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6 November 2026
How can I write my review, or live my life, or do anything without repeating myself, I wonder. Here I go again! My life seems to consist of smaller and larger circles of repetition, my days are filled mostly of content indistinguishable from that which filled and will fill other days, barring some disaster or some miracle that is, though I have only my experience of this moment, shaded with what I call memory, inflected with what I think of as anticipation, to give me any idea of this repetition. I do experience repetition, I experience time, as if it actually exists, but how can I bear this? Any generalisation about the state of the world is a subjective state, but I suppose this endless repetition gets things done, I am a cog in the world-machine or else an untoothed wheel spinning needlessly and without traction, it is hard to tell, but I get things done. Repetition is the mode of action, but it causes me more suffering than it should. I think that perhaps I do not like getting things done. I think that I could so easily slip out of this shuddering machine, any thing could provide a way out, observing anything without the illusion of context would release me from its meaning and allow me to see it clearly, without language, without intention, without usefulness, but for what? Would this be the ultimate dislocation from my world or the ultimate dissolution in it? We repeat ourselves to keep the middle way, to preserve the idea that we have of ourselves, or the idea that others have of us. Tara Selter, in Solvej Balle’s seven-part novel On the Calculation of Volume, finds herself trapped in an endlessly repeating 18th of November, or she repeats her presence in what everyone else experiences as a single day. In this second volume, Tara decides to travel through Europe, guided by a meteorological chart, pursuing the experience of a passing year by moving to places where the conditions on the 18th of November resemble those she would associate with a changed season. She travels north to ‘winter’ and south to ‘summer’ and records the fiction of a passing year in a green notebook in a sustained attempt to live against the facts. When the notebook is stolen and does not reappear, Tara concludes, “I have had no seasons. Seasons are not scenes and locations. You cannot construct a year out of fragments of November.” She considers a Roman sestertius that she has with her and “At that moment I felt a void come into being. I felt a loss, a slide, a shift. It was as if a space was opening up, very slowly, not a big space, or at least it didn’t feel big, but I couldn’t close it again.” There is a ‘looseness’ to the world, she realises, and she is simultaneously immersed and separate from it. “I am walking around the streets, superfluous and out of circulation. It is not a disaster. It is not nothing, but it is not much either. Even the sound of my own feet is superfluous. I am walking through a space that ought to be empty. The place I occupy ought to be vacant, but for some inexplicable reason Tara Selter has taken it. I am in the way, I am a foreign body, an error. I am a strange creature who ought not to be among people with a direction.” It is solipsistic to consider myself an intruder on my own absence, as Tara does, but I suppose we are all intruders on our own absence (or absences (it is hard to know whether not existing is entirely a personal thing or something I would share with everything else that did not exist)). Everyone in this 18th of November experiences the day each time the same (there is no reiteration for them, after all), except when Tara intrudes upon their world and they are affected or respond to her. The anomalies she brings to them change their day but have no effect, for there is no day after, or if there is, Tara cannot reach it. What would be the cumulative effect of all these anomalies, the effects of Tara, if these became compound and consequential? She is right to consider herself a monster, after all. What Tara consumes is not renewed, so although it may seem that she is free from the consequences of her actions, the world, however out of joint, offers her no such liberation. Her dilemmas are those in which we all find ourselves all the time, though our lives are constructed in denial of them. We can follow no thought through to its end. We live against the facts in order to stay within the limits of the space where we can get things done. “My time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a vessel, a container,” writes Tara. Each volume of this remarkable book provides a space for our thought, and equipment to stimulate its exercise.
In the week that installment five has landed, I’ve just completed book three. I’m eeking these out between other reading. One: so they remain distinct, and two: so I don’t finish what has been translated and then have an impatient wait for the seventh and final volume. So yes, still loving this stuck-in-November-18th meditation on life, time, and what makes us tick. In Books I and II, Tara was alone, attempting to navigate her way through this strange scenario — time standing still for everyone else but her. Waking to the start of the 18th yet again, the newspaper falling to the floor at the exact same time, the remeeting of acquaintances — for her a remeeting, for them the first time in that day. In the first book Tara tries to explain to her husband Thomas what has happened, but as each morning dawns she finds it harder to explain again, and he understanding but puzzled by her insistence of what is happening with time. In the second book, she decides to travel — to chase the seasons — to find variety in her day, finding ‘winter’ in the north. And at the close this book an obssession with the fall of Rome, trying to summon a reason for the time problem, only to find something more mysterious. A fellow traveller. In Book III, Henry and Tara exchange notes, discuss the autumnal day of 18th of November, and debate the reasons for their quandry. Book III begins as an investigation through two perspectives. Yet it’s not enough to keep the world they are now fragmented from at bay. Henry misses his young son in America, and Tara, her husband Thomas. Each return to their loved ones, promising to meet up again in 100 days. Tara at first starts to explain again each morning to Thomas what is happening, but as the days go by, she feels a terrible weight of responsibility for the confusion she is causing. She retreats once more to the spare room and is a secret within its walls, until a knock on the door announces something unexpected. Olga. Another person stuck in November 18th seeking her help. There are others. Book III widens the field: Tara is no longer just responsible for herself, but as part of a group navigating the world that moves around them. But what can a handful of people do in this stange scenario where they know the future (having lived through it multiple times)? Are they responsible for the actions of others, for accidents or encounters between people? And if they have been upended into this 18th November, why and what should or can they do about it? Is there a purpose or an opportunity to make the world different? By the close of Book III, as the small group try to find certainty in the situation; it feels like nothing is certain. This is an intriguing series, with its layers of thinking about time, our place in the world, our consumption of resources, our tentative hold on time, and what it means to be a human in a world fraught with ambiguities. In these books the mundane, the quotidian, meets the exceptional and philosophically inventive.
(and there is a choice of cover design!)
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
MAY WE FEED THE KING by Rebecca Perry $35
May We Feed the King dances between a historical subject who resists the march of progress and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present, to offer a beguiling meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.
THE DISAPPEARERS by Marlon James $38
’James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange. The Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.’ —Booker Prize judges’ citation
THE TREATY OF WAITANGI COMPANION by Vincent O’Malley and Bruce Stirling $60
Weaving together voices, documents and images from centuries of co-operation, conflict and change, this important book ranges from first contact between Maori and Europeans to today's debates over the place of te Tiriti o Waitangi in our constitutional arrangements. Beautifully presented and fully illustrated.
THE ROUSE by China Miéville $45
“Excellent though all the books on the shortlist are, it seemed only right to give this year's Goldsmiths Prize to the one that, in terms of ambition, bold use of history, linguistic experiment and sheer scale, broke most explosively with expectation.” —Francis Spufford, Goldsmiths Prize judge
THE VALLEY OF UNLIKELY ACQUAINTANCES by Terri Te Tau $38
“This is a real deal Māori sci-fi thriller dripping in small-town charisma, rongoā, and twists. Terri Te Tau somehow manages to prove, with eye-watering brains and a bit of Indigenous futurism, that the highest technology in the cosmos truly is our whakapapa.” —Coco Solid
“The Rouse is a monumental work that combines a sprawling history of Britain’s postcolonial entanglements in the latter half of the twentieth century with speculation about what lies ‘beyond the veil’ of death. China Miéville sets himself the daunting task of describing phenomena that are indescribable, stretching language to its limits and pushing formal and genre boundaries. In a time when much fiction is careful to colour inside the lines, this enormous, exuberant, overflowing book is a reminder that the novel is capable of containing multitudes. Excellent though all the books on the shortlist are, it seemed only right to give this year's Goldsmiths Prize to the one that, in terms of ambition, bold use of history, linguistic experiment and sheer scale, broke most explosively with expectation.” —Goldsmiths Prize judges
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.
This Must Be the Island — Liga Hanai e Motu: Oceanic conversations by John Puhiatau Pule and Gregory O’Brien $70
In 2010, poet-artists John Puhiatau Pule and Gregory O'Brien embarked on a voyage of artmaking and travel around the South Pacific, making collaborative etchings, corresponding, writing poetry and immersing themselves in Moana Oceania. Sixteen years on, their collaboration continues to yield a heady mixture of dreams, memories and a pervasive sense of the joy and wonder of being alive in this part of the world. This Must Be the Island--Liga Hanai e Motu is the story of their creative friendship and an art project as expansive and all-encompassing as the Pacific. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
PUKE by essa may ranapiri $35
A takataapui verse epic that follows two atua waahine living their queer, poorhara lives on a giant Dead Fish. They first meet a million years ago, in the eruption of a volcano. The second time, it's in a liquor store: Hinenuitepo is buying a lighter for Mahuika; Hinemoana is picking up drinks. Before long, they become entangled in rituals of mortality — love, hot chips, a carved bone strap-on, multiple evictions and a new puppy — all while holding down their duties as Death and the Sea. But there is a great sickness rising in them both. The other atua have begun to disappear, and their world is slowly dying. Somewhere, an insidious power waits. As the story shifts between our two lovers, PUKE weaves a modern puuraakau of desire, decay and decolonisation. [Paperback]
>>No relation.
Tapa: Pacific histories in cloth by Nina Tonga, Rachel Yates and Sean Mallon $95
The most significant contribution of knowledge about tapa in a generation, offering new views on its practices, meanings and histories across art, dress, culture and curation. This multi-authored book draws upon the vast collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, illustrating over two hundred tapa from 18 Pacific island nations, from Taiwan to Hawai‘i, to explore its lineages. For centuries, people across Pacific communities have created beautiful and functional tapa cloth from tropical tree bark. Understood by many names, its uses for mats, clothing, ceremony and art are well known and have been further highlighted by the recent revitalisation of customary techniques. Tapa reveals the many creative processes that shape how tapa mediates these Indigenous histories, both in and out of the museum. Placing artists and makers at its centre, the authors and contributors explore the processes and cultural politics of contemporary tapa making alongside experiences of migration, art, dress, conservation and curatorship that reflect the complex social and cultural lives of tapa cloth. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
My Cinema by Marguerite Duras (translated from French by Daniela Shreir) $55
Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni). In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression. Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history. A beautifully designed and produced volume, illustrated with film stills.
”To still be able to hear Marguerite Duras’s voice as she speaks and writes about her filmmaking practice is a gift.” —Bette Gordon, filmmaker
”Both ahead of her time and nostalgically mired in the past, in My Cinema, Duras deconstructs her own methods, going gleefully against the grain in order to ‘destroy’ conventional cinema. A beautifully translated collection of writing by an often maddening genius.” —Lizzie Borden, filmmaker
>>Look inside!
>>Some films by Marguerite Duras.
Iron Lung by Kirstine Reffstrup (translated from Danish by Hunter Simpson) $38
A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic of the early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own, she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed in an iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in an orphanage for boys. The child goes by the name of 'Boy' but is not like the others, as their body seems to transcend the categories of boy or girl. Between these two young people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond that stretches across time and space. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Reading Iron Lung felt like remembering a past life, at once so foreign and familiar. With her lucid, pulsating sentences, as poetic as they are precise, Kirstine Reffstrup pierces a little hole in history and pulls a thin, but shining thread through it: a vital and very moving connection between two distant young children living at the edges of time and normality. The result is a wonderfully singular novel that is both historically rooted and full of queer fabulation, both violent and brimming with a desire for embodiment and connection.' —Jonas Eika, author of After the Sun
'What if bodies were not told as pathologies or perversions but rather as stories of spiders, rivers, eggs, and laboured breaths? With sensuous sensitivity, Iron Lung imagines the queer twinnings that arise between bodies cast aside by the twentieth century.' —Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
'A wonderful book: writing which is so vital and so visual coupled with a story which is strange, psychedelic, precise and filled with melancholy. Virtuosic work.' —Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
The Chancy Now: 120 sonnets by C.K. Stead $25
In the 1970s a young professor, I rescued from a puddle in Princes Street a Penguin of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, dried it and read it, annotating as I went, underlining his thought that one must have chaos within if one is to give birth to a dancing star. At 93, his wife Kay and son Oliver recently dead, writing nothing, C. K. Stead thought there were no more books. Then, ‘alive on pills, / and the surgeon’s knife’, enduring grief and recovery, sonnets began to appear, three or four a week, the poems collected in this volume. Chaos won’t teach a sonnet to limit its lines but every sonnet should have its dancing star. From the ABs under the high ball to Braunias’s lamingtons, from Dionysus to Guide Rangi, from the Uber driver (‘He’s a Wittgenstein man so we get along perfectly / passing over in silence what can’t be discussed’) to the author (‘My Chookspeak’s better than my French because I learned it / in the right way, by ear, not off the page’), 120 sonnets reveal a poet battered, bruised and still in his prime. After a sonnet tending to self-pity and crap I consign it to the bin and set off knowing today’s wild northerly wind and rough seas at Kohi will knock me into shape. [Paperback]
'If we were able to talk comfortably of an Australasian literature, rather than its Australian and New Zealand sub-branches, then C. K. Stead would be regarded as one of the dominant writers of the past half century . . . a towering talent, cosmopolitan, lucidly intelligent. Few writers on either side of the Tasman have matched Stead's multi-faceted achievement.' —Peter Pierce, Sydney Morning Herald
'Stead writes the way Torvill and Dean skate. He makes it look so easy you don't realise until afterwards that very few people can put together such luminous sentences.' —Iain Sharp
Electric Spark: The enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson $30
“A revolutionary book. When Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, it was recognised as unique — something that quite simply had never been done before. Wilson's achievement in Electric Spark is equally remarkable: an entirely original method of life writing which leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust. Electric Spark heaves with ghosts and furies, burglaries and blackmail. It is disquieting and absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn't put me down.” —Lisa Hilton, Spectator
”Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam — and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
>>World-beating buster-upper.
>>Odd things happened when she was around.
>>Life echoes fiction (or vice versa).
>>Right into the deep end.
>>Spark meets her match.
>>The matter of fact.
>>Twin menace.
>>More than nerve.
>>Strike a few Sparks.
>>Also still available in hardback.
>>Other remarkable biographies by Frances Wilson.
Anya and the Light Above the Ocean by Amelia Giudici $22
When her scientist mum disappears one night, Anya sets out to find her in the middle of a storm. Taking a boat out to sea, she encounters a strange window of light hovering above the waves. Transfixed, she reaches out to touch it. Moments later, Anya wakes in her boat. The sea now eerily silent. With her mum still missing, Anya is packed off to stay with the odd, unwelcoming Mr and Mrs Ungsworth. Trapped under their watchful gaze, she uncovers a shocking secret: the light has split her into two people. Anya escapes and returns home — to find another girl, identical to her, living there. Confronted with this impossible situation, the girls soon realise the organisation their mum worked for, Janus, is seeking to harness the power of the mysterious light and is now after them. Thrown headfirst into the perilous world of Janus, both versions of Anya must now team up to escape them. But can Anya’s battle to find herself also lead her back to her mother? [Paperback]
Birdlands: Up close and personal with the birds of remote New Zealand by Edin Whitehead $50
In the most remote outposts of Aotearoa, our islands are populated not with people, but with birds. From the storm-lashed Subantarctic Islands in the deep south to the scattered volcanic islands of Tikapa Moana/Hauraki Gulf in the north, Birdlands offers a rare passage through the largely inaccessible places where birds still thrive. Guided by scientist and writer Edin Whitehead, Birdlands is part natural history and part love letter to these remote edges and their inhabitants, with stunning photography capturing the wonder and urgency of life among albatrosses, petrels, penguins, kakariki, kiwi and more. This is New Zealand as few of us will ever see it, wild and fragile, and a beautiful reminder that while these birdlands are not ours to visit, they are ours to protect. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black woman in the Romantic archive by Mathelinda Nabugodi $35
Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats — the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world. Their writings are associated with the sublime power of nature and revolutionary politics. But these literary icons also lived through the climax of the transatlantic slave economy. They witnessed both the explosion of the abolition movement — and the reactionary formation of white supremacist ideologies. The Trembling Hand examines how the lives and works of six major Romantic authors were entangled with the racial politics of their era. Mathelinda Nabugodi studies manuscripts and archival treasures — a teacup, a baby rattle, a lock of hair — to recover startling links between the poetry of freedom and the practices of slavery in the Romantic period. [Now in paperback]
”Propelled by a voice that is urgent, exasperated and eager to share what it knows. Her account of Byron shows why she wrote this book, and also her ability to argue with herself, to dramatise her own doubts. That's a rare gift for any critic. Her passion, and her learning, ensure that one will never look at these poets in quite the same way.” —The New York Times
”Ambitious and ingenious, Mathelinda Nabugodi engages the reader both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past. A voice sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter.” —Colm Toibin
>>And also still available in hardback.
