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28 November 2025
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?
Guestbbook is a project, as much as a book. My first Leanne Shapton experience was Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris — a novel about a relationship break-up in the form of an auction catalogue. Then Swimming Studies — a memoir of sorts with essays, photographs and illustrations (a new edition is on its way!) and also her collaborative work with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits, Women in Clothes, which is just brilliant and endlessly browseable. But I think Guestbook might top all these. It’s an experience, an art project, a rumination on memory and story-telling, with its collected images and texts and wonderfully strange, clever juxtapositions. These collected pieces are various and endlessly fascinating. In 'Eqalussuaq', a series of black-and-white photographs worthy of old nature magazines of the Greenland shark is captioned with snippets from newspaper items as well as a monologue of culinary requests to the possible chef for a private party sailing trip. 'At the Foot of the Bed', a series of photographs, some from magazine advertising, of empty beds have an eerie presence on the page — disturbing by their silence and strange wanting for someone or something to happen. There’s the story of a traumatised tennis player, Billy Byron, and his imaginary companion who drives him to the brink — a pinprick look at highly driven competitive personalities. It’s no coincidence that this book is subtitled Ghost Stories. There are ghostly apparitions, tales of odd happenings, old houses with haunting fables. Shapton is delving into and creating the unexplained, using memorabilia, found objects (photos and images), reminiscences, resonances and mis-tellings to make us look twice and then make us look again — think again. Her artworks from various projects are interspersed throughout, watercolours, drawings, sculptural and photographic work, and the overall black-and-white printing gives a feeling of timelessness or 'timetrappedness'. In 'The Iceberg as Viewed by Eyewitnesses', she matches drawings (falsely attributed to eyewitnesses of the Titanic sinking) with the incident book from an upmarket restaurant and bar — the complaints and how the staff dealt with the issues, alongside recommendations for more appropriate actions next time. Humour underscores many of the vignettes. What is true and what is real are not considerations in this Guestbook, but the emotions, the philosophical musings, and Shapton’s role as witness of events and medium of ghostly apparitions will delight anyone who likes to look sideways at the world with one eye squinting and a mind wide open to intrigue and play.
When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal. Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art.
"C.C. Rose's genius novel is a book that shows it is possible for a novel to be at once highly original and to fit within an established tradition. We Live Here Now is both accessible and challenging, entertaining the reader with its ridiculous and sinister figures, even as it prompts more intellectual questions about the reality of appearances." —John Self
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.
Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan (translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwoord) $30
Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate comfort — Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous — and much younger — boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace, in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot. Awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary prize. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Stuns and illuminates. Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an ode to language and possibility and the ongoing question of how to be in an ever-changing world.” —Bryan Washington
”A brilliantly ambitious struggle and mediation on language, thought and existence. A wondrous book.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
>>”Why I used ChatGPT to write my prize-winning novel.”
TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker $33
”Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” You couldn't really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract? After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves. As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic tour-de-force that traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth. [Paperback]
”Brilliantly over-the-top. Barker is known for experiment and brainy whimsy. There could be no better person to write a comedy about art and its discontents. It's a rollercoaster kind of excess, where the best part is that it's too much. Barker seems incapable of putting a foot wrong. This is satire that sees right through you, but forgives you and teaches you to forgive yourself. It's that rare thing, a serious work of art that is also a giddy confection: a vehicle of pure delight.” —Sandra Newman, Guardian
>>Read an extract.
>>We are all weirdos.
The Silver Book by Olivia Laing $38
It is September 1974 and two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini's Casanova, and a youthful — and beautiful — apprentice is just what he needs. He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova's Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini's horrifying fable of fascism. But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising political tensions of Italy's 'Years of Lead', he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn't intend. [Paperback]
”Like the script of an unwritten movie, voyeuristic, slick with 1970s decadence, glittering with shadows and unspoken sins, The Silver Book is lush, intense, wildly evocative; subtly freighted with emotional power and sensuality, it is simply their best book yet.” —Philip Hoare
”The Silver Book is an astounding work. It's difficult to believe this isn't an eyewitness account: the characters appear to live and breathe in actual time and we experience with them all the erotic tensions, as well as the tragedies, involved in their defiant pursuit of beauty. The world of Fellini and Pasolini is uncannily resurrected in this visionary narrative.” —Celia Paul
”Transporting, heartbreaking, beautiful. I did not want this story to end.” —Nigel Slater
”A truly wonderful book.” —Edmund de Waal
”An enchanted tale of an accursed era. In spare, subjective prose, with a deep appreciation of craft, material, texture, color, Laing brilliantly evokes Cinecitta when its creative masters were at their peak. The book manages to be both wonderfully escapist and a timely warning.” —Lucy Sante
>>Dark mysteries and glittery illusions.
>>Fictionalising a murder.
Significant Others: A collection of texts by frank r. jagoe $45
The world is always speaking to you. Held together by a shared language, all beings are constantly, endlessly chatting away, saying something or other. What this language constitutes may vary, but all matter is alive, and it always has something to say. Significant Others is not a world of magical realism, but a different means of describing the existing world. It offers an opposition to the reductive logic of Western capitalism which views other-than-humans as only resources for extraction. Other beings feature as metaphors, or omens, but also as fleshly, agential creatures. Often the encounters are erotically charged, using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as an intentionality that can permeate all aspects of life. In one story, the protagonist attempts to figure out how to have sex with a bathroom mirror; in another, a catfish drags itself through Piccadilly Circus tube station with an uncomfortable level of intimacy with all the surfaces they come into contact with; a person births a stone from their rectum; a lump of topaz in someone’s brain triggers their depression; a human tries to talk to a limestone cliff using touch; a swan drinks the bathwater of their human lover. This book is a collection of different fictionalised narratives, but across them they chart, somewhat anachronistically, a journey from total withdrawal to reimmersion in the ebb and flow of living, alongside a growing recognition that isolation is never truly possible. Life insists. frank r jagoe’s work is a reclamation of madness and monstrosity in opposition to the exclusionary category of the human. Often it explores communication with other-than-humans: in recognition that we are in community with each other; in acknowledgement of the personhood of other-than-human beings; and in order to displace a western hierarchy that claims humanity as the highest form of existence. They are particularly drawn to considering how madness and monstrosity are defined in relation to language usage, and in opposition to rationality, coherence, and ‘reason’. Highlighting forms of communication beyond words, beyond class-based language, beyond human forms of speech, feels an urgent imperative. Throughout they want to consider whose language is respected, whose language is engaged with, and believed, or even acknowledged. Influenced by medieval lapidary texts, jagoe’s most recent focus has been finding kinship with rocks, and trying to think through how we can communicate across vastly different experiences of time.[Paperback]
”Significant Others is a fully grown and highly original manuscript. It is a remarkable and beautiful piece of writing which forges a new language of material aesthetics to think and write beyond the human. There is a fluency and elasticity of invention here, resonating with the processes of artistic creation and encounter. Exciting, passionate and surprising.” —Bhanu Kapil, Tom McCarthy and Elizabeth Price, judges of the 2024 Prototype Prize
Art on My Mind: Visual politics by bell hooks $30
”If one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonisation, is complete. Such work can be undone only by acts of reclamation.” In a collection of essays, critiques and interviews, bell hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting and criticizing art and aesthetics in a world increasingly concerned with identity politics. hooks shares her own experience of the transformative power of art whilst exploring topics ranging from art in education and the home to the politics of space and imagination as a revolutionary tool. She positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be empowering within the Black community. Speaking with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Alison Saar, and examining the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Art on My Mind is a generous and expansive body of work that has become increasingly relevant since it was first published in 1995. [Paperback]
Privatisation and Plunder: Neoliberalism — causes, costs, and alternatives edited by Chris Werry and Richard Werry $30
Privatisation & Plunder lays bare how forty years of neoliberalism reshaped Aotearoa New Zealand more radically than almost any other nation. Privatisation, deregulation and austerity tore through public life, deepening inequality and fuelling today’s crises in housing, work and the cost of living. Bringing together leading voices from academia and activism, this powerful collection exposes the real legacy of the ‘New Zealand Experiment’ — and offers bold, practical alternatives: universal basic income, public ownership, democratic renewal and economic justice. Accessible, provocative and essential, Privatisation & Plunder is both a wake-up call and a vision for a fairer, more hopeful Aotearoa. Contributors: Geoff Bertram, Brett Christophers, Brian Easton, Max Harris, Jane Kelsey, Bill Mitchell, Jacqueline Paul, John Quiggin, Max Rashbrooke, Bill Rosenberg, Guy Standing, Chris Werry, Richard Werry. [Paperback]
Homework by Geoff Dyer $45
In Homework, Geoff Dyer reflects on his childhood and what it means to come of age in England in the 60s and 70s, in a country shaped by the aftermath of the Second World War but accelerating towards change. He was born in Cheltenham in the late fifties, the only child of a dinner lady and a planning engineer. Raised in a working-class area, Geoff and his mates found much joy recreating battles with their beloved Tommy guns, kicking a beachball around until its untimely death, and collecting anything and everything they could find; football cards, conkers and Action Man figures. When Geoff passes his 11-plus exams he gets in to a Cheltenham Grammar School, a school which drastically changes the trajectory of his life. [Hardback]
“Homework is wonderful Geoff-Dyer writing, which we've all learned to crave; something to delight and to move us and to edify us on every page. I find him an irresistible writer.” —Richard Ford
”Moving, atmospheric, truthful, perceptive and hilariously funny — I loved it: a piece of our English history, the story of a vanished time, which feels close at hand but thoroughly gone. What a story. What a great story.” — Tessa Hadley
”Geoff Dyer and I nearly share a name and a birth year. We were born in different countries, however, under different circumstances. No matter. Every page of this exquisite, witty memoir brought back a flood of memories and emotions that seemed to be my own, so lovingly and precisely does Dyer articulate them. A heartfelt book by a supremely intelligent writer.” —Jeffrey Eugenides
>>Catching up.
