unbearable. Time slips, the past is seen to be a threat, even an idyllic past is a threat because it contains the circumstances out of which the problematic present arose. “Birds chirp in the bushes outside. I laugh, realising it’s only a memory.” Every detail, every occurrence is a point of pressure, a point at which the mundane is assailed by dark matter. In the title story, ‘The Dolls’, the arrival of some refugees reveals the fascistic potential latent in the local community, including in the narrator’s father, and the distorting effect of that force upon thought and language: “There is no way to prove whether the scream was real, someone on the radio says. … It sounds real, but these days anything could be propaganda.” The force of the unbearable is always felt first upon language.
If a ghost door-to-door salesperson called at your place, what would you do? In the opening story of Matsuda Aoko’s collection, Shinzaburō tries to ignore the doorbell. It’s persistent and there’s no getting out of answering the door. They know he’s home. His attempts at turning them away are fruitless. There they are — two women dressed identically, yet with different manners. “..the younger one,...raised her head to look towards the spyhole, and said in a weak, sinuous voice, “Come now, don’t be so inhospitable! O-pen up!” If a willow tree could speak, Shinzaburō thought, this is the kind of voice…He blinked and found himself in the living room.” And so, the story carries on, with our hapless Shinzaburō finding himself unable to resist the two women and their special lanterns. His wife is none too pleased when she returns and sees how he’s been duped by the ghost women. The story is premised by a traditional folktale of love and woe, 'The Peony Lantern'. Matsuda Aoko takes these traditional ghost stories and bends them into contemporary settings with her own sense of intrigue and humour. The short stories are variously gothic and satirical in their feminist reinterpretations. In 'Smartening Up', a young woman, obsessed with her body hair, is visited by her interfering dead aunt, an aunt who has definite opinions about an ex-boyfriend, and money wasted on beauticians and clothes. Mostly though she’s concerned — the young woman is destroying the power of her hair! After a bit of a tussle, the two women settle into a discussion about the aunt’s suicide and a housewife’s lot. It’s a conversation that entwines the legend of Kiyohime and ultimately, triggers a programme of hair restoration for our young heroine. “Let’s become monsters together.” Some ghosts just want to be recognised. 'Quite A Catch' dredges up a ghost from the depths, a beautiful woman who long ago in the past was murdered finds a willing partner in Shigemi who fishes her skeleton from the lake. Haunting, it’s an observant eye on expectation and loneliness. The rakugo (a Japanese form of verbal storytelling) Tenjinyama is the inspiration for the tale 'A Fox’s Life', the story of a striking unusual woman. Brilliant, at school she excels in all her subjects and in sports, always finding a shortcut to problems, finding beautiful solutions with little effort, yet she has no desire to take her learning to the next level. At work, this was no different: everything comes easily to her, but she eschews success. She marries a kind-hearted man, stays home, has children, who grow and leave home. Something remains buried within her — a reticence to fully engage all her skills. “Throughout her life, Kuzuha had always had the feeling that she was just pretending to be a regular woman. Of course, that was the path she had selected as a shortcut, and she had never once doubted her decision had been the right one…one day…it occurred to Kazuha that maybe she really was a fox.” Each story in the collection recounts a woman’s life and her place within contemporary Japanese society with links to folktales of love, woe, revenge and mystery. Running throughout the book is another thread — a fascinating twist which draws some of these stories and characters together. It’s a thread that concerns a factory, populated by both a ghost and living human workforce, producing magical or special items which find their way into the world of the living. What these items represent is never fully articulated, but the idea of this place is intriguing and it seems to represent a bridge between the two worlds of the living and dead — each fascinated by the other.
There are new children’s books arriving at VOLUME every week. Here are a few special ones we think you might like.
Let’s Go Ruru! , written and illustrated by Kate Muir, is a bilingual sturdy board book with lift-the-flaps, bright colours, and bold images perfect for a small one. The text uses repetition and rhythm to keep small ones engaged, and there’s a handy pull-out pronunciation guide. Join the sweet ruru to get dressed ready to venture out.
Little Pea is adorable (the brainchild of Davide Cali, charmingly illustrated by Sébastien Mourrain). In this story, Little Pea, the great artist of postage stamps, opens a drawing school. Creatures come from far and near to study in the hollow of a large tree. Some have no drawing experience, others are confident, some are hestitant. Cricket is careful, worm more free-flowing, while Tarantula just draws dots — no matter what the assignment! The end of year exhibition is approaching and a surprise awaits! Little Pea’s Drawing School is a book that celebrates individuality, learning from each other, and the joy of creativity.
The Magic Cap is absolutely wonderful! With its beautiful illustrations by Charlotte Parent and its charming story by Mireille Messier, this is a standout picture book. It is kind and gentle, intriguing and magical, and compliments these characteristics with a hint of humour. It has a folktale atmosphere, set in a forest with sweet woodland creatures, and the rumour of magical beings. When the children’s pet hedgehog Crispin falls ill, Isaura and Arlo do everything they can to make him better. Nothing works. Magic is what they need! They have to find a gnome! Into the forest they go bowl of milk in their hands. The woodland creatures like it. They try wild berries, but a greedy toad eats them all. What’s left to forage? A mushroom — that’s all! Will it work?
A landmark publication, bringing together oral history and a lifetime of knowledge and research by kaumatua and 'Coaster' Paul Madgwick (Kati Mahaki, Kai Tahu). Beginning with mythology associated with Te Tai Poutini (the West Coast), this richly illustrated work follows the story of human settlement including migration and occupation by different iwi, creation of different Māori settlements, the role of pounamu, the earliest interactions between Pākeha explorers and Ngāi Tahu, the Kai Tahu land sales and Maori reserves, through to the 1998 Ngāi Tahu Settlement and today's challenges and opportunities.
Be wild — read a book!
A selection of books from our shelves and ready for the wilderness of your reading pile. Click through to find out more:
