Read our 492nd newsletter
31 July 2026
I thought for a while that horse racing was a sort of sport, and I wondered if there were other sports in which the people participating in them were relatively unknown, horse racing being done in the name of the horses, after all, not in the name of the jockeys, whereas cycle racing is done in the names of the cyclists not in the name of their bicycles, and then I realised that horseracing is not a sport at all, but a kind of competition more akin to marbles, a competition of ownership, in which the jockeys are just what make the horses go, the jockeys are the augmentation of the prowess of the horses with the will of their owners, nothing more, implants, marginal figures along with the other unknown persons whose collective efforts both enable and are obscured by the horses that they serve. But this marginalisation, together with the peripatetic nature of these professions, makes the contained human society of the racecourse backstretch such a fascinating and, for want of a better word, such a human one. In small worlds what would otherwise be small is writ large, and what would otherwise be unnoticed is made clear. Kathryn Scanlan’s wholly remarkable novel Kick the Latch is ostensibly the edited-down text of the Sonia half of a series of interviews between Scanlan and a longtime horse trainer (and subsequently prison guard and later bric-a-brac dealer) named Sonia, conducted between 2018 and 2021. Certainly there is a pellucid quality to these first-person accounts, the voice and language of Sonia are strongly delineated and very appealing to read, and the insights gleaned from them into the life of their narrator, from her hard-scrabble girlhood to her hard-scrabble but colourful life around the racetrack and beyond, are entirely compelling. In these twelve sets of titled anecdotes, Scanlan has succeeded in making herself entirely invisible (the text’s invisible but vital jockey), which shows invisibility to be a cardinal virtue for an author or an editor — and it is uncertain which of these labels applies itself most suitably to Scanlan’s achievement in making this book. Perhaps all good writing is primarily editing, primarily on the part of the writer themselves (and secondarily by any subsequent editor). Anyone can generate any amount of text; it is only the ruthless and careful editing of this text (before and after it is actually written down), the trimming and tightening of text, the removal of all but the essential details and the tuning of the grammatical mechanisms of the text, that produces something worth reading. The virtues of literature are primarily negative. I first came across Scanlan with her first book, the poignant and beautiful Aug 9—Fog, which was made by ‘editing down’ a stranger’s diary found at an estate sale into a small book of universal resonance. Kick the Latch could be said to be an extension of the same project: an applied rigour and unsparing humility by Scanlan that makes something that would otherwise be ordinary and unnoticed — found experiences from unimportant lives, as are all of our lives unimportant — into something so sharp and clear that it touches the reader deeply. What more could we want from literature than this?
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.
That Was Not My Intention by Frances Pavletich $30
"They had not spoken in close to a decade. And now here they were, resuscitating each other back into a story she thought they'd left behind." The story of Lola and Ben as they circle around one another trying hard to grow up. A scathing and satisfying look into the relationships we build and what sometimes happens to them. Inspired by: being a great friend, being a terrible friend, being too self-important to tell the difference, failing to get a person to desire you, using dishonest means to get a person to desire you, making a fool of yourself, the people we loved at first, the people we despised later, and the people we can never look in the eye again. [Paperback]
"When I read Frances' first draft, back in 2024, I absolutely knew her perfectly cool and caustic tone was a book for the times. It is a novel that cuts through vanities, desires and delusions. It is not a novel of redemption but is simply and ridiculously true, populated by a cast of furious brats." —Murdoch Stephens.
"It's a novel that will divide reviewers into the simps and the aghast... there is no in-between with That Was Not My Intention." —Brannavan Gnanalingam
>>Other books from Lawrence & Gibson.
Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire by Tony Ballantyne $60
James Cook is one of the most contested figures in Aotearoa New Zealand’s past. Today, his name evokes not only exploration and scientific endeavour but also the violence of first encounters and the enduring legacies of colonisation. In this major new history, Tony Ballantyne examines how stories about Cook have changed over time — and what these shifting narratives reveal about the making of national identity. From Cook’s death through to Tuia 250, Ballantyne traces three major phases in collective understandings of Cook. The first, imperial memory, is centred on British authority and benevolence. This gives way, by the late 1950s, to a distinct national history, marked by J. C. Beaglehole’s influential scholarship and a growing emphasis on New Zealand’s own place in the imperial world. Postcolonial memory follows, bringing Māori perspectives to the fore and reframing Cook as a deeply contested figure in public debate, scholarship and artistic expression. Across time, Ballantyne examines how ‘competing Cooks’ are invoked in commemorations, political argument and cultural production — from British memorials to contemporary Māori protests, and from academic history to Tuia 250. The book shows how Cook’s afterlives continue to shape New Zealand’s historical consciousness and political culture, offering a deeply perceptive account of how imperialism persists in national memory. Beautifully designed nd presented. [Hardback]
‘This is a fine book by a leading New Zealand historian at the height of his powers.’ —James Belich
Counterfutures: Left thought and practice Aotearoa, 18 & 19 edited by Jack Foster and Neil Vallelly $30
Counterfutures is a multididciplinary journal of Left research, thought, and strategy. It brings together work from across Aotearoa, aiming to intervene in, and inaugurate, debates about how to understand and influence our society, politics, culture, and environment. In this issue: ‘Things can still be less worse’: A Collaborative Reading of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism with liz breslin, April-Rose Geers, Arundhati Sethy, Lynley Edmeades, Sabrina Moro, and Rosemary Overall; ‘Barricading the Doors: Locking Out Disavowal’ by Matt Russell and Warwick Tie; ‘Modelling Mauri: Indigenous Ideas and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Covid-19 Response’ by Sophie Moullin; ‘Tiriti-based Anticapitalism? Contradictions Within the Settler Left’ by Dan Pickering; ‘Our Technocratic Times’ by Jack Foster; ‘Why We Should Write about Work’ by Alex Smith; ‘In Solidarity with Those in Labour’ by Irina Herb. [Paperback]
>>Read previous issues in digital format.
Counternarratives by John Keene $28
Ranging from the seventeenth century to our current moment, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives' stories and novellas draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. 'An Outtake' chronicles an escaped slave's take on liberty and the American Revolution; 'The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows' presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; 'The Aeronauts' soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theatre of the US Civil War; 'Rivers' presents a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in 'Acrobatique', the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back. [New paperback edition]
‘We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene’s remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own.’ —Kate Webb, TLS
‘Counternarratives is that rare book of short fiction with an epic intuition of time, accomplishing in a handful of inspired, intimate portraits what many sagas only manage in reams.’ —Julian Lucas, New York Times
‘Keene’s collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mould-breaking, and deeply political. He’s a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in US fiction should start here.’ —Christian Lorentzen, Vulture
‘Exquisite, and unlike anything I’ve ever read.’ —Eula Biss
>>The universal family plot.