>>Giving up.
The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the birth of the Anglo-Saxon state, AD 630—918 by Max Adams $55
The eighth century has long been a neglected backwater in English history- a shadowland between the death of Bede and the triumphs of lfred. But before the hegemony of Wessex, the kingdom of Mercia — spread across a broad swathe of central England — was the dynamic heart of a kingship that discovered the means to exercise central political authority for the first time since the Roman empire. That authority was used to construct trading networks and markets; develop economic and cultural links with the Continent, and lay the foundations for a system of co-ordinated defence that lfred would reinvent at the end of the ninth century. Two kings, Thelbald (716-757) and Offa (757-796) dominate the political landscape of the rising power of Mercia. During their reigns, monasteries became powerhouses of royal patronage, economic enterprise and trade. Offa constructed his grandiose dyke along the borders of the warlike Welsh kingdoms and, more subtly, spread his message of political superiority through coinage bearing his image. But thelbald and Offa between them built something with an even more substantial legacy — a geography of medieval England. And they engineered a set of tensions between kingship, landholding and church that were to play out dramatically at the dawn of the Viking Age. [Hardback]
”In this this remarkable book, Max Adams breathes new life into the royal families of the largely forgotten Saxon Kingdom of Mercia, which we can now see played a crucially important role in the foundation of the emerging kingdom of England.” —Francis Pryor
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy: City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti, and David Mazzucchelli $45
From award-winning novelist Paul Auster comes the graphic adaptation of his beloved series, The New York Trilogy, a postmodern take on detective and noir fiction. In 1994, Paul Auster's City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction. But City of Glass was only the first novel in a series of books, Auster's New York Trilogy, and graphic novel readers have been waiting for years for the other two tales to be translated into comics. Now the wait is over. The New York Trilogy is post-modern literature disguised as Noir fiction where language is the prime suspect. An interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, each book explores various philosophical themes. In City of Glass, an author of detective fiction investigates a murder and descends into madness. Ghosts features a private eye named Blue, trailing a man named Black, for a client called White. This too ends with the protagonist's downfall. And in The Locked Room, another author is experiencing writer's block, and hopes to brake it by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend. The second two parts of this trilogy will be appearing in this volume for the very first time as a graphic novel. Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind the three adaptations, art-directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by the award-winning cartoonist David Mazzucchielli, the second volume, Ghosts, is illustrated by New Yorker cover artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik himself. These adaptations take Auster's sophisticated wordplay and translate it into comicsplay: both highbrow and lowbrow and immensely fun reading. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Service by John Tottenham $38
In his late forties, John, a failed journalist and failing novelist, finds himself working at a bookshop in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighbourhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances. In between chasing noisy cell-phone users around the shop and wrapping books he hates for wealthy mums he hates even more, John reflects on his fraught relationship with service as an unrepentant outsider in an age of conformity. With dry wit, John Tottenham's debut novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions: gentrification, debt, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. [Paperback]
”So heartfelt that we find ourselves howling with laughter because, despite his best efforts, John Tottenham writes with a rare comic intensity and re-creates himself in the guise of an unforgettable character in fiction.” —Colm Toibin
”The weariest bohemian, with a Keatsian death-drive he somehow keeps outliving, John Tottenham is my favourite nihilistic romantic.” —Rachel Kushner
”Hilarious, refreshingly mean-spirited and often brilliant.” —Washington Post
Anything by Rebecca Stead, illustrated by Gracey Zhang $40
Anything paints a tender picture of a father and daughter moving into a new home. Dad brings a birthday cake for the new apartment to celebrate their new beginning and tells his daughter she can wish for anything (or, more precisely, "three Anythings"). Over the course of the day, she wishes for some of her favorite things, including a rainbow and "the biggest slice of pizza in the whole world”. But she keeps some of her wishes inside. Because what she really wants is to go back home to their old apartment, with its big blue bathtub and space in the closet for hide-and-seek. When she finally admits this last wish, her dad takes her on a journey, and by the book's final pages, she is home . . . in every way that matters. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
A selection of ‘one-sitting’ essays from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
The Face: Cartography of the Void
Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books
I Will Write to Avenge My People
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.
Ngā Mōteatea : The Songs (Volumes 1—4) edited and translated by Apirana Ngata, Pei Te Hurinui Jones, and Hirini Moko Mead $270
This is a new edition of the classic work Ngā Mōteatea, the annotated collection of waiata made over 40 years ago by the distinguished Māori leader and scholar Apirana Ngata. This completely redesigned and reset edition, published in association with the Polynesian Society, preserves the integrity of Ngata's text and Jones's translations and their commentary but adds further notes from contemporary Māori scholars and modernises the typography by the inclusion of macrons. It also includes two CDs of waiata drawn from the archive of Māori and Pacific Music at the University of Auckland. An essential text for anyone interested in te ao Māori. It is good to have this important work back in print. [Four hardback volumes. Also available separately at $75 each.]
The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus $40
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it. At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they'd bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range — Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut. Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is a piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge. [Paperback]
”It's really, really good. Maybe the best thing she's written.” —Gary Indiana
”The Four Spent the Day Together is the great American novel we need right now to understand what has happened to America. To understand how we got here. This is the book for our time, just as perhaps American Psycho was the book of the 80s and 90s. It shows how it happened, how everything is linked, how the American dream slowly drifted into the American nightmare — at its core, within the American middle class. This is Chris Kraus's masterpiece. It is the proof, if needed, that she is more than a transgressive, avant-garde, iconic writer — she is just one of the greatest American writers, one who is able to tell us what's wrong with the world and transform our stupor into thinking.” —Constance Debre
"The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable. I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too." —Rachel Kushner
>>Writing about all of it.