What a Time to Be Alive! Scenes from a strange age by Marina Hyde $38
What a Time to be Alive! So lettuce remember Liz Truss, relive the last days of the Tories, meet the guy they called No-Drama Starmer, and succumb to hyper-resistant superbug Nigel Farage. Travel stateside to meet our supranational Silicon Valley overlords, Donald Trump and his cavalcade of henchmen — then head for infinity and beyond with Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos. Experience testing times for misunderstood men in television, create wonder in every moment with Meghan, and relive the horror of the Gwyneth Paltrow ski massacre trial. Truly, these are times that make you want to put your hands over your eyes, even when your hands are already over your eyes. Collected from Hyde’s weekly Guardian columns. [Paperback]
'Britain’s foremost living satirist.' —Vogue
'Hyde's columns are the solid-silver lining of Britain's political shitstorm.' —Caitlin Moran
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.
On the Calculation of Volume: V by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith) $33
Tara Selter has become someone new. It becomes clear just how ridiculous it is: life in progressive time. Or was. Before we came to a halt. How foolishly one can spend a life in a time that moves forward. The nonsense of the ceaseless grind. Tara has returned to Thomas, but she is no longer the person he remembers. She has now spent twelve years in the eighteenth of November, while Thomas has endlessly repeated his identical day. He struggles to reconcile Tara as she is now with the Tara he loves. And so she rejoins her new friends, with whom she finds companionship and understanding. They set off for Val Benoît, where other time-stranded people have created a community built on curiosity, conversation and even optimism. As the eighteenth of November continues to expand, Tara's connection with those around her deepens, and a life beyond Thomas comes unexpectedly into view. [Paperback]
'The greatest literary work of the 21st century so far. These books will be seen by future scholars as the work which best captured the soul of our times.' —The Herald
"The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle's miraculous septology has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight. On the Calculation of Volume is a literary phenomenon nearly 40 years in the making. It's a speculative masterwork" —Cat Zhang, New York Magazine
"The novel's propulsive imaginative brilliance lies in Tara's metaphoric search for a language with which to communicate the sheer incomprehensibility of her condition." —Morten Hoi Jensen, The Washington Post
"What the best novels can do is open up spaces. And she has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible. I think it's a fantastic book." —Karl Ove Knausgaard
"Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time-and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day." —Hernan Diaz
”Each volume of this remarkable book provides space for our thoughts, and equipment to stimulate their exercise.” —Thomas
>>The New Directions edition will be here soon, if you prefer that.
>>Catch up on any volumes you have missed, or start if you haven’t started.
Opening Night by Sara Baume $38
'I met Mollie's paintings before I met Mollie.' Shortly after the imposed isolation of the pandemic, Sara Baume came across a painting at a pop-up exhibition in a renovated shed in rural West Cork. It so intrigued her that she was inspired to make contact with the artist. Mollie Douthit, a North Dakotan exile, was living and working alone in a log cabin down a ravaged laneway surrounded by rugged coastline. Sara and Mollie discovered they had much in common — a dysfunctional attitude towards companionship, a devotion to the daily rituals of their respective art practices, an affinity with nature. They started to meet every month for soup and punishing swims in the Atlantic. Sara fell under the spell of Mollie's paintings, pictures that welded memory and reality, and gradually started to write about them, curious as to whether any particular insight might be provided by the intimacy of friendship with the artist, and whether it might be possible to craft a book in the style of the paintings. But what she had not anticipated was that a settled period in her own life would coincide with a period of tumultuous change for Mollie, and soon she found herself squabbling with more complex ideas, about community and nationality, about neurosis and mysticism, about love and pain and the power of art. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Sara Baume is a writer's writer, able to clothe her insights on life, art and human connection in beautifully evocative language. There are few living writers who can artistically convey compassion in a single sentence. Sara has given us all the gift of friendship with this book, but most importantly, has allowed us the privilege of getting to know Mollie through the creative lens of an unreliable memory.” —Derek Owusu
”Opening Night is such a beautifully and carefully observed book. I felt like I was in conversation with Baume's thoughts the entire time I was reading it. This book made me think deeply about my own friendships, my creative practice and the place I've come to call home and, for this, I am profoundly grateful. No one knows their way round a quietly profound sentence quite like Sara Baume does.” —Jan Carson
”Sara Baume's Opening Night is a unique and moving portrait of a friendship between an artist and a writer. It's so intimate and honest I felt bereft when I finished it. In her compelling, concise prose, Baume evokes what it means to devote your daily life to conjuring something new and true — and how complex and demanding an activity that is. I've never read anything like it.” —Jennifer Higgie
”In this beautifully written and resonating book, Sara Baume has created an archive via the frame of friendship. Opening Night captures the mystery, infatuation, fantasy, and doubling that occurs in artmaking and between new friends. It is an impressive and generous work, chronicling the pandemic years with fine detail, questions, observations. I had the feeling, while reading, that I was encountering something completely of our time, something that will be read in the future.” —Lauren Aimee Curtis
>>A Fierce friendship.
>>A book in the style of a painting.
The Treaty of Waitagi Companion by Vincent O’Malley and Bruce Stirling $60
Weaving together voices, documents and images from centuries of co-operation, conflict and change, this important book ranges from first contact between Maori and Europeans to today's debates over the place of te Tiriti o Waitangi in our constitutional arrangements. Rather than offering a single narrative, Vincent O'Malley and Bruce Stirling bring readers close to the historical record itself. They draw on the words of key figures, from William Hobson and Hone Heke to Dame Whina Cooper, Sir Edward Taihakurei Durie and Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke. These voices trace the story from te Tiriti's signing in 1840 through war and land loss, Maori renaissance and Waitangi Tribunal inquiries, and on to the debates that continue to shape Aotearoa today. Ever more relevant, this browsable edition is beautifully presented and fully illustrated. [Wrappered flexibound]
>>Look inside.
Consciousness: A book of thinking by Roger Horrocks $38
What is consciousness, and why has itbecome such a controversial subject? Consciousness has been described as “simultaneously the most familiar and the most mysterious thing inthe universe.” It is something we experience in all our waking moments, yet science still struggles to agree about what it is or how it has arisen. Among the many controversies covered by the book is the current debate over artificial intelligence. Can non-biological creatures such as robots share thepower that we call consciousness? This ‘Book of Thinking’ takes an exceptionally broad approach by exploring what science, philosophy, and the arts have to say about consciousness. Sometimes these traditions clash and collide in their views, but each yields rich insights. The book presents a range of innovative ways to understand the nature of subjective experience. [Paperback]
Stations by Louise Kennedy $37
In 1982, Róisín and Red meet as teenagers in their hometown in Ireland. Red's reputation for trouble might precede him, but Róisín finds in him an intelligent and funny — if unlikely — friend. When a brush with the law pushes Red into a corner, he escapes their town and his family for good to start a new life in England. As the years pass, they grow up and apart. Despite Red's particular gift for disappearing, they remain tethered to one another, a fragile thread holding their once fierce friendship together. When Róisín arrives in London to spend Christmas with her estranged father, she finds herself swept up once more into Red's storm. Róisín longs for the closeness they once had, but Red continues to travel away from her — and as the past weighs on the present, Róisín wonders if she'll ever reach Red where he is. Stations is a devastating story of love and friendship, and the choices we blithely make when we are young, unaware that the consequences will reverberate throughout our lives. [Paperback]
”Louise Kennedy's brilliant Stations is a moving and immersive novel about first love, addiction, and regret. Smart, propulsive, and emotionally powerful, this narrative is a transcendent exploration of yearning, transformation and rescue.” —Min Jin Lee
”You can love Stations for the grit and nuance of Roisin's voice and for the 'heart-scalding' story she has to tell, but I loved it for the way it holds a national sorrow. Barry, Red, Muiris are some of Ireland's many lost boys, and this book is a lovely work of mourning and reclamation.” —Anne Enright
”Full of startling insight and rich in social detail, this exceptionally strong second novel emphatically confirms Kennedy's place in the front rank of Irish fiction.” —Times Literary Supplement
>>Thanks to Barry’s Tea.
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare $28
The legacy of William Blake stretches 200 years to today not only through poetry and art but traditions of social, spiritual, sexual and political noncomformity. Philip Hoare drags himself from the company of whales and follows Derek Jarman to follow Paul Nash to photograph the megaliths at Avebury and towards a shared encounter with the luminous William Blake, electrically alive and inspiring to them all. Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the unfettered genius of William Blake. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up 20th century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. As Hoare shows, art and poetry still have the power to make change. [Now in paperback]
'Wild, free, exhilaratingly beautiful, and so alive to the past that everyone and everything seems to be happening right now on the page. I cannot think of a more original writer at work today ... To look at English art through his eyes is to see more than you ever could before.' —Laura Cumming
'A dazzlingly written and wildly eccentric mashup of biography, history and memoir ... Hoare picks up the pieces and rearranges them in a dazzling new pattern, and the result is one of the most original and uncategorisable works I've read for a long time.' —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times
'Everything exists at once: horror, stars, trees, art, love, and it's up to us to behold it all. Which is exactly what Philip Hoare does ... He really sets out to behold it all.' —Helena de Groot, Poetry Foundation
>>Slumber on the banks.