Perennial Counterpart by Yongyu Chen $35
A poetic study in magical modes of connection over distance — how both friendship and reading are similar ways of being together while being alone. Written over several years of solitude, study, and transformation, the poems in Perennial Counterpart trace an evolving, self-questioning practice of thinking-in-poetry where long, reflective lines — evoking both prose and photography — brush against elliptical, fractured modes of film and literary criticism. Anchored by the author's obsessive reading life, this is a book where lyric inquiry becomes its own form of company. Here, the poem is written to remake its writer through glittering connections to a personal lineage of thought. [Paperback]
'Are these poems, or exploding postcards dispatched from the land of dreams? Yongyu Chen's exquisite Perennial Counterpart balances conceptual density with a yearning lyricism: always strange, "unintelligible to the end," but intelligible to those who speak the language of rain and flowers.' —Jackie Wang
'To be with Perennial Counterpart is to "river around" the intimate folds of its letters, lovers, loved ones, literary souls. Like the strange "fur that grows on a crystal," Yongyu Chen's probing language turns mixture into a beguiling poetics of friendship, a reverie for a more elemental and rejuvenated address to our unsettled world.' —Jay Gao
>>Reading, like friendship, is a way of life.
>>Life within language.
>>’Mouse Song.’
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm $38
Mind-bending science fiction about antimemes — ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself. An antimeme is an entity with self-censoring properties. Some are benign; but others, less so... These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you — and you'll never even know anything changed. And they aren't just feeding on us. They're invading. But how do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day. [Paperback]
"Astonishing. Pitch-perfect cosmic horror — and the pitch will break all the glass in your brain." —M.R. Carey
"The coolest, smartest, mind-blowingest novel to be published this year, and probably for many years to come. It is utterly unique, constantly surprising, genuinely unsettling, and a towering work of speculative fiction that may very well take its place among the best sci-fi novels of the century so far." —Blake Crouch
>>We need to talk about fifty-five.
The Common Good Economy: A new compass by Mariana Mazzucato $40
Our economic system is broken. The climate crisis is accelerating. Inequality is deepening. Public trust is crumbling. Wealth concentrates in fewer hands while governments scramble to fix what markets can't do, rather than to shape them from the outset. For too long, economics has treated 'the good' — whether public goods or the commons — as merely correcting market or government failures. This economic framing traps us in an endless cycle of being reactive, patching problems rather than proactively building the economy we need. In The Common Good Economy, Mariana Mazzucato builds on her ideas of the entrepreneurial state and mission-oriented policies to establish a new theory of the common good, one which allows governments and businesses to develop purposeful economic relationships, creating value and building spaces where human flourishing can happen. She argues that how we achieve collective goals — through collective action, participation and reciprocity — matters as much as what those goals are. The book provides a practical 'common good compass' to help navigate our economies in a radically different direction. Full of compelling real-world examples, from governing water as a global common to transforming procurement and finance, this is a rigorous reimagining of economics and a manifesto for a future economy that serves people and the planet. [Paperback]
>>Making people dream.
>>The biggest lie about Capitalism.
Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly
When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague — the poet — his fascination soon begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn't; she has everything he wants. While he writes about steel and sex, she dreams about the movements of swallows. While he tends to his budding career, she writes from her big, white house in the woods. Meanwhile, his homophobic and spiteful mother — who cast a shadow over his childhood — is continuing to make his life difficult. As he is pulled back and forth between these two different worlds, his fixation on the poet, his ‘Kingfisher’, grows into something more powerful. She becomes his sole focus. He is hypnotised. But when simultaneous illnesses threaten to destroy the precarious reality he clings to, he's forced to question what he can and cannot take from someone. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
>>Beauty in the messiness of being human.
>>Every box.
Knives and Spoons: A chef’s story of kitchens, addictions, and mayhem by Alasdair Gill $39
From working in some of London’s most prestigious restaurants to scrubbing fat from kitchen floors, Alasdair Gill’s life as a chef has been a series of exhilarating highs and harrowing lows. But so too has his private life. Taking readers behind the swinging kitchen doors of London’s dining scene, he shows us the major contradictions in his life, from crossing paths with Anthony Bourdain and preparing dishes for the ultra wealthy to hiding in drug-fuelled kitchen dens and a wake-up call that nearly ended his life. Knives and Spoons is a raw and honest look at the chaotic and often toxic world of professional kitchens, filled with fierce and unforgiving moments, but also a testament to the power of finding one’s craft and the long road to recovery. Alasdair Gill has inherited the writing gene from his father, A.A Gill. [Paperback]
”Incredibly moving, heartbreaking, savage, vivid, shocking, immediate and of course very funny.” —Camilla Long
>>Addicted to not being sober.
Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens $38
For weeks, she has been saying it will be their special day. One last, perfect day with her children before she returns to work after maternity leave. What's the worst that can happen? Unfolding across 24 hours, Natural Disaster is a propulsive, darkly funny and sharply observed novel about the absurd, frustrating, hilarious, precarious, bittersweet, sometimes astonishing challenge — literal, existential — of being a woman, a mother, a wife, a person for one single, entire day. [Paperback]
”I absolutely loved it. A forensic, agonisingly relatable account of the highs and lows and in-betweens of one whole ordinary day in a life with two small children. Funny, dark, absurd, pin-sharp, insightful, propulsive, unputdownable.” —Nina Stibbe
”Lisa Owens lays bare the pains, perils and joys of motherhood, all captured over the course of a single day. Hilarious, brilliant, utterly exhilarating.” —Monica Ali
>>Home is where the art is.
Red Snake, Blue Snake by Olivier Tallec $33
Red Snake and Blue Snake have been friends since they were small but that doesn't mean they see things the same way. When Red Snake says the sky is grey, Blue Snake insists it's blue. The cactus looks just like a ghost—or a mitten. With so much to debate, can the snakes stay friends? The two stubborn reptiles start their morning with a little yoga, watch the clouds, bicker about this and that, narrowly escape being captured by a snake charmer, and end the day very nearly agreeing on something. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Look through the book.
I never intended to be so topical. The news of racetrack closures across Aotearoa has been popping up across the channels this week. Reading about horses and the lives of those that work the track wouldn’t have regstered on my radar a few years ago, but after reading the compelling Kick the Latch by American author Kathryn Scanlan and watching Australian author Gerald Murnane talk about his obsession with horse racing, both real and imagined, and how it shaped his writing, had me reaching for the ARC (Advance Reading Copy) that had landed on my desk. Marty Smith’s work of memoir and portraiture It Gets In Your Blood: Lives of a Racecourse is centred on her local, Hawke’s Bay Racecourse, and follows the lives of the trainers, jockeys and trackworkers across a decade. Like Scanlan’s novel, she gets inside, behind the scenes. While Scanlan did this by developing a relationship with Sonia, a retired trainer, Marty is more like one of the crew. She’s trusted: she’s been a rider, owner/breeder; her family working with horses for generations. What started as a year-or-so project for this full-time teacher and poet morphed into a decade immersed in this world of thoroughbred racing, and the people who inhabit it. It’s a portrait of a community, one with its own rules, attitudes and language. A world where the horses are descibed as good and naughty, of 5am starts, of watching form and testing track conditions, of daring and risks — accidents happen. It has its stars, and its hacks, wins and losses.