In the Circle of Ancient Trees: Our oldest trees and the stories they tell edited by Valerie Trouet, illustrated by Blaze Cyan $70
In the growth rings of every tree are ingrained and encrypted the stories of the tree, its environment and the changes through which it has lived. Growing archives of tree-ring samples allow us to read and decode these natural timelines in ever greater detail. In the Circle of Ancient Trees narrates the stories of ten ancient trees, considering why they grew where they grew; how they reflect their habitat; and the events to which they bore witness. Valerie Trouet curates chapter essays by ecologists with specialist knowledge of each tree, exploring how human and environmental history share common roots, while drilling down into the ecology, persistence and resilience of each species. Illustrated with commissioned wood- engravings and tree-ring infographics that visualise each tree's chronology and geography, In the Circle of Ancient Trees uses circular narratives — beginning and ending with the tree's relationship to its location and environment — that consider what lessons for our future might be discovered in our planet's past. Includes a section on the Kauri, by Gretel Boswijk. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Total Eclipse by Annie Dillard $26
What can we know, and what remains beyond our reach? In 1979, Annie Dillard witnessed the solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. In Total Eclipse, this celestial event becomes a metaphysical reckoning. With lyrical precision and eerie clarity, Dillard evokes the strangeness of the shifting sky and the psychic dislocation that descends with the shadow. The quiet yet epic unravelling of the familiar becomes revelation: a rupture in time, a confrontation with mortality and a brush with the sublime. Juxtaposing the cosmic and the mundane, Total Eclipse meditates on the limits of perception and language, entering the surreal intensity of the phenomenon to emerge with the brief, blazing clarity offered by darkness. [Paperback]
Storm Pegs: A life made in Shetland by Jen Hadfield $28
In her late twenties, celebrated poet Jen Hadfield moved to the Shetland archipelago to make her life anew. A scattering of islands at the northernmost point of the United Kingdom, frequently cut off from the mainland by storms, Shetland is a place of Vikings and myths, of ancient languages and old customs, of breathtaking landscapes and violent weather. It has long fascinated travellers seeking the edge of the world. On these islands known for their isolation and drama, Hadfield found something more: a place teeming with life, where rare seabirds blow in on Atlantic gales, seals and dolphins visit its beaches, and wild folk festivals carry the residents through long, dark winters. She found a close-knit community, too, of neighbours always willing to lend a boat or build a creel, of women wild-swimming together in the star-spangled winter seas. Over seventeen years, as bright summer nights gave way to storm-lashed winters, she learned new ways to live. In prose as rich and magical as Shetland itself, Storm Pegs transports us to the islands as a local; introducing us to the remote and beautiful archipelago where Hadfield has made her home, and shows us new ways of living at the edge. [Paperback]
”Storm Pegs is rich, attentive and beautifully written. Hadfield writes vividly about the tides, the Shaetlan language, and shows a great appreciation for the people and modern life of Shetland. This book has been my friend. I really loved it and I recommend it.” —Amy Liptrot
”Storm Pegs is a deeply thoughtful and beautifully written account of a life centred on making art in a lively island community. Hadfield writes with rare nuance about choosing and building a new life in a place that calls to many of us.” —Sarah Moss
”Delightful: at once intricate and effortless, playful and deeply felt. A heartfelt paean to a coldwater Eden.” —Cal Flyn
”What a wonderful book. Jen Hadfield just has to turn her languaged gaze to the world and it fizzes to life on the page. One of the most intensely realised accounts of a place — and time in a place — I have read.” —Philip Marsden
”A gorgeous portrait of a fascinating, ever-changing place, as well as very many other things: friendship, community, creation and self-creation, the cycle of the seasons and the toil and triumph of the elements. I adored it.” —Sara Baume
The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black woman in the Romantic archive by Mathelinda Nabugodi $50
A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair. Percy Shelley's gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats's calm face. Byron's silk-lined leather boot. Who would have known there could be vast worlds contained in these items? In a completely new interpretation of the Romantics and their context, Nabugodi uses these items to frame her interrogation of the poets, leading us on an expansive journey through time and memory, situating us in depth of their world, and her own. "Freedom, liberty, autonomy are the period's favorite words," Nabugodi writes. Romantic poets sought truth in the depth of their souls and in the mind's unbounded regions. Ideals of free speech and human rights were being forged. And yet the period was defined by a relentless commitment to the displacement and stolen labour of millions. Romanticism, she argues, can no longer be discussed without the racial violence with which it was complicit. Still, rather than using this idea to rehash Black pain and subjugation, she mines the archives for instances of resistance, beauty, and joy. Nabugodi moves effortlessly between the past and present. She takes us into the physical archives, and unpacks her relationships with them: what they are and should be; who built them; how they are entwined with an industry that was the antithesis of freedom; and how she feels holding the materials needed to write this book, as a someone whose ancestry is largely absent from their ledgers. The Trembling Hand presents a new way of reading the past. This transfixing, evocative book reframes not only the lives of the legendary Romantics, but also their poetry and the very era in which they lived. It is a reckoning with art, archives, and academia. [Hardback]
”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
”Mathelinda Nabugodi reveals the racial wounds behind the pristine face of British Romanticism. Her journey — part scholarly excavation, part personal pilgrimage — takes readers through abandoned archives and hallowed homes, where she confronts not just history but her own complex relationship with poets whose words shaped her life even as their era sought to erase people who looked like her. Nabugodi shows us how to hold two truths at once: beautiful craft and painful context, literary genius and racial violence. Her reckoning is a love letter written in disquiet, a map for those seeking the unvarnished truth of our literary inheritance, and a gift for anyone who values personal storytelling that illuminates our shared past.” —Professor DJ Lee
The Book of Lives: A memoir of sorts by Margaret Atwood $75
”Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.” Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents — entomologist father, dietician mother — Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: “It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.”), but also thrilling and beautiful. From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat's Eye to divided 1980s Berlin where she began The Handmaid's Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel. As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art — and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations. [Hardback]
The Haunted Wood: A history of childhood reading by Sam Leith $55
Do you remember the first time you fell in love with a book? Maybe you tumbled down a rabbit hole, flew out of your bedroom window, or found the key to a secret garden. And in the silence of that moment, your whole life changed forever. The stories we read as children are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past — collective and individual, remembered and imagined — and invite us to dream up different futures. In a pioneering history of the children's literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading, from the ancient tales of Aesop, through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics. Excavating the complex lives of our most beloved writers, Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the power of books to inspire and console entire generations. [Hardback]
”Sam Leith has been encyclopedic and forensic in this journey through children's books. It's a joy for anyone who cares or wonders why we have children's literature.” —Michael Rosen
”One of the best surveys of children's literature I've read. It takes a particular sort of sensibility to look at children's literature with all the informed knowledge of a lifetime's reading of 'proper' books, and neither patronise (terribly good for a children's book) nor solemnly over-praise. Sam Leith hits the right spot again and again. The Haunted Wood is a marvel, and I hope it becomes a standard text for anyone interested in literature of any sort.” —Philip Pullman
Dead or Alive by Zadie Smith $40
In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith takes a close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tar, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic — and the meaning of 'the commons' in all our lives. [Paperback]
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon $38
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who's taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he's been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there's no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement - and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he's supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can't see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it's the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he's a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question. Much anticipated. [Paperback]
Hard-Case Heroes: Stories from the Abel Tasman by Gerard Hindmarsh $40
Building on the success of his Kahurangi backcountry trilogy, Gerard Hindmarsh’s new book, Hard-case Heroes, focuses on some of the quirky and largely untold characters associated with the Abel Tasman coast and its uplands: early settlers and park rangers; an island hermit and defiant squatters; graziers and a limestone miner. Hard-Case Heroes is a highly readable and engaging book about a remarkable corner of New Zealand, written by a local with a love of the area and a nose for a good story. These largely untold and gritty stories from our social history will interest anyone who has experienced the Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand’s smallest and most visited national park, arguably our most beautiful too. [Paperback]
And back in print: Swamp Fever | Kahurangi Calling | Kahurangi Stories | Kahurangi Out West
And reprinting now: the popular d'Urville Island story, Angelina.