>>Swimming or drowning.
>>The ecstasy of art.
>>Why William Blake became a queer icon.
>>William Blake’s radicalism.
>>William Blake vs. the World by John Higgs.
Butterflies and Moths of Aotearoa by Liv Sisson $50
Aotearoa is home to colourful, curious species that are variously conspicuous and covert. We have world-famous monarchs, a gold-flecked moth as old as dinosaurs, butterflies that flash from purple to orange, and a lime-green moth said to bring messages from the spirit realm. But where do they live, how did they get here and what do they do when we aren't looking? Discover how to find, identify and support these remarkable creatures in this practical guide from Liv Sisson, author of the very popular Fungi of Aotearoa. Featuring hundreds of full-colour photographs, diagrams, fun facts and up-to-date descriptions, Butterflies and Moths of Aotearoa will delight any curious mind, and inspire fresh adventures in your own backyard. [Flexibound]
>>Look inside.
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid $30
In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time. With startling modernity, the people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of fragments of their everyday lives. Immortalised in clay and stone are intimate details from 4000 years ago. We find accounts of an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, a parent desperately trying to soothe a baby with a lullaby, the imprint of a child's teeth as it sank them into their clay homework, and countless receipts for beer. In Between Two Rivers, Moudhy Al-Rashid examines what these people chose to preserve in their own words about their lives, creating the first historical records and allowing us to brush hands with them thousands of years later. [Paperback]
”Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.” —George Monbiot
”I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves. There are beautiful descriptions of what it is to be pregnant, to give birth, to have small children, to love a dog. I love the way in which she's not just writing about priests or kings, but is giving us a clay tablet on which a little child has bitten, so you have the imprint of his teeth. It melts away the sense of time.” —Tom Holland
”A tender, moving and vivid history of ancient Mesopotamia and how it still speaks to us. This is so my jam.” —Robert Macfarlane
>>The stories we tell become the world we inhabit.
>>Cuneiform explained.
Styx: The river by Nikita Gill $40
The firstborn child of Titans, Styx is revered as the first of her kind — until she is eclipsed and forgotten amid her scores of siblings, the Oceanids and the Potamoi. Coming of age in a world simmering with paranoia and unspoken fear of Kronos, the volatile and unchecked god-king, Styx learns to conceal the rage ignited by her growing disillusionment with her parents and her vain and unkind siblings. Instead, she finds solace and sisterhood in her cousin, Asteria. Together, they train in the arts of creation and magic. And as they seek to learn their divine purpose and their place within the Titanomachy, they discover both the joy sparked by true love and the fierce resilience birthed from motherhood. In this verse retelling and adaptation of a Greek myth of sisterhood, identity, love, and war, Styx must carve her own path to womanhood — and ultimately, godhood. [Paperback]
”One of the things I loved best was the unapologetic and comprehensive focus on the female experience hidden in plain view in these ancient stories. We have Styx and Asteria's childhood friendship as a bond that rivals their eventual marriages, we have mothers, sisters, grandmothers and all the complexities, love and rivalry of those relationships. The book is in many ways a love story revolving around a female friendship. It absolutely broke my heart. It also contains a devastating warning — if as a woman you serve the Patriarchy, it will devour you.' —Elodie Harper
>>6000 siblings.
>>Also by Nikita Gill: Hekate.
The Adventure Illusion: Why life is not a journey by Simon Gusman and Arjen Kleinherenbrink $45
The Adventure Illusion dismantles one of contemporary culture's most seductive myths: that life itself should be an epic journey of trials, transformation, and triumph. The call to adventure saturates domains ranging from media to marketing, politics to business, and tourism to therapy. Drawing on existentialist philosophy, narrative theory, and cultural critique, this book reveals how the hero's journey has evolved from ancient mythology and medieval romance to a modern ideology that promises meaning and destiny where none inherently exist. Adventure's hidden costs are exposed through rigorous philosophical argument and detailed analyses of video games, corporate advertisements, social media behavior, and more. Across a variety of domains, adventure consistently fosters unattainable expectations, individualises systemic problems, legitimises violence through redemptive narratives, and forces marginalised lives into supporting roles. Against both rigid life scripts and postmodern chaos, The Adventure Illusion proposes adventurelessness — a liberating acceptance of contingency and plurality beyond the demand for heroic purpose. At once philosophically precise and culturally urgent, this work challenges readers to imagine stories and lives that no longer need quests to matter. [Paperback]
”The Adventure Illusion offers a philosophically serious diagnosis of the nearly ubiquitous fantasy that life itself has the structure of a meaningful story. Gusman and Kleinherenbrink show how the temptation to read existence retrospectively as an adventure distorts our understanding of freedom, responsibility, and failure. What follows is an unsentimental account of contingency that nonetheless takes seriously the role stories play in our self conceptions.” —Jon Cogburn, Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University
Crack the Case: Mysteries at the Museum by Thea Hay and Facundo Aguirre $40
Solve mysteries and stop dastardly deeds with the help of your trusty Detective Torch. Shine the images on every page to create and crack puzzles, uncovering clues in a race against time. In Mysteries at the Museum, take on the role of renowned detective Inspector Renoir as you chase down a notorious art thief. This book contains three individual mysteries and over 25 puzzles, all part of a single thrilling story. Start the story, slot the Image Disc into your Detective Torch, and get cracking! On each page, you'll find a different puzzle for you and your torch to solve. With the torch switched on, rotate the disc to project the right image. On and off the page, use it to unlock a safe, shine a light on suspicious items, or even examine fingerprints at the scene of the crime. In the hands of an expert detective, there's no end to what your torch can tackle! But the torch isn't the only tool in your crime-fighting toolkit: the sturdy book-box doubles up as a map of the famed art museum where the heist takes place. This will come in handy on select puzzles that require a birds'-eye-view, so you have everything you need to unravel the mystery and catch the thief. Alongside the puzzles and the detective story, you'll find non-fiction entries on real-life art heists, crimefighting techniques, and even infamous blunders by criminal not-quite-masterminds! Crack the Case: Mysteries at the Museum is a one-of-a-kind interactive adventure that is sure to appeal to gamers, codebreakers and detectives-in-the-making, complete with timeless illustrations and memorable characters. The game is afoot — will you take up the chase? Includes: A gift-ready book-box with illustrated puzzle map; A high-quality Detective Torch; Three Image Discs; 64-page illustrated book, containing three mysteries to solve. [Boxed set]
>>Look inside!
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
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30 October 2026
My life is a sort of an orbit, he thought. My life is a repetitive circular thing, or something very closely approximating a circle, not that an orbit needs to be circular, necessarily, but I think mine is. How many times will I pass this same point in the geography of my life, so to call it, how many times will I pass by, caught in the momentum of my orbit, unable to touch what I observe of my life below, changing slowly, or fast, as it does by the influence of various forces that I also cannot touch. But what am I if I am remote from what I have just called my life, he thought, what am I, the orbiting observer, if I am not my life, if I am orbiting above my life as the astronauts or cosmonauts in the space station in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital orbit above the planet Earth, orbiting and observing, enthralled by the attractive wonderful damaged planet below, remote from it but falling always towards it though never getting closer, in an equilibrium of gravity and momentum. An orbit, after all, he thought, is always firstly an act of attention. “Is it necessarily the case that the further you get from something the more perspective you have on it?” Harvey asks in the novel, as the astronauts stand in awe at the systems and patterns below them. “If you could get far enough away from Earth you’d be able finally to understand it.” Are understanding and participation mutually exclusive, he wondered, then, in my life, on this planet, necessarily, or is participation in itself a form of understanding, albeit enabled by an inescapable narrowing of perspective? As I circle in my orbit, far above my life, falling towards the object of my attention but carried away anyway by momentum, there in the equilibrium of my distance, I see there are no borders, no edges, no entities other than a oneness, if that could even be thought of as an entity, no entities other than those that exist in our minds, arbitrary borders, arbitrary edges, arbitrary entities, not seen from above but only by the participants in the struggle that they enable, the struggle that they condemn us to maintain. The moonshot is the opposite of an orbit. We divide ourselves with edges to get things done, to act one thing upon another, to intend and do, to participate or at least be aware of what we think of as our participation to the limited extent that we are somehow aware. This is how we get things done. This also is how harm is done. Up here in my orbit I observe how tiny all that is, I understand to the extent that I am remote, I am in a plotless place, I am in a place where everything is in an indefinite tense, where everything is a submission to a larger system, somewhere that I am hardly me. “As long as you stay in orbit you will be OK,” says the astronaut. “You will not feel crestfallen, not once.” I do not want to return, he thought. I do not want to leave my space of suspension, though “our hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it.”