In 2014 Marty Smith won The NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Prize for Horse with Hat, poems about her family, about horses and their human counterparts. Nina Mingya Powles described the collection as ‘gutsy’, the poems giving ‘ the impression of standing on the side of the road when a car swooshes past and you feel it shake the air in front of your face, tipping you a step backwards’. And Emma Neale wrote, 'This is alternately comic, wry, downbeat, vernacular, lyrical: yet is is also at times dark, plangent and moving in its use of narratives distilled from extended family relationships.' Smith brings these same sensibilities to her latest work. She gets alongside, witnesses and records faithfully, bringing to light the often unseen world of the trainer and the trackworkers. It Gets in your Blood has grit, drama alongside the daily grind, humour and pathos. There’s the vernacular of the workers, wry and sometimes oblique, often colourful; and the language of the track. For horse lovers some of this won’t be a foreign world, although it is a more particular subset of the riding world. For those who head to race days the terms of the Plough, Tie-Ups, Birdcage, Bullring, and so on, will be familiar. For the rest of us, we are outsiders, but through Marty Smith’s book we can come inside for a moment, she gives us a window to this world, blinkers off. In this it reminds me of Sven Lindqvist’s Bench Press (a dive into the world of bodybuilding). Like Scanlan’s book of episodic moments, Smith employs a shortpiece motif in the form of diary entries, ideal for this many-yeared project and for an industry that has a season, which kicks off in Spring. (Note: the Hawke’s Bay Racecourse is reopening very soon after unsafe track conditions closed it in September 2024 and, if you are in Hawke’s Bay, the book will be launched at the racecourse on Saturday 8 August). Like Kick the Latch, these pieces sometimes have witty titles, focus on a particular activity or happening, or a revealing conversation. There’s a handy map of the racecourse, as well as a table to explain the track form for the uninitiated, and a much needed list to the large cast, all those she spoke with and wrote about, and their roles on the horses and off. Occassionally, there’s also Marty herself, describing her own relationship with horses, her father and the love and respect she has for the industry. In her acknowldgements she reveals the working title for her project: Because I Love Them, claiming this was the answer, in one form ot another, to her question: Why do you do it? I think this is also the reason for Marty Smith’s immersion, and the result is Aotearoa’s own piece of racing literature, exploring a microcosm all its own.
“The writing in Giada Scodellaro’s debut novel Ruins, Child is difficult to define and grasp onto. Like the comma in its title, the novel is constantly spliced, refracted: a group of people are crowding around to watch the same film they always watch, a film of themselves and their elders; now the beauty of crumbling buildings is being assessed by a floating, undefined voice; now we’re hearing about Stevie Wonder’s The Secret Life of Plants. With a book as free-flowing and unpredictable as a river, the experience of reading Ruins, Child is that of sitting on the banks and watching the water flow. Ruins, Child won Scodellaro the 2024 Novel Prize, though it hardly fits the category of ‘novel’; Scodellaro evades all the trappings of novel-writing by writing something that borrows as much from music and improvisation as it does from experimental film or even literary greats like The Waves by Virginia Woolf. In Ruins, Child, no word is frivolous; everything is exact and exactly as Scodellaro wants it to be, even if on first read it’s baffling or oblique. That’s not to say that the reading experience is difficult; rather, it’s refreshing to read something that refuses to unfurl itself upon first touch.” —Jemima Skala
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.
Enough About Angels: The Nobel Lecture by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $20
There could be no more suitable Nobel laureate for the end of the world than László Krasznahorkai, whose astounding, frequently book-length sentences trace human thought’s struggle against the forces that would ultimately erase it. Although poised always on some sort of cultural event-horizon, Krasznahorkai’s books verbally resist the pull towards annihilation posed by the infinite gravity of social, political, historical, environmental and purely existential impossibilities, and provide glimmers of human authenticity in an increasingly depersonalising world. Pulling a dark literary thread backwards through Bernhard to Kafka, Krasznahorkai’s books have a profoundly hypnotic effect, shot with moments of beauty, exhilaration and clarity. Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Lecture, now available as a small book, typically undermines our understanding of a world we actually fail to understand: in these strange times what we took to be angels are wingless and mute; what we took to be towers are only so because of the slope of the ground; what we took to be failure, incapacity and misfortune are in fact the springboard for existential rebellion. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Enough about angels!
>>Literature exists in itself.
>>Books by Krasznahorkai.
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli $35
A mother and a daughter take off on a road trip after the collapse of a marriage. Their journey begins in Sicily during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, if you got the beginning wrong? The trip soon becomes a quest for origins - not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past. With her daughter coming into her own and her mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself confronting the primary questions of life: How do stories shape our children's imaginations? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family's memories made and what happens when they disappear? A road novel, a mother-daughter story, a mystery, Beginning Middle End is a shapeshifting novel that offers an exhilarating testament to the power and instability of the stories we hold most dear. [Paperback]
'Mind-expanding and heart-expanding; a summer book for life.' —Ali Smith
'What sets Valeria Luiselli's new novel apart is its clarity, its immediacy, its vividness. Not just the characters, but the very rooms, the views from windows and the streets, are created with precision and lucidity.' —Colm Toibin
'A beautiful, maybe perfect novel.' —Tommy Orange
'An instant classic, Luiselli is at her bravest and most sincere.' —Samanta Schweblin
'A new literary form altogether, where storytelling itself becomes an act of survival and reinvention.' —Monocle
>>Skipping and skimming.
>>Beginnings that are ends and middles that are beginnings.
>>Sound, memory, and new beginnings.
>>Other books by Valeria Luiselli.