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Use the VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR to choose your seasonal gifts.
21 November 2025
Children are unable to disagree with the statement ‘Junket is nice’ because they have no idea what junket is, they have never come across junket and have never even heard of junket so, to them, on hearing the statement ‘Junket is nice’, junket is necessarily synonymous with nice. I have no wish to disabuse them, in fact I have no basis on which to disabuse them, as I am, really, no more familiar with junket than they are, although I am perhaps more familiar than they are with its reputation, as a food for invalids, primarily, made of milk curdled with rennet, basically, neither of which pieces of knowledge encourage me to think at all favourably of junket. Actually, I would like to disabuse these children, whoever they are. I have never eaten junket but I do not think that it is nice. The red-bearded old man in red slippers in Dorothy Kunhardt’s 1933 pro-junket propaganda picture book Junket Is Nice is eating junket from a large red bowl. I suppose junket could be a suitable food for old men with few teeth, even if they are not invalids, though I am myself not old enough and have still too many teeth to know this, not that I would eat junket anyway, even if I knew this to be so. If everyone in the whole world comes to watch a bearded old man eating junket because of the size of the bowl of junket that the bearded old man is eating from and because of the correspondingly large amount of junket that he is eating from this large bowl, it is hard to imagine the implausibly large amount of junket that would draw such a crowd and hard to imagine what kind of old man this could be, to impress the whole world with such mundane feats of unilateral consumption. Presumably not an invalid, though we learn nothing of the state of his teeth. As the old man can speak to everyone in the whole world at once, he must either have a very loud voice, access to social media barely imaginable in 1933, or some other way of speaking inside every person’s head. Somehow I suspect the latter. Such omnipotence does he have that he can offer every person in the world something nice if they can guess what he is thinking about. This may seem hard, prima facie, but he gives some clues to make it easier. He describes several ludicrous things that he claims not to be thinking about, though how he can describe them without thinking about them is not presented as problematic. I find this very problematic. This is not something that I can do. The people of the world then suggest many ludicrous things that the red-bearded old man might be thinking about, any of which should trap him into thinking about them, but he tells them they are WRONG! He must be lying, I tell myself. He must be lying, or his idea of thinking is somehow different from mine. If the red-bearded old man’s thinking is limited to such things that are in fact the case and not ludicrous things, the red-bearded old man is the God of the Actual, which, it seems to me, is a terrible limitation upon him, despite whatever capricious omnipotence comes with the position. Does not a mind long for more than that? The gods are never free, it seems: they can have no imagination. A little boy on a tricycle knows that the red-bearded old man has no inside to his mind and therefore must be actually thinking of junket. RIGHT! says the red-bearded old man, and suddenly the last spoonful of junket is gone. What is this junket if it lasts only as long as our uncertainty? The little boy’s reward for guessing what the old man was thinking is to be allowed to lick the bowl from which the old man has been eating. Although presented in the book as something nice, this is surely one of the most disgusting moments in children’s literature, Especially as the little boy seems to like it. Especially as this is junket, which I do not believe is nice, not just due to its association with invalids. This moment is so disgusting that I close the book, cease my pointless metaphysical speculations, and never read about how the little boy gives the red-bearded old man a lift home on his tricycle so that he won’t be late for his supper.
Forgotten in a trunk. Left in the dark. Unwanted. Once they had been on display, crafted with care. They belonged together and they had a story. Would they be together again, and would there be a new story? Kate DiCamillo works her magic with The Puppets of Spelhorst. With the texture of a folk tale, she reveals the story of a girl, a boy, a king, an owl, and a wolf. An old man sees a puppet in the window of a toy shop and the memory of a love is rekindled. He wants to take her home and look into her eyes so like those of his sweetheart long gone, but, bothersome: he has to have all the puppets. And so, it comes to be. In the night the girl sitting atop a dresser sees the moon and describes its beauty to her companions. The old man sleeps and does not awaken. And then an adventure begins. A journey that will take them through the hands of the rag-and-bone man, to an uncle with two inquisitive nieces, where a new story will be made — one which involves all of them; even though they will have their fierce teeth tampered with (the wolf), be mistaken for a feather duster (the owl), left abandoned outside and kidnapped by a giant bird (the boy), be snaffled into a pocket (the girl), and left alone with no one to rule (the king). Yet this is not the only story. Emma is writing, and Martha is making mischief. A story is ready to be told. An extra hand and a good singing voice are needed. In steps the maid, Jane Twiddum — someone who will have a profound impact on the fate of the five friends. The Puppets of Spelhorst is an absolute delight with its clever story. A spellbound tale. "Now it all happens," whispered the boy. "Now the story begins."
This the first of three fairy tales set in the magical land of Norendy. The second is equally charming, The Hotel Balzaar, and coming soon: Lost Evangeline.
A fresh season calls for a fresh cookbook. With a plethora of tasty ingredients just around the corner, let a cookbook take you on a journey, expand your food knowledge and repertoire, open the door to a cultural experience, bring creativity into your kitchen, and supply you with the very best of recipes, both innovative and simple, for indulging in and sharing over the summer months ahead.
Michèle Roberts is cooking for two. A book for friendship, French Cooking for Two: Seaons of Friendship is as endearing and witty as her first French culinary adventure, French Cooking for One. Packed with over 170 recipes for every season, hints, and foodie stories, Roberts gives us her take on the French classics to bring us a wealth of simple recipes to share joyfully. Her sources are both historical, drawing from great cooks such as Mme Saint-Ange and her La bonne cuisine (1929); and personal — the kitchen notes of her Aunt Brigitte.
In her introduction she espouses the delight and sustenance friendships bring her. “Cooking for a dear friend is a major source of pleasure in my life; a practical, direct way of showing love. Talking tête-à-tête over good food adds a further layer of enjoyment to being in a friend’s company. The pleasures of easting and the pleasures of talking enrich and deepen each other.”
With her usual flair and quirky illustrations, Cooking for Two is literary and culinary joie de vivre.
Ixta Belfrgae is a rule breaker. Inspired by her Brazilian heritage, FUSÃO is a fusion cookbook taking the best flavours of Brazil, itself a fusion cuisine with influences from Portugal, West Africa and Indigenous communities, and blending this with Belfrage’s inventive cooking style. Playful, fresh, and jubilant, these recipes intrigue and satisfy. Traditional recipes have twists, there are flavour bombs to excite the taste buds, and much to discovery in Belfrage’s journey through food to her cultural heritage. Delicious! And perfect for summer snacking, and entertaining.
From the author of the bestseller Salt Fat Acid Heat comes Good Things: — a treasure box of a cookbook. In Samin Nosrat’s treasure chest you’ll find her beloved everyday recipes and favourite ingredients, as well as tools, tips and techniques, all imbued with her love for food and pleasure in sharing.
”There is magic in the way Samin teaches. She wins you over immediately with an irresistible combination of warmth, honesty, deep understanding of cooking…. If anyone can show us how to cook, it is Samin.” — Alice Waters
Take a journey into the mountains with travel and food writer Caroline Eden; from the sun-baked valleys of Armenia to the jagged peaks of Georgia. In Green Mountains you will find great walks, epic landscapes, lively stories, cultural history (*featuring this amazing building), and delicious recipes.