We’ve discovered Miss Cat, and Miss Cat is discovering the truth behind the case of Mixus Maximus’s missing canary. Miss Cat runs her detective agency out of an old dairy.
”Her nose was filled by the smell of stinky old milk. Sometimes that was all the breakfast she got.”
Business is slow. Miss Cat wonders if all the criminals had gone on holiday. When the wealthy Mr Maximus laments the kidnapping of Harry, his sweet canary, Miss Cat sets to work.
With not much to go, she starts with Doris, the daughter-in-law and gifter of the canary. A simple enquiry about Harry’s origins leads to a surprising abandoned pet shop and someone trying to warn Miss Cat away. Back to Doris’s house she goes, despite the dog in residence. Luckily, Miss Cat is nimble at climbing tall trees, paw-quiet on the rooftop, good at spying, and has perky ears to overhear. Although a dog will also smell a rat… a cat. Miss Cat smells a rat! Something is not adding up. With the help of her librarian friend Griselda, she looks into the past of Mr Maximus or Mixus the Magnificant, the name he was once famously known by. It’s time to go undercover, do some sneaking, and find out what’s really going on.
“Miss Cat was an expert at the art of disguise….Staking out her own client was an odd thing to do, but she had a sense that something strange was going on.”
Will Miss Cat untangle the secret of Mixus Maximus? What’s with Doris’s slippery behaviour? Who tried to scare her in the abandoned petshop? And what connects a magical jewel with a kidnapped canary?
This is a delightful junior chapter book, comic-style, with a combination of paragraph blocks and speech bubbles. It has just the right amount of mystery and surprise, a little intrepidity, and snippets of wit. Miss Cat is an excellent girl hero in her perky-eared hoodie, with all the best cat qualities, curiousity, smarts, and a good dash of ethics mixed in. This French crime caper will keep both adults and children hooked. It’s a tale with a twist, snappy dialogue and charming characters — an octopus (milk)bar-tender — who I am sure will surface in more stories. The writing from French author Jean-Luc Fromental is superb, and Joëlle Jolivet’s detailed, lively illustrations are spot on. I couldn’t imagine Miss Cat looking any different. This is the first in a series of three. All available now for delightful discovery.
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
U.X.O. by Brannavan Gnanalingam $30
“Brannavan Gnanalingam has become well known for gripping, occasionally gristly, writing about New Zealand society. From the first page U.X.O. he ups the stakes by writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War. And yet, somehow, the book is a page turner.” —Murdoch Stephens
THE BEADED CURTAIN by Lloyd Jones $40
‘A beaded curtain shifts and clatters in the doorway of Lloyd Jones’ mind, filtering early life, explorations, hauntings, and the terrible violences — domestic and global — that we too quickly turn from. This compelling narrative testifies to a writer’s vital work: paying attention and asking we do the same.’ — Kate De Goldi
BLACK BAG by Luke Kennard $38
”Luke Kennard’s of-the-moment satire considers anonymity and disgust, the online rackets of cryptocurrency and energy drinks, and what it means to find love in our unstable times. There’ll be a lot of discussion about what the novel has to say about the state of modern masculinity (fractious; confused) — we also admired its sharply crafted sentences, memorable sex scenes, and humour.” —judges’ citation on short-listing the book for the 2026 Booker Prize
END TIMES FASCISM, And the fight for the living world by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor $40
”Their analysis of contemporary fascism is grounded and convincing — and I love the explosion of language that comes from their conversations, their passion, and their insistence that we make a vibrant common life on earth that reverses climate catastrophe and affirms social and economic equality." —Judith Butler
DIRTY WORK: The Taxpayers’ Union and New Zealand’s hard right by Nicky Hager $35
An exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right, to use race politics to create division, and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. Gives insight into the thinking behind the current right-wing ‘vote splitting’ campaign. "I do not care and New Zealanders do not care about this topic." —Christopher Luxon
All narratives are acts not only of remembering but of forgetting: of the replacement of experiences by the stories we bring ourselves to tell about them. The narrator in U.X.O. constructs a series of ‘drafts’ about his experiences as a Tamil Indian member of the Indian Peace Keeping Force that committed atrocities against Sri Lankan Tamils during the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983—2009). Each draft comes out as a slippery amalgam of confession and denial, and, although ostensibly at attempt to tell about his experiences as a soldier for his grandson’s school project in Aotearoa, the trauma of the narrator’s complicity exerts such pressure on his texts that the results are something else entirely. Formally inventive, deeply considered, and beautfully written.
“In U.X.O. Gnanalingam cuts to the heart of conflict and war crimes, drawing on UN reports and family history, as well as literature and analytical histories. This is a novel with rich characters, writing that grabs you and doesn’t look away from the violence: its consequences for both victim and perpetrator.” —Stella
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.
Riverwork by Lisa Robertson $45
Some ruins are invisible. Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, Lucy Frost has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris's academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt's youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river's documentary traces in the works of the great chroniclers of Parisian life, uncovering a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers — and laundries. She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river's laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost. Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Lisa Robertson is one of those writers who seems to invent a new genre with each book.' —Marco Gluhaich, Frieze
'The work of laundering, the work of revolution, and the work of writing fold into the many layers of the Bievre, and Robertson's geologic style plays as much with place as it does with the scales of time and historical duration.' —Nicodemus Nicoludis, Bomb
'One of the refrains in Riverwork - for there are many, as is characteristic of Robertson's iterative, accumulative style — is that age-old Marxist maxim: the formation of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world. It is an aphorism Lucy invokes more than once, almost as a talisman for her writing and her aesthetics. No body-mind split obtains here; indeed, the body with all its effluvia is a kind of pulsating mind.' —Alex Tan, The Baffler
'What that body desires is the corpus of this book: to unstitch the hems of concepts, and to find there and reveal an erotics of reading that brings one into contact with the desirous bodies of others, living and dead. Desirous of sex, knowledge, aesthetics and revolution. It's an appealing proposition.' —John Douglas Millar, e-flux
>>Aging, wandering, bodies.
Golden Crumbs by Mary Ruefle $48
In Golden Crumbs, Mary Ruefle, a master of the absurd aphorism and philosophical curio, shows us ancient anchovies, poets aspiring to be birds, a cryalogue, powdered glass for dinner, friends who don't read your poems, lovers, big houses, blue houses, big mountains and more, in a voice that is irreverent, philosophical, inimitable: world-making and world-breaking. The kinship between people, animals and landscapes is lightly, thoughtfully, crisply rendered, with emotional depths that she drops through, with ease, like a penny in a well. These texts are fun, funny, moving, melancholic and full of games, Ruefle's voice and style enacting a playful magic that allows us to query art and ourselves in equal measure. This volume brings together for the first time three of Mary Ruefle's collections of prose: The Most of It, My Private Property, and The Book. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Ruefle's work is funny, surprising, melancholy and beautiful. It veers between inventive slants on mundanity (an encounter with a street-cleaning truck) and altogether more high-concept ideas (a land overrun by clouds). Her nearest neighbours, I would say, are Lydia Davis, Donald Barthelme and Italo Calvino. Like each of them, she is an experimental writer in the truest sense: she constantly tries stuff out and it might not always work. But when it does you experience the thrill of feeling new ground being broken.' —Chris Power, Observer
'Ruefle has excelled in writing agile, syncopated free verse, but her prose poems are even more unusual. Her investigations in the genre have yielded a sound all her own. You hear in these new poems how poetic prose can absorb and parody the regular prose of daily life: articles, advertisements, letters to the editor, legal documents, business correspondence.' —Jim Schley
>>Collected quirks.