An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail by Hélène Giannecchini (translated from French by Anna Moschovakis) $38
A friendship is a filiation we choose. It holds love and laughter; it can extend our sense of the possible. Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed 'marginal' into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments. Roving from Casa Susanna, a space of freedom from persecution in McCarthyite North America, to the diary of a man living with HIV in France, and to the life and work of pioneering lesbian photographer Donna Gottschalk, each narrative counters oblivion through loving acts of witness. A slantwise gathering of queer life and activism in the twentieth century, interspersed with images encountered by chance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail establishes friendship as a vital political force and offers a moving testament to its liberatory power. [Paperback with French flaps]
'An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail is a florilegium of countersexual kinmaking, survival strategy, lesbian comradeship, dinner parties full of queer ancestors, fugitive photography, transfeminist acting-up, insurrectionary eroticism and pieces of anonymous queer archival ephemera from many lands, brought alive with the help of critical fabulation. The domination of the couple-form over human life can and must be brought to an end, and Giannecchini deftly points to all the places where it is already dead (or perhaps always was). At the heart of this beautiful book lies a deceptively incendiary critique of capitalist society. It asks a direly urgent question: can humanity rise to the challenge of the term "friend"? If not, how do we propose to live together?' —Sophie Lewis
'We could be friends, we could be lovers, we could be comrades. Queer people are specialists in the art of chosen families because we have to be. Giannecchini's book is not just about such bonds, it's made by making them. In a world intent on crushing us all into isolated particles, this is an essential guide for everyone in how to glue together a fuller and deeper life.' —McKenzie Wark
'As someone who has long struggled with conventional ideas of family and marriage, I felt relieved and hopeful reading this searching text. Helene Giannecchini swings open the doors to a great hall of kinship, camaraderie, companionship and neighbourliness. She writes with love and optimism and a desire that we may all become part of communities in which we endeavour, as friends, to hold one another up. This came at a difficult moment in my own life, a period shaped by the death of my father, and I am grateful to have been able to read it.' —Lara Pawson
'At once a memoir and a sociology of friendship, kin, and chosen family, An Army of Lovers is lucid, impassioned and reasoned to a fault. Alternating between intimate, personal narratives and research-based models of kinship, Helene Giannecchini reflects on their myriad permutations and outcomes, and provides us with an urgent, amorous manual for living.' —Moyra Davey
House of Liars by Jenny Williams $38
When single mother and failed novelist Anna Olin is invited to an exclusive residency on a remote island, it feels like an opportunity for artistic redemption. Alongside five other writers, including an old flame whose spark still smolders, she must finish her novel to compete for a million-dollar publishing contract. The catch? One of the writers isn't human; it's an AI. Isolated and under pressure, Anna’s grasp on reality loosens as alliances form fast, seduction beckons, and secrets press closer to the surface—including Anna's own. When she starts receiving cryptic notes and the AI develops frightening new behaviors, Anna must decide what—and who—she's willing to risk if she is to fulfill the darkest fantasies she can't speak aloud, even to herself. A slow-burn psychological thriller about AI, motherhood, and desire—written by a former big tech AI ethics insider—House of Liars delves into the marrow of the coming wave of AI intimacy, where chatbots and agents influence the most personal parts of our lives, with consequences we can’t yet fathom. [Paperback]
"I devoured this novel--its exquisitely imperfect characters, its propulsive mystery, its urgent questions about human desire in the age of artificial everything. House of Liars captures both the perilous moment our world is facing with AI and the dark tensions of modern motherhood: the fantasies, the hunger, and the way women are torn between the lives we choose and the lives we crave. Riveting, tender, and terrifyingly real, this book will keep you up all night reading and then haunt you long after the last page." —Mia Fontaine
"This novel is a rare find-compulsively readable, gorgeously written, and completely original." —Julie Christine Johnson
Cass and the Beast by Claire Mabey and Jill Calder $30
When a fearful beast arrives in the township, Cass finds her courage and is rewarded with a wild and magical journey. The creature takes her on a thundering ride through a forested landscape, leaving the town and people far behind. In the wilderness that is home to the beast, Cass finds adventure, ferocity, and gentleness. And the beast finds its name. Atmospheric illustrations complement an original narrative voice in this collaboration between an author and illustrator from opposite sides of the world. [Hardback]
”Cass and the Beast is a picture book that affirms the introverted, misunderstood or compassionate child who relishes an imaginative adventure or is brave enough to take risks in real life. Mabey has created a surreal tale of creatures from dreams and nightmares, and what it looks like when children choose not to be afraid. Jill Calder's illustrations have an expressionistic style. Her artwork is detailed yet loose, alternating between wordless and text-filled spreads. The free-flowing lines and layered textures increase the sense of wild motion throughout Cass's journey with the beast. Calder predominantly uses blue, accented with orange, purple and pink, creating a pulsating palette that suggests thrills and excitement and boosts the readers courage to explore the illustrations.” —Joy Lawn, Books + Publishing
>>Look inside!
Communion by Jon Doyle $38
When Mack O'Brien left his home in Port Talbot in Wales for the seminary as a teenager, he didn't imagine he'd be back a decade later, unordained and still at a loss as to what makes for a moral life. He takes a job as a security guard at the local steelworks and begins an uneasy transition into the world he once rejected. When the men of the steelworks organise an unprecedented strike in protest against job cuts, he sees no reason not to go along with it. The last person Mack expects to see in the local club is Siwan Roderick - the woman who appeared out of the blue at the seminary one day to make a confession and swear him to secrecy. Mack kept his word. But as the day of the strike nears, and as he begins to fully understand what
Siwan is planning, Mack is forced to reckon with his loyalty to her and the question of whether an act of violence can ever be justified. [Paperback]
”Gritty and luminous, intelligent and sincere, a radical and transgressive novel in which the profane, the political and the personal are entirely rooted in the sacred. Communion is both tender and confrontational, an immaculate debut with dirt under its fingernails.” —Colin Walsh
”A precise, delicate novel about the complexities of belonging, which gradually and powerfully builds in spiritual intensity. In prose both quotidian and mystical, Communion expands the possibilities of its title in every dimension and marks the arrival of an explosive new talent.” —The Observer
”A highly original book that strips back the traditional architecture of the novel until each paragraph arrives like a short, beautiful breath, and in the silences between, the true voices of Port Talbot are able to sing through. A thrilling evocation of a community.” —Andrew McMillan
”A rare novel. Communion bears witness to quiet accumulating impacts, a tolling, calling out the fundamental question, what happens when the things at the centre of what we try to believe in gutter out, one by one? This is poignant, resounding writing.” —Cynan Jones
>>The sounds of Port Talbot.
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The lives and loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell $33
Augustus was the larger of the two — vivid, volatile, and promiscuous. He was a hero among romantics and bohemians, celebrated as one of the great British talents of his generation. As a woman, Gwen's place in the art world was much smaller, and her private way of working and reserved nature meant it was only long after her death that her tremendous gifts were fully acknowledged. But her temperament was as turbulent as her brother's. She formed passionate attachments to men and women, including a long affair with the sculptor Rodin. And there were other ways in which the two Johns were remarkably alike, as Mackrell vividly reveals. The result is a powerful portrait of two prodigiously talented artists and visionaries, whose experiments with form and colour created some of the most memorable work of the early twentieth century. [Paperback]
”A thoroughly researched and effortlessly written account of the extraordinary lives of Augustus and Gwen John, encompassing painting, of course, but also obsessive love, infidelity, betrayal, family, sibling rivalry and relationships, and how they both subverted society's expectations. A fantastic read - the pages virtually turned themselves.” —Fanny Blake
>>The last laugh.
Miss Cat: The Case of the Curious Canary by Joëlle Jolivet and Jean-Luc Fromental $22
Meet Miss Cat, a private eye with ears on her hat and a nose for mystery! Miss Cat is always keen to get her claws into a new case. When Mr Maximus comes to her detective agency, searching for a kidnapped canary, the scene is set for a tale of crafty crooks, strange secrets, and a huge helping of animal magic. The first in a new graphic novel series for children. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
>>And there are two more adventures!
Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse by Luke Kemp $30
A radical retelling of human history through collapse — from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twentieth-first century and beyond — based on the latest research and a database of more than 440 societal lifespans over the last 5,000 years. Why do civilisations collapse? Is human progress possible? Are we approaching our endgame? For the first 200,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilisations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change. Slowly, reluctantly we congregated in the first farms and cities, and people began to rely on lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. When more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organisation. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires — with vast bureaucracies and militaries — carved up and dominated the globe. What brought them down? From Rome and the Aztec empire and the early cities of Cahokia and Teotihuacan, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power which hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population. Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth-obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech, and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now faces a choice — we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last. [New paperback edition]
>>Self-termination is most likely.
Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell $38
Berlin, 1928. Hannah is new to the pleasures and freedoms of the city. An artist, a runaway, she is building a new life, loving without boundaries and sketching with a cutting edge. But the party is ending. Hannah begins a recklessly consuming affair with a powerful man’s wife and it soon threatens to do more than ruin both of their reputations. People are disappearing. The shadows of something unspeakable are growing darker. Her art could be the thing that secures her survival – or will deny her any chance of escape. [Paperback]
”This vivid novel of 1930s Berlin asks what it means to make art in an emergency. A skilful and loving restoration of Jewish art and women's lives.” —Eleanor Catton
”A rare and precious combination of emotional warmth and cleverness.” —Sarah Moss
”This book offers us a radiant vision of art against evil, of the endurance of love, ambition and vitality amidst the worst of atrocities and betrayal. A bold, moving novel.” —Megan Hunter
”Venus, Vanishing floored me. It is utterly captivating, from first to last.” —Lauren Elkin
”Extraordinary. Venus, Vanishing moved me deeply; I didn't want it to end. The rare sort of book that brings the past back to trembling life.” —Doireann Ni Ghriofa
>>Art, desire, and the rise of the Third Reich.
How to Win a Trade War: A friendly guide to an unfriendly world by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown $39
We used to take trade for granted. Trillions of dollars of goods and services crossed borders each year, made possible by a global, rules-based system. Nobody paid too much attention to supply chains: they just worked. Now, Trump’s latest tariff announcement can crash markets, ruin your pension, and sour decades-long alliances. Brexit can sever Britain from its closest trading partners. China’s export restrictions on rare earths could bring the West’s car production to a crashing halt. Curbs on trade in cutting-edge chips could determine who wins the AI race. The stakes couldn't be higher. In this irreverent guide to our economic world, Keynes and Bown explore the history, players, and rules of trade, asking how we prepare for what the future might hold. Could trade wars lead to hot wars? What can the West learn from China? Timely, funny and informative, How to Win a Trade War argues that the old system is dead. But what will emerge in its place? And ultimately, what is at stake for you, your country, and your company? [Paperback]
”Timely, witty and wise — you could not ask for a better guide to the new economic order.” —Tim Harford
”Full of insight. This is critical reading for anyone trying to make sense of today's trade disputes.” —Chris Miller
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Read our latest newsletter and find out what you’ll be reading next.
24 July 2026
A few years ago, I did a piece of concentrated post-grad study through the art school at Otago Polytechnic. An idea had been pestering me for several years, and I needed a focus to make it over the hump from rattling about in my mind to becoming something actual in the world. I’m usually project-driven when it comes to my art practice, but sometimes an outside structure (deadlines, unexpected conversations, an introduction to whole new bunch of thinkers and artists) is just what you need. Anyway, the study — a great mix of practical experimentation and theory, reading and writing — was perfect for this idea and I finally got it out of my system (mostly). The exciting thing, apart from the study itself (yes, I would do more if time and money weren’t barriers), was what followed: an exhibition and an accompanying book. I never intended to write a book, let alone a book of short stories. That was 2023. The book sold out (admittedly a small printrun) and we reprinted. Now there are just a handful left. So, if you are curious about these stories, interested in jewellery (or objects in general) and our relationship with it (bodily and psychologically), you might like one of the final copies. And it’s also nicely produced, has diagrams and an index, and, although I never intended it, it is surprisingly funny.
(PS: I think there is another book brewing…)
It seemed sometimes that they were even wanting the worst to happen, if only to be relieved of the terrible anticipation that the worst may happen. It seemed sometimes that the worst thing sucks everything else towards it, even our resistance to the worst thing, and the closer we get to the worst thing it seems the less we resist it, just when we would be better to resist it more, until we are drawn over the acquiescence horizon, so to call it, until we are drawn past the point at which the possibility of relief from the effort to resist is stronger than our exhausting effort to resist, the point at which we either try to resist more, which just increases the degree of relief offered by giving up, or we resist less, which draws us closer to giving up. We give up. Of course, we don’t want to be seen to be giving up, not even by ourselves, what we want is a way to be seen to be resisting when in fact we are giving up, what we want is some mechanism that will make it appear that, when the worst happens, it might not have been as bad as it could have been even though it is worse than we could have imagined. How could that they have become a we so easily? A threat presses unrelentingly on the narrator of Krasznahorkai’s text, the threat of the worst thing, the nullification of that narrator, the narrator knows there are assassins on the narrator’s trail, they from whom the narrator flees, they whom the narrator has never seen and may never see, no matter, this just makes the fleeing more urgent, the threat more imminent, the worst that could happen always just on the point of happening if never actually happening. “I know they’ll never relent,” the narrator writes, “it’s as if their orders aren’t to make quick work of me … but rather to keep pursuing me.” The narrator must keep fleeing so as to continue being what a narrator is, the narrator must flee nullification, the narrator must flee into the new. “I have no memories whatever … the past doesn’t exist for me, only what’s current exists … and I rush into this instant, an instant that has no continuation.” The narrator flees in the present tense, the narrator flees by narrating. The text we read is the result of the narrator’s resistance to their own nullification, or, rather, the text is the narrator’s resistance to their own nullification. Obviously. “Life is forever merely the incalculable consequence facing the oncoming process, because there’s nothing that lurks behind the process … for me nothing exists that goes beyond the situation that happens to be at hand,” states the narrator, and if fate, or, rather, the causal mechanisms that we mistakenly label as fate, is nothing but an ineluctable process of destruction, if nullification is a corrolary of being, then we can only exist in our errors, we can only exist to the extent that we make a mistake. “The decisions I make must be the utterly wrong ones.” the narrator states, “that’s how I can confound my pursuers.” Great forces grapple through the text, through the narrator caught within themselves. We all share this pressure upon us that many would mistake for paranoia, no such luck, we all share this problem with time, this snagging in the moment, this agony of being forced on but this terror of no longer going on. “If I were to divine a plan of action of some kind, it would be all over for me,” the narrator states, though, really, is the threat coming from within or from without? But the narrator does divine a plan of action, the narrator is seduced by story, the narrator does start to abrade against their surroundings and against the people in those surroundings by the very fact of their interaction with those surroundings and with those people. The narrator passes the acquiescence horizon without being aware that they are passing the acquiescence horizon. All is lost. Giving up is no less fatal for looking like merely a change of plan.
There could be no more suitable Nobel laureate for the end of the world than László Krasznahorkai, whose astounding, frequently book-length sentences trace human thought’s struggle against the forces that would ultimately erase it. Although poised always on some sort of cultural event-horizon, Krasznahorkai’s books verbally resist the pull towards annihilation posed by the infinite gravity of social, political, historical, environmental and purely existential impossibilities, and provide glimmers of human authenticity in an increasingly depersonalising world. Pulling a dark literary thread backwards through Bernhard to Kafka, Krasznahorkai’s books have a profoundly hypnotic effect, shot with moments of beauty, exhilaration and clarity.
Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Lecture, now available as a small book, typically undermines our understanding of a world we actually fail to understand: in these strange times what we took to be angels are wingless and mute; what we took to be towers are only so because of the slope of the ground; what we took to be failure, incapacity and misfortune are in fact the springboard for existential rebellion.
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
MY YEAR IN PARIS WITH GERTRUDE STEIN: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
As Paris sweeps the narrator of Levy’s latest fiction along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks about what we have to lose to become modern, about navigating anxiety, about living with uncertainty, about angry fathers, about making a new life in another country, about art and language — and how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century.
THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris
NGĀTI KUIA: He pūtake, hei pakiaka ora; A history by Madi Williams $60
Drawing on hundreds of whakapapa, pūrākau, waiata and karakia recorded in nineteenth-century tribal manuscripts and court records, Madi Williams presents Ngāti Kuia history in Ngāti Kuia voices. A vital contribution to the understanding of the history of Te Tauihu-o-Te-Waka-a-Māui (the northern South Island).
TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner $33
Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex.
LAND by Maggie O’Farrell $38
Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. From the author of Hamnet.
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.
I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken $35
Richard Siken's long-anticipated third collection, I Do Know Some Things, navigates the ruptured landmarks of family trauma: a mother abandons her son, a husband chooses death over his wife. While excavating these losses, personal history unfolds. We witness Siken experience the death of a boyfriend and a stroke that is neglectfully misdiagnosed as a panic attack. Here, we grapple with a body forgetting itself — "the mind that / didn't work, the leg that wouldn't move...". Meditations on language are woven throughout the collection. Nouns won't connect and Siken must speak around a meaning: "dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged." To say "black tree" when one means "night." Siken asks us to consider what a body can and cannot relearn. "Part insight, part anecdote," he is meticulous and fearless in his explorations of the stories that build a self. Told in 77 prose poems, I Do Know Some Things teaches us about transformation. We learn to shoulder the dark, to find beauty in "The field [that] had been swept clean of habit." Recommended. [Now in paperback]
"An astonishing feat of poetic prowess. Siken has created 'an encyclopedia of myself,' a kaleidoscope of memory, language and identity that reveals — at times revels — in the faultiness of our own narratives. Siken's voice — and language — is both rooted and aloft, even as he avers that these are not 'poems of song.' Beyond such marvels, this is a virtuosity of candor and technique, bound by a seemingly effortless linguistic choreography that leans into multiplicity and mutability, with continuous sparks and joys, from one of our finest contemporary poets." —Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books
"The second-person strategies of Crush are abandoned in I Do Know Some Things for a more direct style, but Siken's signature intensity still throbs between sentences. Siken's prose is often deft and exciting. As he relearned everything, the prose poem helped him rediscover how to create poetic tension, how to be dynamic without the gravity-defying magic of enjambment. Syntactic variation. Quick, unexpected shifts in register. Artful repetition. These are all refined strategies in the collection. The prose is also a steadying element. It is another way of not losing oneself, of not falling through the cracks." —Richie Hoffman, Yale Review
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Wiped clean.
>>The most fundamental poetic device.
>>Landmarks for meaning.
>>Also available in hardback.
Air by Christan Kracht (translated from German by Daniel Bowles) $33
Two men venture through strange landscapes towards unknowable destinations. Paul, a feted designer, wanders the echoing corridors of a server farm in Norway — before, in a sudden blackout, he seems to vanish. In another time and space, a wounded stranger wakes in a forest, watched over by a young girl who helps him flee to an icebound settlement where perhaps he will find safety. Inventive, enigmatic and chromatically resonant, Air is the seductively disorienting new novel from one of the most significant European writers working today. Heir to the ingenious fictions of Ursula K. Le Guin or Jorge Luis Borges, resistant to single interpretation, it unfolds as a haunting journey through a layered universe that may be a dream, the afterlife or reality's inverted twin. From the author of Eurotrash. [Paperback]
”It is Christian Kracht's fate to be among the last humanists, not to say humans, practising literature as the robots swarm. His Air is part saga, part simulation, which tells of how it feels and how crazy it makes you, to simultaneously hold the mythical and the virtual accountable to true and beautiful words. Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation.” —Joshua Cohen
”Christian Kracht is a writer we cannot do without today. Air is a transgression — a form of storytelling that reinvents storytelling itself.” —Georgi Gospodinov
”In Kracht's nominal realism, a dreamlike air insistently prevails. You read him for the experience of reading him. You read him and wonder.” —Nell Zink
”Ever since his era-defining debut, Christian Kracht has enjoyed a reputation as both a cult and a canonical author.” — TLS
>>Poignant and fun.
The Writer’s Room: The hidden worlds that shape the books we love by Katie da Cunha Lewin $47
What is it that so fascinates us about the spaces where writers work? Why does a remote cabin, ramshackle shed or library garret, strewn with papers and piled with books, so capture our imagination? The rooms of certain writers are mythologised almost as much as the works themselves: Virginia Woolf’s garden room at Monks House; the Brontë’s study at Haworth; Sigmund Freud’s study, with its famous couch. They are preserved in writers’ houses or recreated in museums, pictured and described in newspaper columns and on Instagram, seemingly standing in for the labour of writing itself. And yet writers, old and new, have worked in all kinds of places and circumstances: in hotels, bedsits and boarding houses, at libraries and while on the move. From Proust’s bedroom to Joan Didion’s portable typewriter, Maya Angelou’s hotel rooms to Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafés and Michaela Coel’s Arabella with post-it notes in her rented room, Katie da Cunha Lewin dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer’s room and opens it up. Blending cultural critique with the personal and historical, Katie da Cunha Lewin takes us on a fascinating journey through the hidden worlds that shape the books we love. [Hardback]
”Hand in hand with the question 'what do writers do all day?' is '...and where do they do it?'. Katie da Cunha Lewin's book is an intimate delight and radical demystifier, making the conditions, rituals, and set-ups required for writing to happen individual, multiple, and political.” —Jen Calleja
”Katie Da Cunha Lewin's brilliant book is like a matryoshka: each room visited is also a visit to a life, to a work, to a genius's subjectivity and its many obsessions. Da Cunha Lewin successfully attempts to unravel that exact mix of solitude and companionship, protection and exposure, silence and conversation that writing requires. A book of rare skill and complexity for all those who love literature and wonder about it.” —Guadalupe Nettel
>>At the desk.
Hum by Helen Phillips $28
In a hot and gritty city populated by super-intelligent robots called 'Hums', May seeks some reprieve from recent hardships and from her family's addiction to their devices. She splurges on a weekend away at the Botanical Garden - a rare, green refuge in the heart of the city, where forests, streams and animals flourish. But when it becomes clear that the Garden is not the idyll she hoped it would be, and her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a Hum of uncertain motives in order to restore the life of her family. Gripping and unflinching, Hum is about our most cherished human relationships in a world compromised by climate change and dizzying technological revolution, a world with both dystopian and utopian possibilities. [New paperback edition]
Winner of the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize.
”What's more intoxicating than a Helen Phillips novel? Her books have blown open the doors of what's possible with the art of storytelling - and her latest, Hum, is her best work yet: one that captures, with fire and grace, our future and what it means to love, to persist, and to be human. This is a hold-your-breath book. Buckle up and get ready to deeply feel the joy — the thrill, the magic — of reading.” —Paul Yoon
”An indelible family portrait and a narrative tour de force, Hum generates almost unbearable tension and unease from start to end. Stunning, strangely beautiful, and written from a place of deep compassion but also with a clear and analytical eye. Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future. I loved it.” —Jeff VanderMeer
>>Read Stella’s review.