”There is nobody writing about food at the moment who's committed to this level of immersion and it rings out in every line.” —Tim Hayward, Financial Times
”One of the most brilliant travel writers of her generation.” —Fuchsia Dunlop
Other books by Caroline Eden: Black Sea, Red Sands, Cold Kitchen
This is the perfect book for summer celebrations and relaxed dining. Boustany translates from Arabic as 'My Garden', and the recipes are down-to-earth, relaxed and plentiful. Bold, inspiring and ever-evolving, Boustany picks up where Falastin left off, with flavour-packed, colourful and simple vegetable- and grain-led dishes — a tribute to his Palestinian heritage.
”This is my dream cookbook. It's full of heart, soul and Sami's very delicious food. I have a library of cookbooks, but Sami's are one of the only ones I genuinely cook from.’” —Meera Sodha
”I love Sami Tamimi's wonderful Boustany. It is thrilling and also moving to see what a great chef has done with the flavourful home cooking of a people with a rich and diverse culinary tradition and a deep connection with the land.” —Claudia Roden
Helen Goh draws on her upbringing in Malaysia and Australia, her acclaimed work with Yotam Ottolenghi, and her psychology training to share her distinctive approach to baking. Baking and the Meaning of Life is a stand-out. Divine sweet treats, next-level cakes, tarts and loaves, chocolate and fruits …and more. Over 100 of Goh’s favourite recipes to explore and share.
”Helen in her absolute element. It really doesn't get any better.’” — Yotam Ottolenghi
”I have rarely leafed through a book and wanted so much to get into the kitchen!” — Diana Henry
The best ways to get all your seasonal gift shopping done painlessly (pleasurably!) at VOLUME:
Ask our advice. We’ve had decades’ worth of experience helping all sorts of people to choose just the right book to give as a gift (or to keep for themselves). Just send us your gift-recipient list and we will send you some suggestions from our shelves (or we can arrange a Zoom consultation, if you like!). We can gift-wrap the books and dispatch them to you or to the recipients, or have them ready to collect from our door. >>Ask our advice now.
Browse our website and choose. Our shelves are full of interesting, well-written and beautiful books — all selected by us for their excellence — and our shop website is arranged to help you choose just the right thing. Find the authors or titles you love with the quick-search bar — or make discoveries! Click on our website’s categories and sub-categories bring you to ‘virtual shelves’ of books of similar interest (where relevant, you will find page-views of the insides of the books, to help you choose).
Here are a few shortcuts to some really good books:
Fiction (for adults):
If you are wanting a well-written, vital novel, anything on the Booker Prize short list would be ideal.
Our curated selection of Translated fiction includes the books listed for this year’s International Booker Prize.
It has been a strong year for Aotearoa fiction!
We have many interesting books published by Small Presses in Aotearoa and overseas.
And we have interesting books for those who like Historical Fiction, Crime, and Speculative or Dystopian Fiction.
And Poetry always makes a good gift!Books for children:
We have excellent choices in everything from Board Books to Picture Books, to Junior Fiction, to Senior (or ‘Middle Grade’) Fiction, to Novels for Young Adults.
Choose from our selection of children’s books from Aotearoa, or from our books in te reo Māori.
And we have beautiful and informative books of Non-Fiction, and Graphic Novels for Children, too!This is the time of year in which a Cook Book, an Art Book, or a Book about Gardening would make a perfect gift!
And we have interesting Graphic Novels, too…Our Culture section has books about creative and lifestyle pursuits.
Our Society section includes books on History and Politics for those interested in how people interact — in the past or in the present. It is more important than ever to understand the history and present of Aotearoa.
As the title suggests, our section on the Mind includes books on Philosophy and Psychology.
And our Science section brings you fine writing and the latest information and thinking in many fields.
We now have a Biography and Memoir section!
For a really special gift, why not give a Volume Reading Subscription! We have a subscription menu for adults, and a subscription menu for children — but, really, we can tailor a subscription in any way to suit both the reader and the giver (just ask!).
We can gift-wrap the books* and dispatch them by overnight courier to you or to the recipients — or have them ready to collect from our door.
(*we do not charge for gift-wrapping)
A collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin. Erpenbeck asks: "Is there some kind of perpetrator who makes things that I know cherish and disappear?" These things disappear, and yet do they really? Do they remain in our memories more fully than if they continued to exist?
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
The Paris Trilogy by Colombe Schneck (translated from French by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer) $33
Writing in response to Annie Ernaux and in conversation with Elena Ferrante, Colombe Schneck's three semi-autobiographical takes on a woman's life form an elegant, powerful exploration of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, loss and renewal. Colombe is seventeen in 1984 and carefree, busy discovering sex and studying for her baccalauréat. When she becomes pregnant her choice to have an abortion is never in question. Yet suddenly she must grapple with the body that has brought the precarity of her freedom into focus. Colombe and Héloïse are two little Parisian liberals, friends since the age of eleven. They look alike, have similar upbringings and for years they follow parallel paths: university, love affairs, work, marriage, children, divorce, more love affairs. They are the most enduring witnesses to each other's lives, until illness betrays them. Colombe reconnects with Gabriel in her fifties; their relationship is passionate and transformative. As it unfolds, Colombe discovers many things about herself, including a newfound appreciation for swimming, and the euphoria and strength of a body learning when to push and when to let go. [Paperback]
”This is valuable writing. It has immense vitality. You will encounter a female narrator whose direct and bright-eyed stare at the world, and her self, is without shame or faux modesty. At the same time, it is also a deep study of existence, at various ages and stages in life.” —Deborah Levy
”The 'movements' of The Paris Trilogy thrum with life, sparkle with insight. It was an exhilarating read. I've never encountered a more perfect depiction of how the world shrinks when you understand that you're a 'girl', rather than a 'person'.” —Natasha Brown
”'Seventeen’ mines a trauma all too common for women and is published at a time when France has just enshrined abortion rights in their constitution. I found it a tale of frank retrospection, a mature woman looking back on her naive self with love and respect. It is immensely readable and still sadly relevant. Give it to every young woman you know.” —Monique Roffey
>>Not writing with no affect.
>>Paris and swimming.
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li $45
"There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home." There is no good way to say this — because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a timeline." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: "doing the things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, "The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now." [Hardback]
”To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it at the same time as desperately wishing that it had never needed to be written at all.” —Observer
”A book unlike any I've read, that brims with rare clarity and intelligence, with love and care. It will stay with me for a long time.” —Cecile Pin
>>A new alphabet, a new vocabulary.
This Moment, Every Moment: Collected poems by Ruth Dallas (edited by Nicola Cummins) $50
Ruth Dallas's voice is unique within the Aotearoa New Zealand literary canon. Her poetry is characterised by a profound connection to nature and seasonal rhythms. It is deeply grounded in place — often to locations in Otago and Southland, where she spent most of her life — yet universal in its reach. The clarity, elegance and apparent simplicity of her style owe much to her interest in classical Chinese poetry and thought. This Moment, Every Moment demonstrates the majesty of Dallas's craft across her lifetime of poetic work. Time spent in contemplation of even a single Dallas poem is always time richly rewarded; how much more so with this complete collection. This new volume brings together previously uncollected poems written in Dallas's youth, alongside all her published collections — from her arrival in 1953 as a significant voice in the New Zealand literary landscape with Country Road and Other Poems, 1947-52, to her final book, The Joy of a Ming Vase, published in 2006. [Nice hardback with cover art by Kushana Bush]
”No other poems written in this country move & haunt me as Ruth's do.” —Charles Brasch.
Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life by Diana Morrow $45
Ruth Dallas (1919-2008) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand's most distinctive, respected and influential literary voices. Yet despite her international success and her enduring presence as one of the country's most anthologised poets, the full extent of her contribution to New Zealand literature has been relatively unexamined and under-appreciated. This comprehensive biography redresses this imbalance, and gives this outwardly reserved South Islander her (over)due place in the spotlight as a significant poet, fiction writer and children's author. Drawing on Dallas's 1991 autobiography, Curved Horizon, her writing notebooks and journals, and letters and interviews, Morrow shows how the girl whose first published work appeared in the children's pages of the Southland Daily News grew up to become the internationally acclaimed author of nine poetry collections, a book of short stories and eight children's books. Ruth Dallas: A writer's life illuminates Dallas's personal and professional relationships, describes major formative episodes in her life — including the traumatic loss of an eye as a teenager — and investigates her inspirations and creative process. Morrow brilliantly captures the inter-regional jousting of the post-war New Zealand literary scene, and Dallas's independent-minded and highly respected presence within it. An early and regular contributor to Landfall, Dallas became both a friend and a trusted literary advisor to the journal's founding editor, Charles Brasch, working for a time as Landfall's 'secretary' — a role perhaps more justly described as co-editor. As well as Brasch, Dallas's circle of friends and colleagues included James K. Baxter, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Roderick Finlayson, Janet Frame and Basil Dowling. In this generously illustrated biography, Morrow gives us the Ruth Dallas that her family and friends knew and loved: a private person with a lively outlook on life; a serious and informed writer with an impish sense of humour; and a writer of clarity and insight. [Paperback]
The Emotion Dealer by Jack Remiel Cotterell $30
Jack Remiel Cottrell's short fiction ushers the reader into a liminal world of grief and dreams. Stories of heartbreak and betrayal jostle with incisive cautionary tales about self-aware A.I., deranged algorithms, memory transplants and bionic enhancements. The Emotion Dealer is a kaleidoscopic exploration of technology, art, cities, capitalism, disinformation, loneliness and greed. It is a guide for our troubled moment and a book that will make you wonder what — if anything — we are leaving for those who come after us. [Paperback]
“The Emotion Dealer is constantly surprising, deeply incisive, and finely attuned to the way people interact with each other. Cottrell is already a master of the short story form.” —Brannavan Gnanalingam
“Inventive and full of feeling, this is fiction that gets into your blood, changes you. Cottrell is an alchemist of language, a mad scientist of story, transmuting essential ideas and moments into fascinating and faceted prose formations – you’ll be dazzled and moved by even the briefest of these glistering creations. In this collection, you have just about everything you could ever want, right there with you.” —Anthony Lapwood
“The Emotion Dealer is astounding. This is a collection of urgent contrasts – gentle yet brutal, hopeful yet terrifying, dark yet so full of light. Jack takes us on a journey of what could be and is, leading us by the hand into a future as wicked and foreboding as it is radiant. Fears are brought to life and created in our image, and the result is absolutely captivating. The best works are those that make us feel, and The Emotion Dealer demands we do. The challenge is exhilarating. What a gift this collection is.” —Emily Writes
Any Person Is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert $45
Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love? In sixteen essays, Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and cliched, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them — chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. The whole becomes a love letter to literature and to life. [Paperback]
"A work of embodied and experiential criticism, a record of its author's shifting relationships with the literature that defines her life. Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic: in place of the analytic pleasures of a robustly defended thesis, we find the fresh thrills of a poet's perfected phrases and startling observations. Any Person Is the Only Self is both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references, as packed with unexpected treasures as a crowded antique shop. She is a fiercely democratic thinker, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity." —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
"Any Person is the Only Self is absolutely brilliant, full of clarity and mystery and light: Gabbert effs the ineffable, describes the impossible to describe — the state of reading, what it means to remember. I'm still thinking about these essays, by which I mean still thinking about Gabbert's own thoughts; I keep bringing them up in conversation. Elisa Gabbert is one of my favorite living writers." —Elizabeth McCracken
>>Memory, identity, and synchronicities.
Air and Love: A story of food, family, and belonging by Or Rosenboim $28
As a child, Or Rosenboim’s knowledge of her Jewish family’s history was based on the food her grandmothers cooked for her — round kneidlach balls in hot chicken broth, cinnamon-scented noodle kugel, deep-pink stuffed quinces and herby green rice with a squeeze of lemon juice. It was only after reading their recipe books once they had both died that she began to understand their complicated past. Taking us from Samarkand and Riga to the Middle East, Air and Love is a deeply human retelling of some of the major moments of the twentieth century, and a family story of migration and belonging, suffused with recipes of the food made along the way. [Paperback]
'This is a moving memoir about how recipes are formed by migration, love and loss, even within a single family.” —Bee Wilson
”A fascinating book. ’Food of the road’: through memory, history, recipes — and love — a family, and an era’s, complex story is movingly traced.” —Judith Flanders
The Discovery of Britain: An accidental history by Graham Robb $60
Taking the reader on a time-travelling adventure around the "spindly, sea-wracked islands" known as Britain, this book is history that's both panoramic and intimate, poignant and shocking, seriously funny, and enlightening in the most surprising ways. Often from the unique vantage point of the author’s bicycle, we encounter an entertaining cast of characters foreign and homegrown, drop in on places and events, and dwell on the successes and catastrophes across British history. From ancient settlements swallowed up by the sea and the creation of Stonehenge to the advent of multiculturalism and recent political earthquakes, this is an enjoyably idiosyncratic take on place and history. With intriguing maps and illustrations throughout, The Discovery of Britain can be devoured whole or each chapter read in the time it takes to change a bicycle tyre or drink a cup of coffee. Enjoyable. [Hardback]
>>Books by Graham Robb.
The Collector: Thomas Cheeseman and the making of the Auckland Museum by Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe $65
When Thomas Cheeseman arrived in Aotearoa in 1853 at the age of eight, the world outside knew little of this country's people, plants, animals and environment. Within weeks, he began a lifelong love of collecting and classifying, and by his early twenties he was making waves in colonial scientific circles. Appointed the director of the Auckland Museum when it was not much more than a shed of curiosities, by sheer force of dedication he developed it into one of New Zealand's leading museums and scientific institutions. Along the way he cultivated relationships with the leading scientists of the day, including Charles Darwin and directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, William and Joseph Hooker. And he collected many thousands of specimens and objects, making a vital contribution to our understanding of New Zealand's natural history. This handsome, richly illustrated book tells both his story and the story of the museum he founded. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel $38
The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice. And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems. And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home. A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice. [Paperback]
"Unlike any novel you will read this year, a story about millennial angst that is also a bewitching fable. Dwelling is social commentary wrapped into a delightful allegory about identity, work, ritual and tradecraft." —Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times
”A book of miracles masked by the mundane, an entertaining antidote to urban ennui that doubles as a survival guide for souls refusing to surrender to the superficiality of their surroundings." —Roberto Ontiveros, Dallas Morning News
"Dwelling, Emily Hunt Kivel's kooky, endearing fairy tale of a debut novel, is interested in the wobbly line between what's real and what's not — and on what could happen in a world that is deeply, invigoratingly made up. Allusions to myths, fables, and riffs on common idioms abound, many of them evocative and quite funny." —Lora Kelley, The New Yorker
>>A serious attempt to remain curious.
A Little Life (10th anniversary collectors’ edition) by Hanya Yanagihara $60
This exclusive 10th anniversary edition features cover artwork by RF. Alvarez and Linus Borgo, painted in response to the book, as well as an exclusive interview of the author by Neel Mukherjee.
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor. JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world. Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm. And withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself. By midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome — but that will define his life forever. [Hardback]
”This novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship.” —Dua Lipa
Get your reading in the frame with this 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.