The Fathership by Glenn Bech (translated from Danish by Hazel Evans) $48
This object, a novel, a letter, a self-realisation project, a final reckoning, a murder and a rebirth, a documentation, a work of art, an interactive gravestone... redemption, at last. When Glenn is five years old and his younger brother, René, is three, their father commits suicide. In the void left by this incomprehensible loss, the family is shaped by a succession of men who move in and out of their lives. Deconstructing the enormous, destructive power unleashed by suicide, Glenn Bech attempts to find a language for a past that refuses to be remembered. Through fragments of poetry, letters, and home-video transcripts, 'The Fathership is a brutal and dazzling work of social realism that stretches the definitions of autofiction to breaking point; a sorrowful and furious documentation of a family in crisis and a psychological search for a father known only through his absence. [Paperback]
‘An utter masterpiece, propelling its author towards the peak of literary accomplishment… The Fathership is a wild, experimental and genre-bending novel. Virtually every single page takes the reader by surprise.’ —Henriette Bacher Lind, Jyllands Posten
‘Can an author of autofiction write honestly about their own family without hanging said family out to dry? Especially when the story in question concerns the suicide of the author’s father, his mother’s suicide attempt, his former and current stepfathers’ abuse and his little brother’s behavioural problems. Having now read The Fathership my answer to that question is: if you can write with as much love, care and poetic sensitivity about such a family as Glenn Bech does in his debut novel, then it’s not a question of hanging anyone out to dry, but a beautiful and painful attempt to heal – for everyone involved.’ —Amalie Langballe, Weekendavisen
Killing Spree by Jorie Graham $44
Jorie Graham has long used her remarkably self-renewing gifts to confront the threats posed to the planet and to our humanity. Her recent work — collected in [To]The Last [Be] Human — followed by the acclaimed To 2040 — constitute a wake-up call regarding the ecological, technological, spiritual and political risks we face in the 'new world' we are creating. Graham now speaks to that world in 2026, with particular focus on the forces of destruction we have unleashed across the globe. Urgent and unflinching, these poems test how the human spirit might endure under conditions set to undo it. Killing Spree is a book of vigilance and resistance, insisting that imagination and love remain forces of survival. Here, at the height of her powers, Graham offers not consolation but clarity, guiding us through catastrophe toward what cannot be taken from us. One of the most celebrated living American poets — winner of the Forward Prize 2012 and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1996 — presents a poetry against numbness, insisting on the need to understand, respond to and act upon political reality in her new collection, as confrontationally titled as it is scrupulously crafted. [Paperback]
Shortlisted for the 2026 T.S. Eliot Prize.
'What makes her work required reading is her readiness to go where angels fear to write, to do the terrifying work of visualising the future.' —Kate Kellway, The Observer
>>The world.
>>When the end starts.
>>Hell in a go-bag.
Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin $30
In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who ‘breed’ women to be perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom for all. Originally published in 1984, but somehow increasingly relevant. [Paperback]
”Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy, a classic text of angry feminism, is also an exemplary experiment in speculative fiction, deftly and implacably pursuing both a scientific hypothesis and an ideological hypothesis through all their social, moral, and emotional implications.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
”Less well known than the The Handmaid's Tale but just as apocalyptic in its vision, Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue records female tribulation in a world where women have no public rights at all. Elgin's heroines do, however, have one set of weapons — words of their own.” —New York Times Book Review
>>Creating a feminist language from scratch.
>>Frustration with language.
Peasants: Makers of the wodern world by Maryam Aslany $40
For centuries, peasants stood at the heart of human society: feeding empires, leading revolutions, building modern states. Industrial modernity forced them into the shadows, replaced in our imagination by machines and megafarms. But the elimination of the peasantry is a myth. Today, peasants make up roughly a quarter of humanity. They underpin the global economy, stabilise food systems and protect fragile ecosystems. Peasants hold up the modern world, yet their labour and voices have been hidden in plain sight. Maryam Aslany restores the peasantry to the centre of our global story. She embarks on an epic journey across three continents into some of the most remote places on earth — from India's sugarcane fields to Cambodia's rice plains, Peru's cocaine valleys and Ghana's cocoa belt — travelling deep into the landscapes where global supply chains begin. Here, she uncovers the lives behind the world's most vital commodities. She speaks to farmers, smugglers and traffickers. Men driven to extremism or suicide by failing livelihoods, and women forced to bear the burden of agricultural labour. Families on the brink of survival. As our demand for cheap goods intensifies, our most vital and innovative workforce is being driven towards collapse. The consequences are already starting to show: food insecurity, mass migration, ecological collapse. Far from being a relic of our past, the peasantry is essential to our future. [Paperback]
”On each page of this remarkable book, Aslany marshals evidence to counter received wisdom about the inevitable extinction of global peasantry. As we drift into a world of megacities, she shows how cultural and intellectual forces across the political spectrum conspire to render another quarter of contemporary humanity invisible, with catastrophic consequences for our future. Shifting registers, from deep history to first-hand encounters with farmers and landscapes across the world, Aslany builds an argument of astonishing scope and consistency. There is also a miraculous deftness of touch to her writing, which makes the argument of Peasants not just forceful, but riveting to read. This is a major work, bound to ruffle feathers and stir debate.” —David Wengrow
”An out-and-out masterpiece.” —William Dalrymple
”Peasants transformed the world in the past, and their views on fairness and sustainability will matter more than ever to shape the twenty-first century. A fascinating book, and a must-read.” —Thomas Piketty
On the Mark: A history of punctuation, from Ancient Egypt to the emoticon by Florance Hazrat $55
Why does this sentence start with a capital letter? Why is this one broken up — and why does it end in a question mark? Does anyone really know what semicolons are for; why are italics italicised, and why do words have spaces between them? Punctuation turns written words into meaningful language, inflecting them with nuance and tone: it can be the difference between a nice surprise! And a nasty ending... Florence Hazrat's ground-breaking history of punctuation stretches from the ancient past to into the digital realms of today, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the rise of the emoji, the birth of the printing press to the death of the Oxford Comma. In this definitive biography of the marks that give voice to our written words, and the characters that have shaped their usage, Hazrat reveals their richly storied past and how punctuation is evolving and more important than ever as we move from the printed page to the digital screen. A deeply researched treasure trove that wears its knowledge lightly, On the Mark is a fascinating odyssey through time and place for language lovers everywhere. [Hardback]
”This wonderful history of punctuation is also a history of the world. In Hazrat's hands, every story has a point, and every point a story.” —Simon Garfield
Lo-TEK. Water. A field guide for TEKnology by Julia Watson, Lina Muller, Piera Wolf and Stephanie Specht $100
This book reveals how Indigenous innovations — like floating farms, tidal fish traps, and aquifer recharge systems — have sustained civilisations for millennia by working with nature, not against it. Far from relics, these systems offer dynamic, adaptable solutions for the climate crisis of today. Structured to bridge past and future, the author Julia Watson dissolves the divide between technology and ecology, between ancestral wisdom and digital innovation. The TEKnological Renaissance it celebrates redefines water as an intelligent force that can shape resilient cities and landscapes. Aquatic infrastructure is reframed — from extractive and industrial into regenerative and evolving — designed to sustain life for generations. Co-authored with Indigenous knowledge-keepers and with a foreword by Dr. Lyla June Johnson (Diné/Tsétsehésthese), this captivating read investigates traditional hydrological technologies across diverse ecosystems, from salty coastal reefs to freshwater wetlands. Discover Mexico's chinampas, China's dike-ponds, Bangladesh's floating farms and Micronesia's tidal traps. Shifting focus from the past to the present and future, it also showcases 22 groundbreaking contemporary TEK projects-including Peru's reed-insulated housing, Thailand's terraced rooftop farms, and China's Sponge Cities-proving TEK continues to drive transformative design. This is both a field guide and a manifesto: a call to architects, planners, and communities to design with water's elemental intelligence and build future worlds that are rooted in resilience. Witness a paradigm shift for architects and policymakers seeking biocultural resilience and regenerative urban futures. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Climate-adaptive design.
Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kuang $37
Yale student Lily Chen arrives in Taipei hungry: for family, for culture, for connection. But her summer of discovery quickly unravels. Her classes are grueling, her roommate unbearable, and a reckless, deeply awkward trip to the hot springs with a man she barely knows soon ignites vicious gossip. Then her grandfather dies. Grieving and adrift, Lily must confront her own questions about the culture she inherited but never fully understood. She embarks on a wryly funny, often devastating search for understanding: of herself, her family, and the meaning of home. All over one unforgettable summer in Taipei. [Paperback]
'Kuang is sharply attuned to current mores, but prefers satire to lecturing — reminiscent, in this respect, of her fellow American writers Kiley Reid and Curtis Sittenfeld, who have also written wonderful campus novels. I loved this idiosyncratic coming-of-age story.' —The Spectator
>>Grieving and learning languages are similar.
>>Language, identity, and making mistakes.
>>People default to silence.
The Goldsmith and the Master Thief by Tonke Dragt (translated from Dutch by Laura Watkinson) $23
Born to a poor cobbler and his wife in the beautiful city of Bainu in the land of Babina, Laurenzo and Jiacomo are identical twins, as alike as two drops of water. No one can tell them apart (which comes in very handy for playing tricks on their teachers). And no one can split them up. But when tragedy strikes their carefree young lives, they must make their own way in the world. At a fork in the road they decide to split up, and return to meet in the same place one year later. As each brother chooses his own path — hardworking Laurenzo to make beautiful objects from gold and silver, and fearless Jiacomo to travel, explore and become an unlikely thief — so begins a series of incredible escapades that will test them to their limits. Along the way they will face terrible danger, solve cunning riddles, become prisoners in a castle, sail across the ocean, fall in and out of love, stay at an enchanted inn, help save a priceless pearl, and even become kings by mistake. They must use all their talents, wiles and wisdom to survive, in this charming adventure through a fairy-tale land. The first edition in English of this much-loved 1961 classic. [Paperback]
"A wonderful book. Ms. Dragt's drawings are as delightful as her storytelling. What makes The Goldsmith and the Master Thief a joy is its lively spirit; what makes it refreshing is the clarity of its moral sensibility. The characters may stumble and fall, but they quickly right themselves and affirm the values of honesty and loyalty. This is a terrific family read-aloud, ideal for a mix of ages between 4 and 12." —The Wall Street Journal
"Older readers will be swept up by the sometimes dizzyingly Shakespearean twists and complexity; younger audiences would be best pleased hearing these misadventures read aloud." —Booklist
Concrete by Stephen Parnell $23
Concrete has an image problem. Portrayed as boring, cheap, and thoughtless, it is often considered synonymous with bad architecture. For many, concrete is architecture gone wrong dogmatic, ugly, and as miserably grey as English drizzle. Stephen Parnell's Concrete is an apologia of concrete, second only to water as the world's most consumed material. From the personal, intimate scale of jewelry to the monumental scale of Brutalist architecture, Parnell explores the personality of concrete and how it is embedded and embodied in everyday and familiar objects. He revels in concrete's ambiguity and contradictory qualities, from its sensitivity to the tiniest imprint to its immense compressive strength in hydroelectric dams, and traces how concrete is both the ultimate unaesthetic material as well as the quintessential building block of modernity. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Concrete has been accused of crimes from vulgarity to enabling the climate crisis. Parnell has assembled an excellent, nuanced case for its defence, arguing incisively for a richer understanding of this most divisive and paradoxical of substances, but also for both it and its creators to urgently change their ways.” —Tom Dyckhoff
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
End Times Fascism, And the fight for the living world by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor $40
The far right is on the march again — but this time it's different. A new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is on the move. They're united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, and they welcome a future of shocks, scarcity and collapse, convinced they'll be among the saved on the other side. In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex — and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it's by repairing to luxurious private islands, or bunkering nations against a dehumanised 'other'. If we're to meet this critical moment and defend what's left of democracy before it's smashed up beyond repair, Klein and Taylor argue, we must break the doom loop, and tell a story not of end times — but of better times. [Paperback]
"Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are a powerful duo who embody in their own collaborations the kind of solidarity we all require. They show how one can find the formulations that touch the suffering and the aspirations of those who are looking for language, connection, and a life-affirming vision of the world. Their analysis of contemporary fascism is grounded and convincing — and I love the explosion of language that comes from their conversations, their passion, and their insistence that we make a vibrant common life on earth that reverses climate catastrophe and affirms social and economic equality." —Judith Butler
>>Our mission is clear.
>>Extreme wealth has a deranging effect.
>>A.I. is a fascist idea.
>>The fightback starts here.
Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick $33
An intrepid, galvanising mediation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive. In 1995 Alice's mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother's and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin's lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattrick's genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Ill Feelings is a deeply personal and deeply political reckoning with the nature of illness, inheritance, time, silence, bodies and invisibility. Alice Hattrick offers both a radical redefinition of the dominant narratives surrounding health and pain, and the knowledge we need in order to name, understand and resist them. Hattrick has found a voice and form which open up new and exciting possibilities for writing the self and making sense of the collective past: I read this remarkable book with outrage, fascination and immense admiration.' —Francesca Wade
'I love the quality of attentiveness that Alice Hattrick brings to their poised and pointillistic exploration of the mysterious aetiologies and affects of chronic fatigue. They excel in listening out for echoes and whispers, their narrative of illness wriggling into uncomfortable places that medicine dismisses or ignores. Their book makes you pause to think - and rethink - page by page.' —Marina Benjamin
'Ill Feelings defies neat conclusions as well as easy categorization of the book itself, so that attempting to describe it here seems like misdiagnosis, and to try and name the paradox at its heart seems like a betrayal of its rewards. But the thrill of Alice Hattrick's writing stems from its struggle to be free of its constraints, communicating with unspooling fury the mutability of lived experience rather than presuming to define it. In doing so, they remind us that the undefined — our own ill feelings — reveals not weakness so much as our inherent capacity for resistance.' —Olivia Sudjic
>>To yourself and for yourself.
>>Crashing.
>>Fresh and gorgeous.
Girlbeast by Cecilie Lind (translated from Danish by Hazel Evans) $38
Girlbeast is a fearless, unsettling, and poetic reimagining of the Lolita narrative, where power shifts unpredictably, and desire and coercion become indistinguishable. In a world that fetishises girlhood, it asks whether a girl be blamed for internalising the roles imposed upon her? Can she wield her youth as power in a system designed to render her powerless? With sharp, fast-paced prose and an addictive plot, Cecilie Lind crafts a daring examination of female agency, sexuality, and the complexities of consent. The novel evokes the idea of the girl as animal — a creature conditioned to be both docile pet and wild beast, torn between submission and rebellion, innocence and desire.Brave, provocative, and unflinching, Girlbeast is a gripping, vital novel for our times. [Paperback]
”Girlbeast is a fever dream of a novel that put a knot in my stomach. A provocative, vulgar and tender fable about the uneasy ruin of girlhood.” —Lucy Rose
>>I wasn’t a sun.
We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translated from Spanish by Robin Myers) $28
Written in beautiful, surprising, vegetal prose as if written by the rainforest in which it is set rather than by a human hand, this novel incants to life Antonio de Erauso, a real figure from the Spanish conquest of South America, a trans man disgusted with religion and authority, hiding in the jungle with two Guarani girls he has rescued from slavery. Only in the jungle, where the categories imposed by human understanding are in flux, can transformation and liberation be effected. [Now in paperback]
”A hallucinatory, innocent, fanciful and redemptive book. Cabezon Camara's historical fiction plays out like confession or revelation, a piece of real-unreal colonial apocrypha, glowing white hot, dancing like the heart of a pyre.” —Financial Times
”Sumptuously translated by Robin Myers, We Are Green and Trembling is strikingly relevant to the present day. Cabezon Camara uses history to illuminate and interrogate threats to trans representation and, in parallel, to interrogate the enduring, humanising effects of colonisation. An epic in miniature; mercurial tale for all time.” —Irish Times
”So sharp, so urgent, so brave. Gabriela Cabezon Camara is one of the most authentic voices writing in Spanish today, and among her many talents is one that's especially hard to find: not only does she challenge and incite us, not only does she confront the darkness, but she also gives us in return the subversive courage to think of ourselves as more human, more alive, and more luminous than ever.” —Samanta Schweblin
>>Read an extract.
>>The germ and the translation.
>>The importance of representation.
>>Writing like a river.
>>Letting the jungle win.
Essays Two: On Proust, translation, foreign languages, and the city of Arles by Lydia Davis $35
Each deisplaying Lydia Davis’s precision of language and acuity of perpception, the essays in this volume focus on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles. Davis’s account, for instance, of learning Norwegian Bokmål by reading Dag Solstad’s ‘Telemark Novel’ — with no external assistance — is entirely compelling, and filled with revelations of how language works. [Now in paperback]
'Precise, concentrated, lyrical. No one writes like Lydia Davis, and everyone should read her.' —Hanif Kureishi
’A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust.' —Ali Smith
’Essays Two is a guide to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self.’ —The Boston Globe
”Whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising. Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process of translation. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting that satisfaction to the reader. A book that contains an incredible amount of life-enhancing morsels."‘ —Molly Young, New York Times
The Expansion Project by Ben Pester $28
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? [New paperback edition]
”A tour de force in surrealist comedy: fresh, sublime and eerie. He could be described, in part, as a comic descendant of J.G. Ballard. Pester is a talented writer of the surreal. A novel about dislocation that feels dislocating. It should serve as an ominous warning to us all.” —Camilla Grudova
”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
>>I am made entirely of wood.
>>Also from Ben Pester: Sail Away Land.
The Urban Activity Book: 99 ideas for nature activities in urban spaces around Aotearoa New Zealand by Rachel Haydon, illustrated by Pippa Keel Situ $35
Nature isn't just found in forests, on beaches, in rivers or on faraway mountains. It's right here, living with us in our gardens, on our windowsills and in the cracks of a footpath. The Urban Activity Book centres outdoors fun and learning within the urban environments of Aotearoa New Zealand with a view to making this series (The Nature Activity Book and The Beach Activity Book) even more accessible for tamariki living in our cities and towns. The 99 activities are designed to connect with nature in unexpected ways, to inspire young people to get outside and explore their community and urban environments, from experiments and observation to conservation and mindfulness. Written by a children's learning expert, all sorts of learning styles are recognised, with each activity being open to children who like to draw and those who like to write. The book's journal-like format and activities that range across the seasons make it a long-term and much treasured companion. Mātauranga Māori concepts and the theme of nature connectedness are an integral part of the activities. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
Thyme to Cook: Grow and cook real food at home by Emma Galloway $60
From cookery writer Emma Galloway, author of My Darling Lemon Thyme, A Year in My Real Food Kitchen and Every Day comes a new title full of fabulous simple recipes — all vegetarian, flavour-packed and gluten-free. In a development from her earlier books, this one contains a Gardening 101 section on planting a kitchen garden — prep, seed sowing, saving seeds and harvesting. There are also simple planting guides to a range of vegetables — peas, beans, chillies, radishes, cauliflower, broccoli, capsicum and more — for any size garden, from containers to full-sized garden beds. And then she shows you how to use these vegetables to make delicious, simple, nourishing meals! [Hardback]
'A treasure trove of a book — an approachable and very beautiful guide to growing your own food and easy and original ways to cook and eat it.' —Anna Jones
>>Look inside!
Data Empire: How information shaped human history by Roopika Risam $40
The first written name in human history was neither a god nor a king, but an accountant. From clay tablets to the algorithmic state, this groundbreaking 11,000-year global history argues that information has always been the seed of power. Long before writing existed, at the dawn of civilisation in Mesopotamia, rulers pressed marks into clay to keep track of land, people and grain. To rule, they had to keep count. It is no accident, then, that the first written name in human history was neither a god nor a king, but an accountant. As ships and navigation expanded our horizons, a new age of European empires took control of more than 80 per cent of the world's surface, using censuses, maps and ledgers to decide who belonged, who owed, and who could be sacrificed. Today, we live in the third great era, when trading our information for access can feel harmless or inevitable — yet from targeted advertising to border policing and mass surveillance, data shapes the course of our lives. Drawing on stories from ancient cave markings and knotted strings to colonial record-keeping and the algorithmic state, Data Empire reveals how data has always been the seed of power — a technology of control that has shaped civilizations and upheld empires. Provocative, humane and sweeping in scope, it asks us to recognise the power data has always held — and to imagine what resistance looks like in an age defined by it, so that we might remake the modern world for the benefit of all. [Paperback]
”Here is the new history of mankind demanded by our times. We can understand our past, going all the way back to our emergence as a species, as a struggle over data. Data used to turn into power through intermediates like money and politics, but now it does so more directly. Humanity was forced to enact reforms to make money and politics survivable. This book asks what we will do about data now that we have no choice but to do something.” —Jaron Lanier
>>The Empire of Information.
>>Excavating colonial data cultures.
Edward Gorey 1000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle $45
All of Gorey’s characters inhabit a uniquely enigmatic world, where the lamentable frailties of existence are humorously assuaged by the hopeful delights of fantasy. You need this. Completed size: 75 x 50cm. [Boxed]
>>Other jigsaw puzzles.
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Read our reviews. Decide what you will read next.
23 October 2026
A man puts on a uniform and goes to a country he thinks he’ll understand. A place where he thinks he can make a difference, or so he infers in one of his explanations. He goes out of frustration, because of poverty, to escape his responsibilities, due to his own sense of failure — or any number of reasons. He returns ashamed, defeated, wishing for escape, confused, belligerent, damaged, haunted, fortunate to be alive. In a new country, his grandson Arjun asks him about the past, about the war, for a school project. He promises to write something to capture his time as a peacekeeper. The Sri Lankan civil war was a 26-year conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LLTE (Tamil Tigers), from 1983-2009. In 1987, the Indian government sent a peacekeeping force. While initially welcomed in some quarters, the IPKF became increasingly unpopular and a ‘peace force’ in name only, before withdrawing in 1990. In U.X.O. the narrator is a grandfather negotiating the past with himself. In an attempt to tell his story, he tells many stories. Gnanalingam cleverly sets these as ‘drafts’ — each story a retelling of a day, a particular event or, conversely, many events. Each draft starts with ‘This is how I went to Sri Lanka.’ The man is a lowly soldier, the lowest rank, part of a four-person patrol. They are there to check, watch, and question. They are disliked. The narrator, partly chosen for his origins, he is Indian Tamil, is surprised by the locals’ distrust; the others on his patrol less disturbed by it. Yet we only have the narrator’s view: his re-tellings often putting him in a better light than his fellows. Are his clutch of notes, which he hands over to Arjun’s mother (a Sri Lankan Tamil) a confession, a justification, a denial, or a witnessing? In U.X.O. Gnanalingam cuts to the heart of conflict and war crimes, drawing on UN reports and family history, as well as literature and analytical histories. This is a novel with rich characters, writing that grabs you and doesn’t look away from the violence: its consequences for both victim and perpetrator. Who is accountable for actions committed in the height of madness or callousness? And can one ever absolve oneself from one’s actions, whether that is done as an individual or as part of a group or behalf of the state — where does the responsibility lie? This is also a story of a family, of generations, and the consequences of actions and behaviours — of what is said or done in love or anger. It’s a story of dislocation, externally and internally, both physically and culturally. Drawing on literary traditions of narration and philosophical studies of genocide, Gnanalingam not only brings to light the atrocities committed in the name of the more powerful, but delivers it with consideration to form, making this an important and interesting work. Gnanalingam is an excellent writer and I will not be surprised to see this novel on the book awards shortlist in 2027.
‘Perry combines the story of a reserved museum curator who recreates historical banquets, using a careful array of fake pies and pomegranates — with the story of a medieval king, reluctant to occupy the throne (and possibly unfit for it anyway). It’s a wonderfully enticing, and eye-opening, combination of themes, woven together with an extraordinary delicacy of touch. You can’t read May We Feed the King without reflecting on the fragile boundary between the present and the past. What’s the difference between historical fiction and historical fact? Can history ever be a safe place we can go to escape the present?’ —2026 Booker Prize judges’ citation
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
MAY WE FEED THE KING by Rebecca Perry $35
May We Feed the King dances between a historical subject who resists the march of progress and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present, to offer a beguiling meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.
THE STARVING BRIDE by Catherine Chidgey $38
Catherine Chidgey’s much-anticipated new novel in set in a near future where suffering is presented as an amausement to distract the populace from mounting disasters, and personal appearance has replaced ethics as a guiding force for action (just like our own times on both counts, actually!).
ON TYRANNY (Graphic edition) by Timothy Snyder and Nora Krug Special price: $36
Alerts us to the tell-tale signs of a society shifting away from democracy and towards authoritarianism, and gives us some simple but effective ideas on combatting this. This graphic edition of this important book is given even greater depth and resonance by the illustrations by Nora Krug. Use the code DEMOS for a 25% discount (usually $48). Only a few copies left at the special price!
END TIMES FASCISM by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor $40
”Their analysis of contemporary fascism is grounded and convincing - and I love the explosion of language that comes from their conversations, their passion, and their insistence that we make a vibrant common life on earth that reverses climate catastrophe and affirms social and economic equality." —Judith Butler
THE VIVISECTORS by Missouri Williams $35
"The final chapter of Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors is titled ‘The Future Sublime’ and I think this is it: a lush, verdant, light-saturated take on bad nature, contaminated politics and rotten institutions that is both awesome and terrifying. Singularly strange, ambitious and brilliant." —Kate Briggs, Goldsmiths Prize judge