>>Fake nature.
>>The Disneyfication of nature.
A Place to Stand: A country doctor’s life in Hokianga by Clare Ward $38
Clare Ward is a country doctor living and working in the Hokianga Harbour area in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand, a sparsely populated area where there are many health challenges. This thoughtful memoir tells the story of Clare's thirty-year working life, the people she works with and the remote and isolated landscape in which she practises. She explores what it means to be Pākehā in this deeply Māori world, writing about this with respect, while also acknowledging her standing as outsider. [Hardback]
>>The man who always slept in his chair.
>>The call of Hokianga.
>>A good grounding.
No New York: A memoir of No Wave and the women who shaped the scene by Adele Bertei $50
In 1975 a young queer singer from Cleveland meets photographer Nan Goldin — an encounter that will lead them to New York's bombed-out downtown, where something unprecedented is brewing. At Max's Kansas City and CBGBs, in derelict lofts and underground clubs, a generation of visionary women artists is rewriting the rules of creativity, sexuality, and power. Adele Bertei didn't just witness the No Wave explosion — she ignited it. As acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno's assistant, she was at the epicenter when punk collided with post-punk, birthing a counterculture that fused music, art, cinema, fashion and outlaw literature into an uncompromising explosion of creativity. While mainstream culture wallowed in sexism and homophobia, these artists and more created something fluid, fierce, and transgressive. Raw, gripping, and illustrated with rare photographs from personal collections, No New York is the definitive insider's account of the women who obliterated every barrier in their path, taking you deep into the artistic and sexual experimentation of an era when true expression mattered more than money or fame. [Hardback]
"An eccentric and energetic tour through a vibrant chapter of New York City music history." —Publishers Weekly
"A love letter to a punk/post-punk era and the female creatives who transformed gender and genre defiance into art." —Kirkus Reviews
"A brutally honest memoir about surviving sexual assault, drinking and drugs, creativity, and finding your own way." —Booklist
"Essential for anyone interested in the history of this particular demi-monde. Bertei has new stories about every denizen of Lower Manhattan of the era and she spins them like a tiny, pugnacious Goldilocks." —The Wire
"No New York focuses on that fertile period in the mid-1970s when punk collided with art on the derelict streets of Manhattan. There is a keen sense of yearning for the youthful possibilities of pre-gentrified New York, and a hint of wonder from Bertei that she was there when all of this stuff was new and cheap and possible." —Uncut Magazine
>>What to do?
>>More than Theorietical Girls.
>>Female commodification.
>>Lionessised?
>>The Contortions.
Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva $37
In this groundbreaking work, two world-renowned scholars argue that ecological destruction and industrial catastrophes constitute a direct threat to everyday life, the maintenance of which has been made the particular responsibility of women. In both industrialised societies and the developing countries, the new wars the world is experiencing, violent ethnic chauvinisms and the malfunctioning of the economy also pose urgent questions for ecofeminists. Is there a relationship between patriarchal oppression and the destruction of nature in the name of profit and progress? How can women counter the violence inherent in these processes? Should they look to a link between the women's movement and other social movements? Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva offer a thought-provoking analysis of these and many other issues from a unique North-South perspective. They critique prevailing economic theories, conventional concepts of women's emancipation, the myth of 'catching up' development, the philosophical foundations of modern science and technology, and the omission of ethics when discussing so many questions, including advances in reproductive technology and biotechnology. In constructing their own ecofeminist epistemology and methodology, these two internationally respected feminist environmental activists look to the potential of movements advocating consumer liberation and subsistence production, sustainability and regeneration. They argue for an acceptance of limits and reciprocity and a rejection of exploitation, the endless commoditisation of needs, and violence. [Paperback]
>>Hard work and great joy.
Bookish: A love letter to reading by Lucy Mangan $30
As a child, Lucy Mangan was reading all the time, using books to navigate the challenges and complexities of this world and many others. As an adult, she uses her new relationship with literature to seize upon the most important question — (how) do books prepare us for life? This account of Mangan’s reading life starts at the cusp of teenage, when everything — including the way we read — undergoes a not-so-subtle transformation. Here, Mangan vividly recounts her metamorphosis from young bookworm to bookish adult, from the way school curricula can impact our relationship with literature to the growing pains of swapping the pleasures of re-reading for those of book-hoarding. Revisiting the books of all genres — from thrillers and bonkbusters to historical sagas and apocalyptic zombie stories — that ferried her through each important stages of life — falling in love, finding a job, becoming a mother and navigating grief — Bookish is a coming-of-age in books. It's also an ode to our favourite bookish spaces — from the smallest secondhand bookstalls to libraries, glorious big bookshops and our very own book rooms — and a love story to how books not only shelter our souls through hard times and help us find ourselves when we feel lost, but also help us connect with the people we love through shared stories. [Now in paperback]
>>“Books picked me up on bad days.”
>>Never lost for words.
>>Bookworm dealt with Mangan’s childhood reading.
The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten (translated from Norwegian by Alison McCullough) $30
How would you spend your last day? And whom would you spend it with? Ferryman Nils Vik chooses to head out onto the fjord, as he has for many years. Today, the 18th of November, his trip is different. As his trusty boat reaches the sea, a lifetime of passengers join him from beyond the grave, among them his rescue dog, the American photographer he thought of as his friend and young Jon Anderson, whose funeral Nils attended. But Nils is truly waiting for just one passenger: his beloved wife Marta, whose absence has marked each day since her passing. [Paperback]
”Uplifting and gentle. Each page is made marvellous. Grytten's characters are intriguing, unique and reassuringly flawed.” —The Times
”A heartfelt reckoning of a human life, with all that it entails. With a grounded, everyday touch, Grytten patiently weaves the slow tapestry of how a human being comes into being — through their relationships, not only with other people, but with the place itself and the lives that inhabit it.” —Lisa Ridzen
”Few novels understand so well that a life can never be summed up and will always overflow its telling. Everything is at stake in these 166 pages, saturated with tenderness, achingly real and profoundly moving.” —Anne Michaels
Stakes: On Dracula and happiness by Noelle McCarthy $37
You have to invite him in. You have to want the vampire’s badness in the house with you. Growing up in Catholic Ireland, Noelle McCarthy is captivated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire is a risk-free fantasy, a suave alternative to the fraught realities of desire. Twenty years later, exhausted by her unruly appetites, Noelle returns to Dracula, reckoning with her own history and a changing world: generation-spanning shame and trauma given voice by #MeToo and the horrors emerging from Irish soil. More than a century after readers were first mesmerised by Dracula, Stakes transposes its electric themes of transgression, intoxication and sexual danger onto Noelle’s own life, asking: what’s the difference between an inheritance and a curse? A funny, visceral follow-up to the acclaimed Grand, Stakes celebrates the power of a gothic horror to help you face the parts of life that scare you most. [Paperback]
Where the Earth Meets the Sky: A story of penguins, people and place in Antarctica by Lousie K. Blight $40
Antarctica is the coldest, windiest and most inaccessible part of our planet-and now one of the places most affected by climate change. In this moving narrative, conservation biologist Louise K. Blight recounts her summer studying Adelie penguins. On isolated Ross Island, from which legendary explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott attempted the South Pole, Louise and pioneering penguin biologist David Ainley document how the region's penguins are being affected by the world's largest-ever iceberg. The iceberg's impact is geological in scope and life-changing for the tens of thousands of breeding penguins rushing to mate and rear their young. Surrounded by the hypnotic splendour of Antarctica's landscape, Louise and David record details of penguin courtship, incubation, and chick-rearing against a backdrop of the mental and emotional impacts of extreme weather, ongoing isolation and twenty-four hours of daylight. Interwoven with stories of early explorers and modern-day Antarcticans, Louise poetically conveys the isolation and the endless silence that ultimately allows her to explore the grief that has lingered since the untimely deaths of her father and sister. Blending polar travelogue, science and natural history, this is a story about a female scientist navigating Antarctica's extreme conditions and quirky human subculture. [Paperback]
>>An anxious environmental heart.
Read our latest newsletter.
17 July 2027
Aug 9 – Fog could be called ‘How A Notebook Became a Fiction''. It could be dismissed as a disjointed list, or recognsed for its realist nature, or, more aptly, embraced for its brilliant author’s machinations. Kathryn Scanlan, author of the excellent Kick the Latch, found a five-year diary at an estate auction. Falling apart, worn, and illegible in places, somehow it resonated with her. These notings of daily life; the weather, the visitors, the ordinary weariness of aging. There’s food and gatherings, the deaths and births, iilnesses and misadventures as well as the mundane beauty of life. Our diaries or notebooks are our own, whether that’s your physical journal or digital one. We have our own shorthand, the initials or pet names of our most initimate family and friends. Our own shorthand for tasks, thoughts or feelings. Some of us are visual recorders — a sketch or a doodle; while others will write long paragraphs intermittently. Some of us begin well and peter out before the year is done, leaving crisp pages for another purpose (maybe scoring board games). But back to Scanlan, who spent fifteen years reading, studying and dissecting the diary of this elderly woman. Taking it as inspiration, she has written her own version, a series of fractured, seemingly irrelevant, episodes or jottings. As you read on, allowing yourself to abandon trying to work it all out, patterns of time, people, emotions, weather etc emerge. Here, an ordinary life, captured in a work of both deconstruction, almost destruction, and creation. Through Scanlan and her interpretation or disruption, we find in our hands something remarkable and surprising.
The inability to tell on a coldish day whether the washing you are getting in is actually still a bit damp or merely cold is a universal experience, he thought, at least among those whose experiences include getting in washing on a coldish day, which would not be saying much (‘A’ being the universal experience of those who have had the experience ‘A’) if it were not for the fact that perhaps the majority of people (in whom I am immersed and from whom I am separate) have actually had that experience. Why then, he wondered, is Amy Arnold’s book Lori & Joe the first book I have read that records this experience? And why do I find it so thrilling, he wondered, to read this account of what could be termed a fundamental existential dilemma writ small, why, in my deliberately solitary pursuit of reading this book, am I thrilled by the most mundane possible universal experience? Maybe exactly for that reason, the unexceptional experiences, the fundamental existential dilemmas writ small, are exactly those that connect us reassuringly when we are reading solitarily. What is thought like? What is my own thought like? What is the thought of others like? I am not particularly interested in what is thought, he thought, I am more interested in the way thought flows, surely that is not the word, the way thought moves on, or its shape, rather, if thought can be said to have a shape: the syntax of thought, which, after all is the principal determinant of thought, regardless of its content but also determining its content. If my primary interest is grammar, then what I want from literature is an investigation of form, an adventure or experiment in form. I think but I do not know how I think unless I write it down or unless I read the writings down of the thoughts of another in which I recognise the grammar of my own thoughts. What I think is a contingent matter, he thought. Why washing is called washing when it is in fact not washing but drying is another thing he had wondered but maybe nobody else has wondered this, he thought, it does not appear in this book but this book does not pretend to be exhaustive of all possible thoughts either explicit or implicit in quotidian experiences, though it is fairly exhaustive of all the thoughts that rise towards, and often achieve, consciousness, so to call it, in its protagonist, so to call her, Lori, who takes up her partner Joe’s morning coffee one morning just like every morning and finds him dead, not like any other morning. Lori immediately then sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells, in typical weather and mud, and the book consists entirely of a record, for want of a better word, of the pattern of her thoughts, looping themselves onto the armature of a fairly constrained present, winding twenty-five years of repetitions and irritations and unexpressed dissatisfactions, such as we all have, I suppose, he thought, memories of all those years since she and Joe came to live in the cottage, their isolation, the landscape, the weather, the routines of mundane existence, ineluctable and cumulatively painful when you think of them, their breeding neighbours, no longer neighbours but no less inerasable for that, the small compromises made when living with another that become large compromises, perhaps less conscious ones but maybe intolerably conscious ones, consciousness after all being what is intolerable, through repetition over decades, all wound over and over and around themselves and around the armature of the present, drawn repeatedly, obsessively to whatever it is that troubles Lori the most, but always turning away or aside without reaching that something, or in order not to reach that something, which remains as a gap in consciousness, unthinkable, but a gap the very shape of itself. Lori & Joe is a remarkable piece of writing that shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold shows how Lori’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies. It reminds me, he thought, suspecting that readers of his review might respond better to a little name-dropping than to his attempts to express his own enthusiasm, of works by Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard in its fugue-like form, its musicality, so to speak, in the way that it perfectly calibrates the fractality of thought, so to term it, and he wished that he had not so termed it, upon the unremarkable slow progression of the present.
This deeply researched and beautifully presented book traces the origins of early Waitaha and Kāti Māmoe, and the later migrations, conflicts and settlements of the hapū who became Ngāi Tahu. Drawing on tribal knowledge, early written records and archaeological insights, he details the movements, encounters and exchanges that shaped these southern regions. He shows how people lived seasonally from the land and sea, supported by long-distance trade and a deep knowledge of place. These were the communities that the first Europeans encountered, as whalers, sealers and missionaries made their way around the coast.
”With one eye on the universal and the other on the particular, Atholl Anderson reveals how culture and nature shaped one another in southern Te Waipounamu for some five hundred years, down to the mid-nineteenth century.” —Michael Stevens, Professor and Director, Ngāi Tahu Research Centre
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout $38
”One of the most profoundly moving books I have read - I envy anyone reading it for the first time. Elizabeth Strout is one of those rare novelists whose books leave you a little wiser, open and more compassionate than you were when you began reading. Her best novel yet.” —Rachel Joyce
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy $30
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to her mother, Mary Roy.
THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris
Son of Nobody by Yann Martel $40
“A brilliant novel of ideas; a powerful meditation on life, death, and the vanity of human wishes, all illustrated by a poem that would do Homer proud. A stunningly imagined revisitation of an ancient past that is every bit as awful as the present.” —Kirkus
TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner $33
Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex.
A selection of good books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Good and Evil and Other Stories
Government for the Public Good