The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, loss, and kitchen objects by Bee Wilson $50
This strikingly original account from award-winning food writer Bee Wilson charts how everyday objects take on deeply personal meanings in all our lives. One ordinary day, the tin in which Bee Wilson baked her wedding cake fell to the ground at her feet. This should have been unremarkable, except that her marriage had just ended. Unsettled by her own feelings about the heart-shaped tin, Wilson begins a search for others who have attached strong and even magical meanings to kitchen objects. She meets people who deal with grief or pain by projecting emotions onto certain objects, whether it is a beloved parent’s salt shaker, a cracked pasta bowl or an inherited china dinner service. Remembering her own mother, a dementia sufferer, she explores the ways that both of them have been haunted by deciding which kitchen utensils to hold on to and which to get rid of when you think you are losing your mind. Looking to different continents, cultures and civilisations to investigate the full scope of this phenomenon, Wilson blends her own experiences with a series of touching personal stories that reflect the irrational and fundamentally human urge to keep mementos. Why would a man trapped in a concentration camp decide to make a spoon for himself? Why do some people hoard? What do gifts mean? How do we decide what is junk and what is treasure? We see firsthand how objects can contain hidden symbols, keep the past alive and even become powerful symbols of identity and resistance; from a child’s first plate to a refugee’s rescued vegetable corers. Thoughtful, tender and beautifully written, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a moving examination of love, loss, broken cups and the legacy of things we all leave behind. [Hardback]
”This beautifully written book about the deep significance of certain objects in our kitchen is nothing less than an intense, compassionate expression of the human condition. Both intimate and expansive, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a book I know I'll give, urgently and importantly, to those I love.” —Nigella Lawson
”Bee Wilson has changed the landscape of the kitchen by breathing life into ordinary objects. Through this remarkable book you will find yourself discovering meaning in plates, sadness in spoons, love in a measuring cup. I want to give this book to every cook I know.” —Ruth Reichl
>>Passing through different hands.
>>Look inside the book.
A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele del Giudice (translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel) $45
This haunting novel was championed by acclaimed Italian author Italo Calvino who called it a "very simple book, straightforward to read, but at the same time possessing great depth and extraordinary quality." First published in 1983 and never before translated into English, A Fictional Inquiry tells of an unnamed narrator visiting Trieste and London to retrace the footsteps of a fabled literary figure. The narrator is intrigued by the elusive, long dead man of letters whose career proved decisive to the culture of his native Italy despite his apparently never having written a line. There are encounters with those who once loved him, walks along the streets he frequented, and visits to his favored cafés, bookstores, and a library in search of an answer. Why did he leave no written trace? In the end, as Italo Calvino wrote when this book originally appeared in Italian, who the legendary author manqué actually was is beside the point. What really matters are the questions and the disquiet running through these luminous pages, the dialectic between literature and life playing out just below the surface. A Fictional Inquiry — which includes notes from both Calvino and translator Anne Milano Appel — is a gem of unparalleled writing appearing in English for the first time. [Paperback]
"The vague state between writing and not writing, between the books written and the parallel world where they're not, this is what consumes the narrator of A Fictional Inquiry, a metaphysical detective story and a modern Italian classic. A strange and ambiguous novel and a brilliant meditation on the mysteries that inform literature." —Mark Haber
"Explores the nature of perception while critiquing both writers and the writing life. Anglophones at last have an opportunity to engage with this intriguing and intellectually stimulating novel for the first time." —On the Seawall
"Constant movement places A Fictional Inquiry in a line of texts narrated by a walker, from modernists like Robert Walser and Fernando Pessoa to more contemporary writers like Sebald." —Full Stop
>>An investigation into the nature of fiction and reality.
Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington, street by street by Elizabeth Cox $90
In 1891, a remarkable map of Wellington was made by surveyor Thomas Ward. It recorded the footprint of every building, from Thorndon in the north and across the teeming, inner-city slums of Te Aro to Berhampore in the south. Updated regularly over the next 10 years, it detailed hotels, theatres, oyster saloons, brothels, shops, stables, Parliament, the remnants of Maori kainga, the Town Belt, the prisons, the 'lunatic asylum', the hospital and much more, in detail so particular that it went right down to the level of the street lights. Luxuriously packaged, cloth-bound with a fold-out wrapper, Mr Ward's Map uses this giant map and historic images to tell marvellous stories about a vital capital city, its neighbourhoods and its people at the turn of the twentieth century. Very nicely presented in large format and full of valuable historical detail. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Victorian Google street-view.
>>88 A1 sheets.
>>Struggling.
Dead Ends by Laura Borrowdale $30
In the dark, uncanny world of Dead Ends, our ghosts live alongside us, break-ups come with a grisly cost, and there really are monsters under the bed. Laura Borrowdale's short story collection is full of the horrors of domestic banality, parenting, relationships, and womanhood. With deft and exacting prose, Borrowdale's stories reflect our own lives back at us told slant, revealing where something sinister lives just beneath the surface. [Paperback]
”Weird, disturbing and dystopian, but also at times warm and comical, Dead Ends reaches back to a tradition of New Zealand gothic, and forwards to a nebulous future. There is discord between siblings, parents and children, and romantic partners, the threat of AI artbots, annoying ghosts, and the menace of authoritarianism. This collection is filled with what ifs — What if you had to physically lose a limb to be allowed a divorce? What if you were forced to give yourself full body tattoos? What if a potter puts too much of her soul into her work? What if a pregnant woman's thoughts literally shape her baby? What if the government turned Jonestown on the populace? Laura Borrowdale is a skilled and imaginative storyteller with a pitch-perfect approach to the short story form.” —Airini Beautrais
The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, gender and Indigenous communism by Kevin B. Anderson $47
In his late writings, Marx traveled beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts. In research notebooks, letters, and brief essays during the years 1869-82, he turns his attention to colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender. These texts, some of them only now being published, evidence a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. Anderson’s book focuses on how the late Marx sees a wider revolution that included the European proletariat being touched off by revolts by oppressed ethno-racial groups, peasant communes, and Indigenous communist groups, in many of which women held great social power. Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on India, Ireland, Algeria, and Latin America. This book will appeal to those concerned with the critique of Eurocentrism, racial domination, and gender subordination, but equally to those focusing on capital and class. For as Anderson shows, the late Marx transcended these boundaries as he elaborated a truly global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities. In all these ways, the writings of the late Marx speak to us today. [Paperback]
”Imperialism persists in the 21st century. Marx's last endeavors to overcome his Eurocentrism give an invaluable lesson to today's struggles against ongoing settler colonialism.” —Kohei Saito
”After the Young Marx, a Hegelian philosopher and the mature Marx, a political economist, we can now see the late Marx grappling with colonialism, globalization, various forms of landed property, and gradually questioning his own earlier Eurocentrism. This Third Marx, while the least well-known, may be the closest to our modern sensibilities and interests.” —Branko Milanovic
Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohammed $30
In the cold Wellington winter, Omar’s grades are slipping, his mum is unwell and his best friend is growing distant. Two decades earlier in Mogadishu, Asha and Yasser are falling in love and starting to build a life together while a burgeoning war threatens to take it away. Before the Winter Ends explores the relationship between mother and son across Aotearoa New Zealand, Somalia and Egypt as they search for understanding and try to bridge the distance between them. Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel is a stark portrayal of how the past illuminates the present and how grief shapes a family. [Paperback]
>>That prickly feeling.
>>An interview with the author.
The Neverending Book by Naoki Matayoshi and Shinsuke Yoshitake $40
A book that makes the sound of turning pages fractionally too early, infuriating its readers; a diary shared by two children with painful secrets; a photo album left by a dying father for when his daughter gets married. An elderly book-loving king sends two subjects on a mission: to travel the world collecting stories about weird and wonderful books. Upon their return, they recount their stories for the king over the course of thirteen nights. From the comically irreverent to the heartrending to the heartwarming, The Neverending Book delves into all that a book can be, forming an enchanting compendium that reveals the ways in which we interact with books, and the importance they hold in our hearts — all told in words and pictures through the tale of two subjects gathering stories about books for their blind, book-loving king. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
The Traitors Circle: The rebels against the Nazis and the spy who betrayed them by Jonathan Freedland $40
The Traitors Circle tells the true, but scarcely known, story of a group of secret rebels against Hitler. Drawn from Berlin high society, they include army officers, government officials, two countesses, an ambassador's widow and a former model — meeting in the shadows, whether hiding and rescuing Jews or plotting for a Germany freed from Nazi rule. One day in September 1943 they gather for a tea party — unaware that one among them is about to betray them all to the Gestapo. But who is the betrayer of a circle themselves branded 'traitors'? [Paperback]
”A story of unlikely rebels who had much to lose from resisting the Nazi regime, which so many of their peers supported. What made them trade personal safety for moral rectitude? Freedland's answer is as tense as a thriller yet perceptive, thoughtful and thoroughly researched. It made me think long after I'd turned the last page.” —Katja Hoyer
>>The uses of a sofa bed.
Pox Romana: The plague the shook the Roman world by Colin Elliott $40
In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history's first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall. In Pox Romana, historian Colin Elliott offers a comprehensive, wide-ranging account of this pivotal moment in Roman history. Did a single disease its origins and diagnosis still a mystery bring Rome to its knees? Carefully examining all the available evidence, Elliott shows that Rome's problems were more insidious. Years before the pandemic, the thin veneer of Roman peace and prosperity had begun to crack: the economy was sluggish, the military found itself bogged down in the Balkans and the Middle East, food insecurity led to riots and mass migration, and persecution of Christians intensified. The pandemic exposed the crumbling foundations of a doomed Empire. Arguing that the disease was both cause and effect of Rome's fall, Elliott describes the plague's 'preexisting conditions' (Rome's multiple economic, social, and environmental susceptibilities); recounts the history of the outbreak itself through the experiences of physician, victim, and political operator; and explores post-pandemic crises. The pandemic's most transformative power, Elliott suggests, may have been its lingering presence as a threat both real and perceived. Interesting. [Now in paperback]
The Bagpipes: A cultural history by Robert McLauchlan $45
A diverse history of the pipes from inspiring terror on battlefields to enriching cultures worldwide. In the early second century CE, someone was described as playing a pipe “with a bag tucked under his armpit”. That man, the first named piper in history, was the Roman Emperor Nero. Since then, this improbable conflation of bag and sticks has become one of the most beloved and contested instruments of all time. When another piping emperor, Tsar Peter the Great, watched his pet bear take its last breath, he decided the creature would live on as a bagpipe. This rich and vivid history tells the story of an instrument boasting over 130 varieties, yet commonly associated with just one form and one country: Scotland, and its familiar Great Highland Bagpipe. In fact, the pipes are played across the globe, and their story is a highly diverse one, which illuminates society in remarkable, unexpected ways. Richard McLauchlan charts the rise of women pipers; investigates how class, privilege and capitalism have shaped the world of piping; and explores how the meaning of a 'national instrument' can shift with the currents of a people's identity. The vibrancy and inventiveness characterising today's pipers still speak to the potency of this fabled and once feared instrument, to which McLauchlan is our surefooted guide. [Hardback]
”Historically insightful and full of character. Captures the essence and beauty of piping's vibrant culture with historical, musical and characterful insight.” —Finlay MacDonald
”Richly entertaining and perceptive. A revelation in how an instrument can transform culture.” —Alastair Campbell
>>Pibroch at Braemar.
The Monster in the Lake by Leo Timmers $30
In this larger-than-life picture book, Eric the duck is nervous to swim in the lake for fear a monster might live there, but he bravely follows his friends and discovers something spectacular indeed lives beneath the surface. Four ducks are tired of their small pond and set out for an adventure in the big lake. Walking at the back, Eric isn't sure. He’s heard there’s a monster in the lake, but his friends don’t believe a word of that old story! Eric reluctantly tags along, only to make a startling discovery and find himself in a wonderful underwater adventure. This large-format picture book features a detailed fold-out underwater world of mechanical marvels and sea creatures. The story of a nervous duck who finds courage and the overconfidence of groups will resonate with anyone who’s nervously dipped a toe in unknown waters. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
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14 November 2025
Freud’s consideration of the case of the judge Paul Schreber, and his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), was instrumental in the formulation of the modern construct of paranoid schizophrenia, and Schreber’s experience, treatment and interpretation have been rigorously explored and debated by Deleuze, Guatarri, Canetti, Lacan, Calasso and others. Playthings, a novel by Alex Pheby, depicts, sometimes horrifically, sometimes with humour or beauty, sometimes ironically, Schreber’s descent into and experience of madness: his inability to achieve the culturally determined overarching perspective that enables us to function without being overwhelmed by minor details, observations and experiences (of course, none of us do this especially well; our ability to ‘function’ determines which side of our society’s line of ‘madness’ we exist on); his inability to integrate his experiences into ‘useful’ concepts of time and causality; his inability to see others as persons or to interpret their intentions and actions in ways that fit with shared concepts of the patterns of intentions and actions, and his projection of suppressed psychological material onto such others (this dehumanisation of those seen as ‘other’ is a manifestation of the mechanisms by which socially inter-confirmed mass paranoia presented itself as fascism in Germany a few decades later). “It was nothing to him, because they were all nothing. Fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, soul-less automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind.” As Pheby zooms in and away from Schreber’s experience, playing always with the issues of perspective that lies at the core of his illness, leaving us uncertain which side of the line between madness and sanity we are experiencing or what constitutes ‘reality’, we as readers become aware of ourselves as the author’s plaything. The key mechanisms of schizophrenia are the key mechanisms of literature; it is only our ability to close the book that keeps us sane.
This psychologically charged novel is a slow burn. Haushofer hypnotises us with the banality of suburbia — housework is a not only a constant occupation for our narrator, but also described in detail — and then awakens us to the trauma, both personal and societal, underpinning a week in the life of a middle-aged woman in 1960s Austria. On Sunday, she argues with Hubert, her husband, about the tree outside their bedroom window, an argument on repeat. He insists it is an acacia — she says an aspen, but maybe an elm. Their middle-age married life is one of habit and company, but also they appear estranged. Into this predictable existence, a disturbance from the past intrudes. A diary: its pages arriving in the mail over the week unsettle the woman. It’s her diary, an account of living away from civilisation, away from her husband, and small child, about twenty years ago. Who is sending them to her we never know, but she has her suspicions. Banished to the woods by her mother-in-law and by her husband to recover from a psychosomatic deafness as a young woman, her words on the page send her into a flurry of tasks — anything to avoid looking straight on. It is only in exhaustion that she has the courage to read, in private, in her loft, and then to take these pages to the cellar to burn. Both facing her past and expunging it. We are left in the dark, feeling our way, our ear attuned to a narrative not altogether reliable. A woman who, in spite of her fondness for Hubert, is trapped in a marriage and the expectations of being wife, mother, daughter. Here there is loneliness, repression and frustration. Her work as an illustrator has been stymied. Hubert admires her drawings and allows her time in the loft, but lacks understanding, relegating her art to a hobby. Like her two years in the woods, the loft symbolises both freedom ( à la ‘a room of one’s own) as well as threat. Here perfection does not come, she is restless and paces the floor. Is it the ‘mad woman in the attic’ or a woman recognising a truth? It’s the 1960s and the war still looms large. An amnesia has crept in, pushing against truth with attempts to relegate the war to acceptable stories, to move on and away from a collective guilt. The desire to forget, to repress the trauma at both a personal and societal level, drives the banality forward. The diary-entry arrivals in the letterbox disturb this illusion. Both threat and release, they insist on being recognised. For a book about trauma and seeking truth, The Loft is surprising wry. Haushofer’s final book is tautly written (well translated), strangely compelling, and a novel that comes into fuller focus when you step a little aside, as if the narrator has trained you to see the world as she does.
Do books with black covers have anything else in common?
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more: