Read our latest newsletter.
17 July 2027
Aug 9 – Fog could be called ‘How A Notebook Became a Fiction''. It could be dismissed as a disjointed list, or recognsed for its realist nature, or, more aptly, embraced for its brilliant author’s machinations. Kathryn Scanlan, author of the excellent Kick the Latch, found a five-year diary at an estate auction. Falling apart, worn, and illegible in places, somehow it resonated with her. These notings of daily life; the weather, the visitors, the ordinary weariness of aging. There’s food and gatherings, the deaths and births, iilnesses and misadventures as well as the mundane beauty of life. Our diaries or notebooks are our own, whether that’s your physical journal or digital one. We have our own shorthand, the initials or pet names of our most initimate family and friends. Our own shorthand for tasks, thoughts or feelings. Some of us are visual recorders — a sketch or a doodle; while others will write long paragraphs intermittently. Some of us begin well and peter out before the year is done, leaving crisp pages for another purpose (maybe scoring board games). But back to Scanlan, who spent fifteen years reading, studying and dissecting the diary of this elderly woman. Taking it as inspiration, she has written her own version, a series of fractured, seemingly irrelevant, episodes or jottings. As you read on, allowing yourself to abandon trying to work it all out, patterns of time, people, emotions, weather etc emerge. Here, an ordinary life, captured in a work of both deconstruction, almost destruction, and creation. Through Scanlan and her interpretation or disruption, we find in our hands something remarkable and surprising.
The inability to tell on a coldish day whether the washing you are getting in is actually still a bit damp or merely cold is a universal experience, he thought, at least among those whose experiences include getting in washing on a coldish day, which would not be saying much (‘A’ being the universal experience of those who have had the experience ‘A’) if it were not for the fact that perhaps the majority of people (in whom I am immersed and from whom I am separate) have actually had that experience. Why then, he wondered, is Amy Arnold’s book Lori & Joe the first book I have read that records this experience? And why do I find it so thrilling, he wondered, to read this account of what could be termed a fundamental existential dilemma writ small, why, in my deliberately solitary pursuit of reading this book, am I thrilled by the most mundane possible universal experience? Maybe exactly for that reason, the unexceptional experiences, the fundamental existential dilemmas writ small, are exactly those that connect us reassuringly when we are reading solitarily. What is thought like? What is my own thought like? What is the thought of others like? I am not particularly interested in what is thought, he thought, I am more interested in the way thought flows, surely that is not the word, the way thought moves on, or its shape, rather, if thought can be said to have a shape: the syntax of thought, which, after all is the principal determinant of thought, regardless of its content but also determining its content. If my primary interest is grammar, then what I want from literature is an investigation of form, an adventure or experiment in form. I think but I do not know how I think unless I write it down or unless I read the writings down of the thoughts of another in which I recognise the grammar of my own thoughts. What I think is a contingent matter, he thought. Why washing is called washing when it is in fact not washing but drying is another thing he had wondered but maybe nobody else has wondered this, he thought, it does not appear in this book but this book does not pretend to be exhaustive of all possible thoughts either explicit or implicit in quotidian experiences, though it is fairly exhaustive of all the thoughts that rise towards, and often achieve, consciousness, so to call it, in its protagonist, so to call her, Lori, who takes up her partner Joe’s morning coffee one morning just like every morning and finds him dead, not like any other morning. Lori immediately then sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells, in typical weather and mud, and the book consists entirely of a record, for want of a better word, of the pattern of her thoughts, looping themselves onto the armature of a fairly constrained present, winding twenty-five years of repetitions and irritations and unexpressed dissatisfactions, such as we all have, I suppose, he thought, memories of all those years since she and Joe came to live in the cottage, their isolation, the landscape, the weather, the routines of mundane existence, ineluctable and cumulatively painful when you think of them, their breeding neighbours, no longer neighbours but no less inerasable for that, the small compromises made when living with another that become large compromises, perhaps less conscious ones but maybe intolerably conscious ones, consciousness after all being what is intolerable, through repetition over decades, all wound over and over and around themselves and around the armature of the present, drawn repeatedly, obsessively to whatever it is that troubles Lori the most, but always turning away or aside without reaching that something, or in order not to reach that something, which remains as a gap in consciousness, unthinkable, but a gap the very shape of itself. Lori & Joe is a remarkable piece of writing that shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold shows how Lori’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies. It reminds me, he thought, suspecting that readers of his review might respond better to a little name-dropping than to his attempts to express his own enthusiasm, of works by Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard in its fugue-like form, its musicality, so to speak, in the way that it perfectly calibrates the fractality of thought, so to term it, and he wished that he had not so termed it, upon the unremarkable slow progression of the present.
This deeply researched and beautifully presented book traces the origins of early Waitaha and Kāti Māmoe, and the later migrations, conflicts and settlements of the hapū who became Ngāi Tahu. Drawing on tribal knowledge, early written records and archaeological insights, he details the movements, encounters and exchanges that shaped these southern regions. He shows how people lived seasonally from the land and sea, supported by long-distance trade and a deep knowledge of place. These were the communities that the first Europeans encountered, as whalers, sealers and missionaries made their way around the coast.
”With one eye on the universal and the other on the particular, Atholl Anderson reveals how culture and nature shaped one another in southern Te Waipounamu for some five hundred years, down to the mid-nineteenth century.” —Michael Stevens, Professor and Director, Ngāi Tahu Research Centre
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
MY YEAR IN PARIS WITH GERTRUDE STEIN: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
As Paris sweeps the narrator of Levy’s latest fiction along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks about what we have to lose to become modern, about navigating anxiety, about living with uncertainty, about angry fathers, about making a new life in another country, about art and language — and how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century.
THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris
NGĀTI KUIA: He pūtake, hei pakiaka ora; A history by Madi Williams $60
Drawing on hundreds of whakapapa, pūrākau, waiata and karakia recorded in nineteenth-century tribal manuscripts and court records, Madi Williams presents Ngāti Kuia history in Ngāti Kuia voices. A vital contribution to the understanding of the history of Te Tauihu-o-Te-Waka-a-Māui (the northern South Island).
TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner $33
Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex.
LAND by Maggie O’Farrell $38
Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. From the author of Hamnet.
A selection of good books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Good and Evil and Other Stories
Government for the Public Good
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.
Lamento by Madame Nielsen (translated from Danish by Gaye Kynoch) $40
”Love doesn't have a language; it's an animal, it's theatre of cruelty, it's borderline madness, it's the sublime and is incapable of articulation. It's only long afterwards, once all hope is at an end and the two of you in a sense no longer exist, once you are dead, that it can be told.” Lamento is a love story that questions the possibility of reconciling the magic of infatuation with everyday life. The story begins with a fire — an image which permeates the novel. The narrator, a writer, meets a theatre artist; their love feels ecstatic and utopian, completely untouched by the outside world. With the birth of a child, the weight of the everyday turns their passion destructive. The woman fights for every minute she can to write, while the man abandons family life to focus on his art. Their private drama is further confronted by the jagged realities of colonialism and injustice, forcing them to see themselves as part of a violent history they cannot escape. As love turns to hate, we follow their restless search to understand the enigma of love. In a startling act of reverse auto-fiction, Madame Nielsen — a legendary figure of the Danish avant-garde — inhabits the voice of the woman she once loved to interrogate the man she once was. The result is an unsparing reconciliation of gender and memory, a lament that strips away self-pity to expose the narcissistic cost of creative obsession, and a meditation on how gender alters our experience of the world. [Paperback]
‘Reading Madame Nielsen’s masterfully written and haunting novel Lamento is like drowning in honey with a flail in your mouth.’ —Christian Kracht
‘Lamento: all one could ask from prose, and so much more. Razor-sharp, devastating, lucid – what a voice, what a generous gift to the English readers.’ —Maria Stepanova
‘In this searing work of autofiction, celebrated in the original Danish and now in a luminous English translation by Gaye Kynoch, Madame Nielsen places the artist’s life in a crucible and turns up the heat. By turns defiant and vivid, smouldering and tender, Lamento will captivate any reader who has ever had the misfortune to fall in love.’ —Nancy Campbell
‘A first-person novel about how it may have been to be married to the man she once was. Lamento is a genuinely sorrowful book, both self-obsessed and self-tormenting.’ —Information
>>AMy-former-self-as-not-my-former-self.
>>Who can say who I am and who you are?
>>The nameless man.
plastic by Matthew Rice $33
Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet. Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice's experience working in a plastic moulding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labour in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a 'post-industrial', 'post-Troubles' society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film and the visual arts. Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker's experience, this is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labour — making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day, uniting what Jacques Rancière calls the 'labourers in love with the intellectual nights' and those 'intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the labouring people.' plastic's evocation and lucidity moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings. [Paperback with French flaps]
'In Matthew Rice's furiously everyday and erudite book, all senses of plastic are in play, but this is first of all a (seemingly autobiographical) study of the rigours of work in a plastics factory in the poet's native Northern Ireland.... In the end, [plastic] is also a poem about knowledge and art: the words and music and imagery that live alongside the night's labour, that make it bearable and at the same time highlight its violence.' — Brian Dillon, 4Columns
'This sardonic, bleakly moving book interrogates ideas of working-class masculinity and intergenerational trauma, with "hell as an idea of what work could be"; there are glimpses of hope in poetry itself, "the treasure buried in my father's field".' —Jennifer Lee Tsai, Guardian
'Whether Rice is observing the enforced machine-order of the production line, evaluating his own thoughts about cinema, music and literature, or empathising with the other workers, each individual short poem is a cherished fragment of perception seeking a moment of freedom from the tyranny of its time-stamp. The poems in plastic both honour and transcend their traditional factory setting, and remind us of how much there could be to gain in the dawning digital era.' —Carol Rumens, Guardian
'With cutting, spare elegance, passages of the long poem tangle with the complex and violent implications of petrochemical supply chains. I kept returning to this line, so apt for plastics: “I wonder for a moment if preservation means perishing in increments.”' —Frieze
>>Hell as an idea of what work could be.
>>Stealing time.
>>The poetry of labour.
And the Waves by Luoyang Chen $33
”Is poetry writing labour? Perhaps I am so damaged that I don't consider writing poetry labour. Every weekend I replenish myself by collapsing and every week I work within a system that is hideous and greasy, that remains ineffective in dealing with whatever it claims to tackle. Imagine this book is about Labour, imagine Labour is being seductive, alienating, and out of control, imagine being f**ked by Labour 24/7, imagine poetry is not Labour... Imagine this book is about 'and' and this book is about 'the waves'. I am essentially the system: ineffective, hideous, greasy... confused. I profit from the work I do, from the system that I am. Then I confront myself. Then I turn to poetry. And if I am successful, I want my poetry to resemble the way my body labours, like the waves, coming and keep coming. There seems no beginning nor end in labour. Across borders of gender, language, immigration, language, experience, and the lyric 'I', I position myself as a non-Subject that confronts Capitalism in my own turn/term.” Divided into five sections, And the Waves investigates the ethics of producing/'labouring' poetry. [Paperback]
On the Couch: Writers analyse Sigmind Freud edited by Andrew Blauner $40
W. H. Auden described Sigmund Freud as “a whole climate of opinion / Under whom we conduct our differing lives.” The controversial father of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Freud charted the human unconscious, brought us the talking cure, and wrote books that now rank among the classics of world literature. In On the Couch, the analyst is analysed by some of today's writers and thinkers, who help us understand the man who has helped us understand ourselves as much, if not more, than anyone else, ever. The result is a fresh, multifaceted reassessment of Freud's continuing relevance and influence on ideas, literature, culture, science, and more. Here, Colm Tóibin writes about Freud, World War I, Henry James, and Thomas Mann; Adam Gopnik explores Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents; Susie Orbach considers Freud's 'ordinary unhappiness' and D. W. Winnicott's 'good enough'; Jennifer Finney Boylan reflects on penis envy and gender identity; Peter Kramer describes how new science and drugs have revolutionised psychology since Freud; Susie Boyt, one of Freud's great-granddaughters, spends the night at the Freud Museum in London; Siri Hustvedt examines Freud's divided reception today; and there's much more. On the Couch offers an original and nuanced portrait of Freud as a complex figure who, for all his flaws, forever changed how we see ourselves and the world. Original contributions by Andre Aciman, Sarah Boxer, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Susie Boyt, Gerald Early, Esther Freud, Rivka Galchen, Adam Gopnik, David Gordon, Siri Hustvedt, Sheila Kohler, Peter D. Kramer, Phillip Lopate, Thomas Lynch, Daphne Merkin, David Michaelis, Rick Moody, Susie Orbach, Richard Panek, Alex Pheby, Michael S. Roth, Casey Schwartz, Mark Solms, Colm Toibin, Sherry Turkle. [Paperback]
Your Life Without Me by James Meek $38
Mr Burman is unmoored. Still reckoning with the death of his wife Ada, and struggling to understand his grown-up daughter Leila, he finds himself on a train to London, at the invitation of the police. He is to meet Raf, a young man suspected of trying to blow up St Paul's cathedral — and a man once intimately connected with the Burman family. Have the police laid a trap? This compelling and compassionate novel follows Mr Burman's journey towards the mystery of a radical act and into the true nature of his own family. It asks what a person leaves behind when they've gone, and how much of the past we can carry with us into the future. The long-awaited new novel from the author of The People’s Act of Love. [Paperback]
”James Meek is one of our most consistently brilliant and thought-provoking writers. This is his best novel yet — a dark and unsettling meditation on marriage, fatherhood and architecture. Every page rings with deep truth.” —Alex Preston
”Unsettling and boasting a haunting twist, this is one of our great prose writers on guilt, complicity and forgiveness.” —Observer
”James Meek is a master of the art of the stealthy narrative, and his keen intelligence and alertness are evident on every page of his new novel. Heart-breaking.” —Rupert Thomson
”our Life Without Me follows a retired schoolteacher as he tries to discover whether it was his influence that landed a favourite former pupil in prison for a radical act of destruction. A novel that is a profound and unsettling take on modern life by a writer at the top of his game.” —Kirsty Lang
>>The links between personal trauma, family dysfunction, and political violence.
Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley $38
Mary is struggling with her memory. She does not have too few recollections but too many, including some that are downright absurd. She has many memories of her childhood: going to parties and on school trips, walks with her father and family dinners. She remembers world events too: the falling of the Twin Towers and the Iraq War. But the most concerning memories she has are about her Jewish grandfather and his role in the death of Adolf Hitler. She feels sure — almost completely sure — that what she has been told can't be true, that she must have imagined the whole thing. But there is a doubt. To decipher fact from fiction, Mary goes back over her life, sorting through her childhood and adolescence with her three friends in York, through an adulthood accustomed to tragedy. Guided by her family and friends, Mary attempts to figure out what is real, both in history and her own life, all the while wondering if her mind has conjured everything. [Paperback]
”An incredible achievement, a story of friendship, memory, loss, and moral duty unlike any I've read before . Every character and storyline could be its own novel and yet they come together so thunderously and convincingly. It blew me away.” —Dina Nayeri
”A unique, visionary novel about the toll of memory and the power and fragility of the human heart and mind. Fiona Mozley gives a masterclass in the novel form, showing just how much room for invention we still have. I couldn't put it down.” —Kim Sherwood
”A warm, kindly and beautifully written novel about growing up in a family and in history, about inconvenient memory and haunted repression.” —Sarah Moss
”On the one hand, a clarion call — a clear-eyed view of contemporary moral and political failure in the UK — and on the other, an assembly of engrossing philosophical and metaphysical engagements with the nature of memory. A fascinating read.” —M John Harrison, Guardian
>>In pursuit of false memories.
Borrowed Land: A Highland story by Kapka Kassabova $55
rom the powerful rivers that bring life and prosperity; to the Pictish cairns, undisturbed for centuries; to the meadows of bluebells, where deer emerge, God-like, in a flash, Kapka Kassabova reveals a world that has been abused, but remains achingly beautiful and alive. In the Highlands, centuries-old connections between the land, nature and people have been, and continue to be, shaken by the forces of colonialism, industry, depopulation, and private property speculation. Borrowed Land tells the stories of those who are working against this disconnect: the last true Highlanders fighting to preserve their home. An extraordinary portrait of the Scottish Highlands, this is an epic and urgent story of destruction and renewal, told through encounters with some of the last true Highlanders. [Hardback]
”Combines the detail and intimacy of boots on the ground reportage with the universality of a dark fable. This is a Highland story, but also a global story — a poetic and haunting anatomy of what happens when a world is addicted to extraction.” —James Crawford
”To read Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova is to understand what it means to slip one's skin and become a river, a forest or a mountain. This mesmeric and intimate testimony becomes a defiant dreamlike thrum of resistance to corporate greed. Brilliant, daring and urgent.” —Sally Huband
”This is a hugely important, and timely, book. It has filled me with anger and despair, as well as a good deal of hope.” —Angus Peter Campbell
”Essential and revelatory reading. It's full of quiet rage on behalf of the old land — and the health and dignity of the humans that live there — being destroyed by industrial capitalism. It's a wake-up call that exposes the great lie of a profit-driven corporate decarbonisation. Kapka's writing is ferocious and instinctive, and my copy is full of underlined passages and folded corners, so much is there to treasure.” —Kerry Andrew
Digging Deep: Women on New Zealand’s goldfields by Julia Bradshaw $60
The goldfields of nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand have long been talked and written about as almost exclusively male places. Many historians have either ignored women completely or mentioned them only as wives or as prostitutes. But they could and did make their way to these tough, unforgiving environments, often very early on, and not just as the givers of sexual favours, either via marriage or for money, but as adventurers, entrepreneurs and, most of all, as survivors. Until now too little has been known about these remarkable women, who journeyed to Golden Bay, Otago, Marlborough, the wild West Coast and the Thames — or, in the case of Maori, were often already on the fields. But this ground-breaking book changes all that. Based on 30 years of extensive research, Digging Deep tells the stories of the women who set up stores, ran (and often owned) hotels and became wealthy businesswomen, who worked as barmaids and dancers, who raised their children in challenging conditions, sometimes as widows or deserted wives, and who were miners themselves. There were characters aplenty, including Porpoise Maria, Sugar Annie, Dirty Mary and the notorious Mrs Swords, but also many women who were victims of alcoholism and illness or suffered the trauma of rape and the shame of unwanted pregnancy. In Digging Deep Julia Bradshaw has given a voice to the fascinating and forgotten women of the New Zealand goldfields. This lively account, rich in memorable images, fills a long-neglected and significant gap in the social history of our country. Fully illustrated. [Flexibound]
>>Look inside.
Salt Quilt by Airini Beautrais $30
Salt Quilt is a portrait of an uneasy stretch of time. The poet looks back at various episodes of her life and then far ahead, to other lives and ways of seeing. She sheds cynicism, celebrates some constraints and rejects others, and keeps rewriting the endings. Poetry has saved her more than once. On the inside maybe she is becoming a 1980s self-help guy. Many of these poems are a lyric archive of the times and places that still hold their charge. Many are about the aliveness of things we take for granted. Out of the wild medley of experience, and all of this living, dying and losing, comes something fertile and growing. [Paperback]
‘Beautrais writes with a luminous, matter-of-fact intelligence about life’s disappointments, and also life’s consolations, with a level of care and attention that is in its own way a kind of liberation.’ —Noelle McCarthy
>>A relic from the Depression.
The House With Nobody In It by Jon Klassen $25
Here are all the things in this house: a chair, a clock on the wall, a stool, a lamp. And more. What’s missing from this house? Somebody. This is the house with nobody in it. Well, there might be something . . . A saitisfying board board book, this story takes young ones through a recognisable, cosy house, while die cuts introduce just a hint of precarity. This is the house with nobody in it—or is it? Very gently spooky fun [Board book]
>>Look inside the house!
Rome: Classic Recipes from the Eternal City by Lucia Tersigni and Audrey Cosson, with photography by Emanuela Cino $60
Italian food is consistently ranked one of the most popular cuisines in the world and this book contains many of the classics Italian food is known for, from bruschetta al pomodoro to spaghettoni à la carbonara and penne all'arrabiata. The book also has stunning photography of Rome and its environs. With the inclusion of every essential, authentic recipe made easier than ever before, and restaurant recommendations off the traditional tourist path, Rome transports readers to all the delicious sights, smells and flavours of Italy's oldest city.
>>Look inside.
Mānawatia a Matariki! Reading a book combines past, present and future; memory, perception and imagination into a single transformative experience.
Read our latest newsletter
11 July 2026
A riotious comic novel of ideas, Seven tells the story of an unnamed philosopher plunged into the strange world of Theodoros Apostalakis: dentist, poet, pursuer of lost things, and obsessive player of ‘Seven’, a revered board game whose champions struggle to hold onto what is most valuable in human life in the face of Artificial Intelligence. Blending academic satire, travel writing, farce, and philosophy into a singular, intoxicating brew, Seven is a literary novel that stretches the boundaries of the form.
"Joanna Kavenna. What a writer." —Ali Smith
"The most brilliant novel I've read in ages, part academic satire, part philosophy of AI and gaming, all hubris-puncturing wisdom worn with such levity that I was cackling from start to finish." —Adam Rutherford
"Philosophical concepts and dizzying speculations on the nature of reality have always featured in Kavenna's novels, but here she ramps up the comedy, interleaving erudite playfulness with characters who are as believable as they are eccentric." —Suzi Feay, Financial Times
Megan Hunter writes beautifully. I was beguiled by her first novel, The End We Start From, with its mesmerising poetic language and precise emotional observation of parenthood under pressure. It was cli-fi of a literary nature. When Harpy announced itself, the dials turned a notch or two higher on the pressures of motherhood. This was a darker encounter amid the chaos of betrayal. Language-wise, again, taut and precisely tuned. Days of Light has a luminosity all of its own. Open the book at any page, and the language takes you to the inner world of Ivy and the times she lives through. Opening in 1938, we meet Ivy, nineteen and ready to launch into her ‘adult life’. It’s Easter, war on the horizon. The family gathers. (Think Bloomsbury group. Unconventional.) The guest of honour, her much adored brother Joseph’s fiancée, Frances, is running late for lunch. Although the train is late, all seems right in the world, until the spell of this idyll is broken by a drowning incident. A singular moment that will change Ivy’s world. Swimming under the stars Joseph disappears. Ivy, his swimming companion, can’t save him. All she recalls is a bright shining light. This elusive light will appear in different guises over her lifetime. Days of Light recalls Ivy’s life in 6 precise days; Easter Sunday 1938, April 1938, April 1944, April 1956, April 1965, and Easter Sunday 1999. Frances will appear across these pages (she is like a touchstone for Ivy), and others who are core to her. Bear, the writer, who becomes her older husband. Her fraught relationship with her artist mother, and her more familial love for Anne, their housekeeper. But it is Joseph who propels her onward towards a luminous answer about what life is, almost always just out of reach. Ivy is always searching, looking for an answer beyond herself, in language, in art, and in faith. Ultimately, it is in the moments when she turns toward herself, that something unexpected is ignited. With reviews mentioning Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Graham Swift, Hunter has a lot to live up to. Days of Light is luminous in content, structure and language, and a telling portrayal of a woman’s life through changing times.
Hardback in stock, Paperback due September 2026
Novels and parenting are both traditional but unstable technologies of transmission. Neither are ‘resolvable’; both are technologies in which the ‘definitive’ is impossible and in which any attempt at the ‘definitive’ interferes with the transmission. Both progress in a single direction, as a series of moments, but in each moment multiple times are present simultaneously, layered, both present and absent, creating nodes of attention and possibilities for realisation and invention. Both novels and parenting privilege us to the experiences of others (for good or for ill) and through them the experiences of others again and so on, linking the influences of the past to the possibilities of the future. Each technology is a vector for the development of the characters to which it is applied but the more conforming the characters to external parameters the less interesting the result. Novels and parenting are both technologies of transmission, but the measure of their value lies entirely in the reader or child who either receives or resists the transmission according to their needs and in the way most suitable for them. Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription explores the possibilities and limitations of the novel as a technology of transferral while addressing the possibilities and limitations of parenting (both biological and metaphorical or ‘cultural’) as another technology of transferral, all the while contrasting both to the new attention-hungry technologies that are embedded for instance in a cell-phone, and charting how these new technologies have impacted the types of transferral addressed by the novel or by parenthood (biological or metaphorical). The new technologies in their most widely consumed mode tend to provide experiences that are temporally flat, a scrollable inescapable present, even though the moments that comprise that ersatz present are necessarily captured in the past. The ‘present’ of the new technology is discontinuous, uninhabitable, spaceless, compounding, and generally over-literal, inherently disjunctive and competing for attention with the other modes of experience that may be suggested by the actual location or circumstances of the rightful ‘owner’ of that attention. A novel, traditionally embedded in the codex as a hand-held device, offers one way in which attention may push at the limitations of its moment and enlarge its circumstances through an experience of simultaneity; scrolling social media on a cellphone — skimming — allows attention to push at — or be drawn through — the edges of its moment through an experience of algorithmically determined disjunctive seriality (this is not inherently a bad thing (but may (or may not) in effect be a bad thing)). Regardless of the content transferred, the medium is shaping and patterning our experience, though the medium itself is unseen as the transference occurs (which is what makes it a medium). When the narrator of Transcription drops his cellphone into the handbasin at the hotel on his way to conduct what will be the final published interview of his nonagenarian cultural mentor, Thomas, he finds himself unable to admit that he is not recording, and ends up reconstructing the interview from memory. When he admits this at a symposium in the second section of the novel, he is castigated, not unreasonably, by the attendees but it could also be said that Thomas’s voice, especially since his death, now speaks through or inhabits the narrator in a way that would not be possible if that voice was contained by and limited to forensically verified data. The new technologies are technologies of cumulative capture before they are anything else, performing literality and definitivity (even when they are wrong or fake). If the conversation between the narrator and Thomas written for us by the narrator in the first section of the book is an accurate reconstruction of the actual conversation (we play along with the author that there might be such an actual thing so that we can then speculate on the reliability of narrator’s account of it), it would have made a very poor written interview as Thomas is exhibiting post-Covid cognitive decline and the narrator is comically distracted and dense. Fortunately for Thomas’s legacy perhaps, there is no definitive recording of the interview and the narrator has therefore had to use a combination of memory and imagination to construct Thomas’s final interview for publication (of course, we as readers do not get to read this (novels are potentised by what they leave out)). Where a technology of capture literalises what it captures and presents it as definitive, memory and imagination allow the voice to live and change in those it inhabits, to use its force for further and yet further acts of nuance and transmission. Whether we think of this living-on-in-others (especially when the original personage can no longer contribute to or ‘own’ the idea of themselves) as colonisation, theft, or haunting, it demonstrates the transpersonal nature of what we think of as personhood: the idea of us continues to vibrate in others, diminishing but never completely disappearing even when it is no longer consciously noticed. We both receive and transmit; we ourselves are media of transference. The narrator's cultural relationship with Thomas, his mentor, privileges him to Thomas’s voice and to the thoughts it expresses but it also overwhelms the narrator’s own less certain voice. The narrator is the admiring cultural son, dominated by his father, hoping to live up to his standards, too frightened even to admit a misfortune. The narrator’s relationship with Thomas is contrasted, especially in the third section of the book, with that of Thomas’s biological son, Max,who was a university friend of the narrator’s and his double for the purposes of the novel (even Thomas confounds the two). Max’s experience of Thomas and of his shortcomings as a father contrasts with that of the narrator both on matters of fact and of perspective. Their experiences are often co-extensive both in time and space, but are very different. Max sees clearly from his position as the overlooked son, and his longing for and attempts at connection with Thomas are poignant. The narrator and Max each have young daughters who are exhibiting refusals that their parents find distressing and confusing: the cultural son’s daughter refuses to go to school; the biological son’s daughter refuses food. These refusals are also each refusals of transmission, disarming reactions by the otherwise powerless to systems that derive their power from their capacity to withhold. That each of the girls’ problems are ‘overcome’ by means of new technologies is both disconcerting and somehow plausible: the vacuous unboxing videos that enable Max’s daughter Emmie to start to eat again are effective precisely because of their vacuity: with irrelevant content, the underlying pattern of expectation, discovery and satisfaction resonates deeply and reassuringly in a world where expectation, discovery and satisfaction are unstable, undermined and uncertain, especially for the young. What then, though? Do the new media pattern our attention so that they appear to assuage the very problems they exacerbate? We are of course and as always asking the wrong question or only part of the right question. As with any medium we must ask not so much whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but: in which direction does the power flow, and to whom?
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.
Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne $36
Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly... Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her. [Paperback]
”Ghost Driver devises a new genre of administrative horror: by turns addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar. Malory's inner and outer worlds, like the novel's prose, feel agonisingly poised on a knife edge — gothic in the cruellest, off-kilter sense. I am obsessed.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Nell Osborne is a genius. Ghost Driver is brilliant and hilarious and dark and true. I loved it.” —Sarah Bernstien
>>Every wrong turn.
>>Getting evil freely.
>>A tapestry of humiliation.
No Money Nice Cock by Victor Brooks $35
Victor fucks up. His friends rescue him. He keeps running... running zigzag. He knows he has to keep moving, to keep ahead of the verbs he has been avoiding: excise; suture; reconstruct; harvest; implant; mobilise. At 47, Victor's GP informs him, "You're allowed to try and be happy." This statement, part-revelation, part manifesto, alive with possibility, was the permission slip and catalyst for change. Set over half a century across Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne, India, London and Haiti and written in two parts, NMNC is anarchic, high risk, dopamine-seeking with little reflection and few apologies. Humour finding absurdity in the extremes and serving as a disarming tool of vulnerability. [Laser-cut paperback]
"A very gritty, gutsy, moving memoir of one man's coming of age in the wrong body, and his decision to undergo full transition. It's frank, unflinching, with bold streaks of humour: come to it with your open and lion hearts." —Emma Neale
"Brooks' memoir is a vital, groundbreaking work about all manner of transitions, delivered with equal parts gallows humour and radical vulnerability. It's a wild, gonzo, shocking, explicit and extremely funny exploration of identity and community — and that's just the bits about teaching high school. His story is raw and often confronting but will leave you awash in kindness and compassion. No shame, nice book." —Dr Erin Harrington
"I'm not much of a reader but the moment I started I binged NMNC in two days. The engaging and immediate plot and style drew me in; humour and pathos in beautiful balance." —Nicholas Macaulay, man about town
"Seldom do we come across an author who is brave enough to write with such true grit and honesty. NMNC uniquely reflects the NZ experience of this life-changing journey. It is a must read for everyone interested in, or pursuing, a medical or surgical transition." —Rowena Palmer, Clinical Psychologist
To Lose a War: The fall and rise of the Taliban by Jon Lee Anderson $38
Jon Lee Anderson first reported from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, covering the US-backed mujahideen's insurrection against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, he was again on the ground as an early eyewitness to the new war launched by the US against the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies. At the time, the American military had prevailed on the battlefield, and the newfound peace seemed to offer a precious space for Afghan society to restore itself and to forge a democratic future. But all was not well: Osama bin Laden was still in hiding, the Taliban were stealthily reorganizing for a comeback, and the United States was about to turn its attention to Iraq. To Lose a War collects Anderson's writing from Afghanistan over a near-quarter-century span, offering a chronological account of a monumental tragedy as it unfolds. The colossal waste, missed signals, and wishful thinking that characterized the twenty-year arc of the US-led war in Afghanistan have consecrated it as one of the greatest foreign policy failures of the modern era, and a bellwether of a larger American imperial decline. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Anderson's eye for drama and ear for telling quotations sustain the lively pace of a book peopled with murderous warlords, religious fanatics, victimized civilians and western militarists devoid of sympathy for or curiosity about the people they are killing.... To Lose a War documents in detail, without the polishing of hindsight, what happened as it happened during America's twenty-year sojourn in the "graveyard of empires".' —Charles Glass, Times Literary Supplement
'More than any American journalist of the war in Afghanistan, Jon Lee Anderson knew where to find the story: in the lives of Afghans navigating between an American occupier and a repressive Taliban. With his characteristic courage, curiosity, humanity and unflinching eye for official hypocrisy and the revealing detail, Anderson paints a riveting picture of what went wrong over the two decades after 9/11. To Lose a War is an epochal and essential record of what happened in Afghanistan, a timeless warning about imperial overreach, and a poignant tribute to the resilience of Afghans who lived through it all.' —Ben Rhodes
'Jon Lee Anderson is the real deal. He's the foreign correspondent's foreign correspondent. To Lose a War is a brilliant, compelling and uncomfortable dissection of everything that went wrong — did anything go right? - in the US-led war in Afghanistan.' —Justin Marozzi
'Anderson's pieces are a triumph of high-wire journalism - often taking him into hair-raising action — that also offer a capacious, resonant panorama of Afghan society. The result is a captivating account of a military march of folly that ably dissects its many tragic delusions.' —Publishers Weekly
How to Make a Woman by Marie Darrieussecq (translated from French by Penny Hueston) $40
Rose, a psychotherapist, and Solange, an actress, are very different, one diligent and loyal, the other rebellious and self-centred, but they have been best friends forever, despite their contrasting social backgrounds. In How to Make a Woman, we follow the young women's experiences of adolescence, love, sex, work and motherhood, as they negotiate their place in the world. This lively portrait of female friendship, of two identities under construction, of 'what gets done to women', is also a snapshot of French provincial life in the eighties and nineties. [Paperback]
‘Marie Darrieussecq courses through dark places with such buoyant energy that you emerge exhilarated.’ —Helen Garner
'A lucid, clear-eyed and strangely comforting novel about the paths two friends take away from each other.’ —Amina Cain
‘It’s impossible to stop turning these pages. Profoundly original.’ —Libération
‘Darrieussecq is one of the most prolific and distinguished living writers in France with a truly impressive body of work.’ —Samantha Harvey, Guardian
'It made me think about time and how we spend it, about being a girl, and about the different ways two people experience the same moment.' —Daisy Hildyard
‘Intelligent, insightful, mischievous and tender.’ —Albertine
>>Sleepless.
The End of Romance by Maria Takolander $40
It is the future, and the earth has seemingly refused to cooperate with humanity, producing only thorn-bearing plants and caustic fogs in abundance. Life is hard for those who still inhabit urban communities. For those who have chosen to live 'off-grid' it is subsistence at best, but at least there is some kind of independence. A woman and her son live alone, surviving as scavengers. Even so, the boy must attend military school like all the other boys. In time he will be shipped off with the rest of them to a distant planet — the Promised Land — to fight the colonising war that is touted as humanity's only hope. By chance, the woman meets a young man who has avoided this fate, despite his lack of physical impairment. It appears that he comes from a place of sanctuary. Can he lead her back there — and help her to save her son? [Paperback]
”This is a tense, engrossing and deeply uncomfortable novel that speaks in urgent tones to our complacent moment.” —Guardian
‘There is something deliciously generative about the juxtaposition of Muskian fantasies of space exploration and ecological and social breakdown. Not only does the idea of troops being sent to fight wars of colonial conquest in space evoke the classic texts that so many of our tech bro overlords cite as inspirations—Starship Troopers, anyone?—it also subtly invokes the anti-colonial, anti-militaristic counter-tradition found in works such as Ursula K Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. The End of Romance lets us see our world in new and different ways.’—The Saturday Paper
>>Eking out an existence.
Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim $38
When you emigrate, you leave a version of yourself behind. Literally. One instance crosses the border; the other instance stays trapped behind it. Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, synchronize their lives and minds in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Other instances, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at age ten and never speak to their other selves again. With a life of her own in New York, Rose never imagined she’d return to Korea. Then her grandfather dies and Soyoung, her Korean instance, summons her home for the funeral. But Soyoung’s motives aren’t as innocent as Rose imagined, and the consequences of Rose’s return to Seoul will change her forever. [Paperback]
”One of the best debuts of the year. Sublimation speaks to our moment, in ways we could not have expected.” —John Scalzi
”In this dazzling parable of connection and isolation, Isabel J. Kim's vividly crafted characters navigate identity, belonging, and the weight of a divided history. A richly imagined alternate reality that serves as a perfect allegory for our own world, where the borders of our fragmented selves are increasingly shaped and policed by corporate technologies.” —Scott Westerfeld
The North Pole: The history of an obsession by Erling Kagge $35
Throughout recorded human time, few places on Earth have inspired as much fascination as the North Pole. This is an otherworldly place where the sun rises and stays aloft for six whole months before setting, plunging the expanse of ice and water into darkness for half a year. Foot-stepping alongside Erling Kagge, who ventured to the North Pole in the spring of 1990, we hear the story of the North Pole as never told before. From Herodotus who first wondered what the northernmost point of our planet might be like, to the intrepid early cartographers who mapped the world, and the legendary expeditions led by Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary - the first polar explorer global celebrities - who were in the grip of a dangerous obsession to get to the North Pole first. What emerges is a new history of the world, spanning thousands of years, as seen from the 'silver-shining vacantness' of the North Pole. Blending memories from Kagge's own 1990 trip with this epic history, The North Pole is an adventure story, a book about enacting hidden human dreams, about difficult fathers and their difficult sons, and a psychological record of what it means to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of adversity. It is for anyone who's gazed out at the horizon — and wondered what happens if you just keep walking. [Now in paperback]
”Erling Kagge is a deeply thoughtful writer. The North Pole proves to be the perfect subject for him>” —Michael Palin
”The book of a lifetime, from a rare writer-adventurer whose obsession and passion for his subject know no bounds.” —Elif Shafak
Checkmate: Genius, scandal, and the billion-dollar rise of chess by Ben Mezrich $39
In September 2022, the chess world watched in disbelief as Magnus Carlsen, widely considered the greatest player in history, faced an unthinkable defeat against the nineteen-year-old American upstart, Hans Niemann. When Carlsen withdrew from the prestigious Sinquefield Cup and subtly accused Niemann of cheating, shockwaves hit the chess community, igniting the biggest scandal in the sport's history. Checkmate dives deep into this modern-day drama, tracing the parallel rises of Carlsen, the stoic virtuoso, and Niemann, the fiery disruptor. Niemann denied the accusations, even as past online cheating incidents surfaced, while powerful entities like Chess.com, a billion-dollar online arena, became entangled in the escalating controversy. As the scandal went viral, it became clear that more was at stake than a single game. Checkmate is a story of ambition, genius and greed set against the backdrop of a once-niche game exploding into a global, multi-billion-dollar phenomenon. It's a compelling exploration of a world where tradition collides with innovation, and a new generation, forged in the digital age, threatens to upend everything. [Paperback]
Family: Simple, healthy recipes for everyone by Claudine Boulstridge $60
French-British chef and mother-of-three Claudine Boulstridge is passionate about family food. She wants to show everyone how to transform daily meals into flavour-forward, vibrant and healthy home-cooked dishes you and your children, will love at any age. Packed with tempting and creative recipes and practical ideas for a balanced, varied diet, Family will make mealtimes more delicious and help you to nourish adventurous eaters at the same time. Today most people work long hours, meaning that it can be hard to find the time to cook meals from scratch. This cookbook will transform the way you eat as a family without upending your daily routine. With one-pot dishes, prepare-ahead meals, and minimal washing up, Family is the perfect solution for health-conscious, time-pressed families. [Handback]
”Wholesome and delicious go naturally together — like family, really — in this joyful book. Claudine and I have been working together for two decades now, during which I've seen her grow, develop and become a master of ingredients and craft. This book is a perfect reflection of her experience, talent and domestic flair.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
>>Look inside.
How To Use a Fork: Stories of mending the broken brain by Orlando Swayne $39
The science of brain plasticity in demonstrated in human stories of survival and recovery. We meet the woman who thought her arm was a baby, the man who saw mannequins peering at him through the dark, and the patient who found his way back to human interaction through music. As a medical student, Orlando Swayne was taught that a broken brain doesn’t mend. But as a junior doctor, he began to meet patients for whom this was clearly not the case. Intrigued by what he saw, he delved deep into the emerging neuroscience of brain reorganisation, and discovered that over time brain tissue creates new networks and regenerates. Developments in neurology continue to reveal new capabilities that allow functions we thought to be lost to be restored. The key to recovery, a return to some semblance of our previous selves after brain injury, lies in neurorehabilitation: painstaking work that rebuilds shattered lives. [Paperback]
”An incredible voyage of discovery. Intensely moving and awe-inspiring.” —Marina Hyde
Pierre the Maze Detective: The Hunt for the Maze Pyramid by Hiro Kamigaki $38
Phantom thief Mr. X has escaped Lockmaze Prison, announcing his intention to steal the precious Maze Stone from the Valley of the Mazes. Travel with Pierre and Carmen to the Kingdom of Caramelia and journey through an endless desert aboard an enormous mechanical camel. Marvel at the legendary Red Pyramid —home of the prized Maze Stone — and puzzle your way out of a confusing Christmas market and a spectacular Ice Palace. This colorful, illustrated activity book features 15 intricate mazes. Trace your way through each maze, search for hidden objects, spot clues, and solve some extra mystery challenges along the way as you become a key member of the maze detective team! [Large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Other Maze Detective books.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (Translated by Lin King) $38
”With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” —judges’ citation on awarding the book the 2026 International Booker
NIGHT, MA: A memoir by Elizabeth Knox $40
'Absolutely brilliant. This radiant, radically honest memoir pulls the pin on a sequence of domestic grenades, from the perils of semi-feral childhood to a cruelly compacted series of family crises that, like shock waves, sweep all before. Armed with inimitable wit, the consolation of cats and a forensic gaze that spares no one, least of all herself, Knox interrogates the act of caring; the ties that burn and bind, that we somehow survive.' —Diana Wichtel
THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris
LAND by Maggie O’Farrell $38
Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. From the author of Hamnet.
LIGHT AND THREAD by Han Kang $35
Kang recalls a poem she wrote at eight years old in which she imagined a ‘gold thread’ of connection: language. Here she uses that thread to tie together essays and poems, her life and her work, beginning with her Nobel lecture in which she discusses her writing process and the myriad questions that drive her work.
Read our latest newsletter and lengthen your days with a new book.
3 July 2026
While being generally uncomfortable about comfort, he wrote when asked what he read for comfort, in times of particular stress or despair I do find that re-reading any of the novels of Thomas Bernhard makes me feel better, though I am also uncomfortable about the concept of feeling better, he wrote. He had been re-reading Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters, a book that he had read before, and, indeed, reviewed before, so, he thought, he would not review it again, he would just read it for what he, not without irony, called comfort, not that he understood the word. Bernhard’s sentences are unrelentingly beautiful and his negativity so intense that it becomes ludicrous, he wrote. Everything exaggerated moves towards its opposite, so I often find my negativity turned, too, he also wrote, and then, he thought, I have finished answering the question I have been asked, not only answering it but explaining my answer, too, which was more than I had been asked to do, even though I have done it rather briefly. The first time he had read Woodcutters, he had been younger than the narrator, and younger than the author when he wrote the book, the narrator and the author sharing rather more than their age, he thought, but now he was older than the narrator, and older than the author was when he wrote the book, and also older than the author was when he died, or, rather, committed suicide, whichever is the better description of the author’s death. The narrator of Woodcutters has not committed suicide, obviously, and does not even do so at the end, but the entire novel is narrated in the evening of the day of the funeral of one of the narrator’s former friends, who, finding herself denied artistic success merely through mediocrity of talent, which is not necessarily sufficient to exclude someone from success, depending on how you understand the word success, but perhaps sufficient to exclude someone from success in what the narrator calls Vienna’s art mill, the art mill that grinds even those with talent into powder, most effectively by acclaiming their talent, and, by doing so, destroying it, whereas Joana, losing all that she had going for her, which is a strange turn of phrase, spent many years in alcoholism and despair, in decline, so to speak, and hanged herself in the village in which she was born, just before the narrator’s return to Vienna after an absence, apparently, of some twenty years. The host of the dinner party at which the narrator observes the proceedings without involving himself in them, as he says, was once a talented composer, or at least so it had seemed to the narrator when he had been involved with him twenty or even thirty years before, before the narrator had left Vienna in disgust with Vienna and with the artistic and literary circles of Vienna, but now the host has been destroyed by his talent, or by the acclaim accorded his talent, and in this way relieved of this talent, and the host, one Auersberger, or so he is called in the novel, though it is perhaps interesting to note that the book was banned in Austria after one of Bernhard’s former patrons reognised himself in the character, is now little more than ludicrous or pathetic. And the same could be said, and indeed is said by the narrator, albeit to himself, as he sits in a chair just off the main room, observing them, of the other guests at the dinner party, the dinner party styled by its hosts an artistic dinner held in honour of an actor who is rather late to arrive, but really more of a gathering of members of the artistic and literary circles that included both the narrator and Joana twenty or thirty years before, when the narrator, like the author, if the author can be distinguished even a little from the narrator, was an aspiring writer who was supported by persons like Auersberger, or by the person who recognised himself as Auersberger, writers who had talent but whose talent has been destroyed by Vienna’s art mill and other persons whose talent has been similarly destroyed. “As I see it they haven’t become anything. They’ve all quite simply failed to achieve the highest, and as I see it only the highest can ever bring satisfaction, I thought.” But, thinks the narrator, these people, the people of this so-called artistic circle, have been more than complicit in the destruction of their talent. “All these people have contrived to turn conditions and circumstances that were once happy into something utterly depressing, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, they’ve managed to make everything depressing, to transform all the happiness they once had into utter depression, just as I have.” When the celebrated actor finally arrives and the narrator moves with the other guests to the dining room, the narrator’s focus moves, if the narrator can be said to have a focus, from his opinions formed in the past of those present, attitudes which caused him to leave Vienna twenty years ago, when his love for those present, and for Joana, had turned entirely to disgust, when he had taken from them all he could, to his observations of what is said and done, though not said and done by him, who only observes the proceedings and does not participate in them, or so he says, in the present, at the artistic dinner itself, observations, it must be said, no less vitriolic but rather more ambivalent, by which I mean, the bookseller thought as he paused in his train of thought, a train of thought that had begun to resemble a review but was not a review but only a train of thought, unless a train of thought can be called a review, and he thought not, he thought, not the popular misconception of ambivalence as some wishy-washiness, if he was writing a review he would replace wishy-washiness with a better word, or at least an actual word, but ambivalence in its true, etymological and Freudian sense of being beset with equally overwhelming but opposite inclinations. The narrator, he thought, loathes those most like himself, all his loathing is self-loathing, and to loathe, therefore, is the greatest act of sympathy, the strongest form, he thought, of identification. “We are not one jot better than the people we constantly find objectionable and insufferable, those repellent people with whom we want to have as few dealings as possible although, if we are honest we do have dealings with them and are no different from them. We reproach them with all kinds of objectionable and insufferable behaviour and are no less insufferable and objectionable ourselves — perhaps we are even more insufferable and objectionable, it occurs to me,” the narrator of Woodcutters says. To grow older, the bookseller thought, is not to become more certain but to become less certain, certainty is for the young, he thought, certainty is for those who do not think, not that it is necessarily true that the young do not think, there are, no doubt, some who are young who do think, but they have not thought long enough, being young, to realise that all thought leads to the destruction of certainty, all thought leads to ambivalence, to the undermining of anything that might be said to be one’s own identity, there’s no such thing as one’s own identity anyway, he thought, except in the thoughts of others, and hardly even then, all thought is its own undoing. As the guests depart from the dinner, the narrator, the last to leave, thanks the hostess for a lovely time, after apparently hating it the whole time and hating everything about it and everyone who was there and everything they said and did, kisses her, and then runs through the streets of Vienna, away from his home, towards the centre of town, in the wrong direction, in a dishevelled state of mind, so to term it, completely dishevelled and confused. “To think that I was capable of such hypocrisy, I thought as I was speaking to her,” he says to himself about the only words he actually speaks in a book full of words. “To think that I am capable of telling her to her face the precise opposite of what I feel, because it makes things momentarily more endurable.” Well, thought the bookseller, I can understand that, we all tell others to their faces the opposite of what we feel because it makes things momentarily more endurable, and, in fact, we also do feel what we tell them, that is how we survive and that is how we destroy ourselves, we destroy ourselves by surviving and we survive by destroying ourselves, this is what thinking tells us if we think our thoughts through to the end, this is the truth that is hidden from the young by their youth, this is why I resist my own existence, at least internally, whatever that means, whatever form that resistance could take, and, at the same time, this is why I long to exist, for my nonexistence to end, though my nonexistence cannot end, it can only be obscured, for a chance to take refuge from thinking in busyness, so to call it, in the busyness of my life, the life I therefore both long for and resent. He felt comforted by this thought, he thought, my negativity has become so intense, he thought, through reading Thomas Bernhard or through the thinking that accompanies reading Thomas Bernhard, through thinking like Thomas Bernhard and not thinking like myself, that it has become ludicrous, and always was ludicrous. Everything exaggerated moves towards its opposite like this, he thought. I find my negativity has turned, he thought, and this, he thought, is a comfort.
Where to start with this slim novel? It’s brilliant. The writing is crisp. Lerner not only writes well, but with economy. Each word feels as though it belongs on the page, each action or non-action vital. Transcription is about things that matter; not a cluster of meaningless or fabulous characters or plot twists that may entertain but don’t add up to much in the end, like much of what passes as a novel in the oversaturated publishing world — as well as other social media that tell ‘stories’. Ironically, a central theme in this novel is technology, and it’s definitely exploring ‘story’: what gets told, what’s said or supposedly said, what’s remembered compared to what’s recorded (or not). The novel opens with the unnamed narrator heading by train to Providence. It’s the return of the nervous protégé to his alma mater to record the ‘final interview’ with Thomas, a famous cultural critic, who is now in his 90s. The narrator is restless, travelling backwards (which makes him nauseous), photographing his masked self in the reflection of the moving train’s window. He looks at the photo and deletes it. He begins a conversation about the morning's problems by txt. This small passage tells the reader so much. It’s sometime after the lockdowns; recording yourself and then just as easily deleting yourself on your handheld device is a common phenomena; our awareness of ourselves in place and time determined by or acted out through the technology we hold close to us (continuously). This same technology enables us to escape the present by replaying or reimaging the past, or determining a future that will never be actual. Time is a central player in the conversations in the three distinct parts of this novel, and the way in which Lerner seamlessly takes us through conversation from America in the 2020s, then to late 1990s and back to Germany in the 1940s, not layering in historical facts or particular incidents but rather by reference to cultural touchpoints, mentions of music, philosophers and writers creating what made me think of a series of vibrations. Vibrations that resonated through not only time, but the shared (and often differently interpreted) experiences of each of the main characters. Are these vibrations a transcription of a sort?
Yet it is technology that lets the narrator down. He drops his phone in the sink. It’s kaput. And, as much as he tries to suggest that the interview could be the next day, and the evening for ‘catching up’, Thomas is keen to get started, and the narrator is too cowardly to say his phone isn’t working. So the interview goes ahead without a recorded transcript. The protégé doesn’t even take notes. Or so it seems. There is the possibility that Thomas suspects there is something amiss. There is the possibility that even if the phone had worked the subsequent published interview would have been a fabrication. Ben Lerner is leaning into this idea of the real and imagined, of what is fiction? And the novel is dotted with this concept. Of how we look, how we remember, and what happens when we start to think that something is imagined or described rather than ‘real’ – whatever that may be. When his phone doesn’t work, the narrator begins to ‘notice’ everything, “The stones are stonier”. He has no google directions. He would have used them if his phone was working even though he knows the way. Without his phone, time shifts as his head has space to imagine and remember, and he’s walking through the campus of his student days. If this sounds nostalgic or overwrought, don’t worry: it’s not. These moments are often depicted wryly, with a wink to the reader and a self-deprecating honesty.
The characters in Transcription are ordinary and real (and possibly often Lerner himself, or facets of). They are fallible and not always likable. There are no heroes, although maybe sometimes heroic, if you can call it that, attempts to deal with our contemporary world, that’s a world on the intimate as much as the wider scale. This is most telling in the passages where the narrator talks about his relationship with his daughter, and Max (his friend from college, who also happens to be Thomas’s actual son) discusses his own daughter’s problems. Both children have issues with the world, and these issues visit upon their bodies. One through anxiety and a refusal to participate (go to school) and the other through a refusal to eat. Both these problems are overcome to some degree via mindless games and social media dross. That this distraction, although empty, can be an antidote for other more harmful problems, puts our devices, and what they deliver to us, into that ambivalent space, providing a lifeline despite appearing meaningless. How do we measure this against the ability of the book to provide a place to escape to?
Transcription is completely satisfying — it’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that ends so well. Ben Lerner covers so much ground in these 130 pages. Here we encounter interviewer, author, and cultural critic; here are the fathers, Thomas the elder, Max the son, and the unnamed narrator — the cultural son. There are the issues of the modern world (climate, politics, image), threaded through but never belaboured. There is memory and misremembering — what is invention? And where does fiction start?
We will be discussing Transcription at our next Talking Books session on July 14
Find out more and join in by Zoom
”Set in a remote penal colony built on land scarred by slavery and colonialism, this vivid and haunting novel unfolds in a landscape where punishment has replaced justice and cruelty has become the norm. As the colony nears its end, the warden introduces a ritualised full-moon hunt, releasing prisoners into the forest for sport. Through spare yet masterful prose, Ana Paula Maia renders a closed world thick with dread, brutality and moral decay. The prisoners and guards alike are trapped within a system that corrodes and suffocates everyone it touches. On Earth As It Is Beneath is a stark, unsettling exploration of power, violence, destruction and institutional corruption that will linger with readers long after the final page.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Kieron Smith, boy by James Kelman $48
Rejected by his brother and largely ignored by his parents, Kieron Smith finds comfort – and endless stories – in the home of his much-loved grandparents. But when his family move to a new housing scheme on the outskirts of Glasgow, a world away from the close community of the tenements, Kieron struggles to find a way to adapt to his new life. Kieron Smith, boy is a brilliant evocation of an urban working-class childhood, capturing the joys, frustrations, injustices, excitements, revels, battles, games, uncertainties, questions, lies, discoveries and sheer of wonder. Kelman is an outstanding writer, uncompromising and with deep sympathy for the downtrodden, and it is good to see his works coming back into print. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Kieron Smith, boy is one more in a line of uncompromising, honest, passionate, radical and perfectly crafted books from a writer who has not given up on the questions of freedom and justice.' —Sean O'Reilly, Stinging Fly
'Kieron Smith, boy gives voice to an honourable decency which guides the human spirit even in the midst of its own brutality. This is an outstanding novel of immense power, and is Kelman's best yet.' —Simon Koevesi, The Independent
'By forcing us to rethink childhood, (and therefore adulthood), Kieron Smith, boy is a magnificent and important novel, and might just be Kelman's greatest achievement to date.' —Irvine Welsh, Financial Times
'An outstanding, living, breathing novel that powerfully documents the life of a Glaswegian boy in his own voice. This book is almost impossible to review, because it is simply too good. Kelman is not beating up the contemporary novel — he is simply showing how it's done and shoving the bar that bit farther up and out of reach for most British writers.' —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
'James Kelman's best novel so far, Kieron Smith, boy is Kelman's tender evocation of his own childhood.' —James Wood, New Yorker
'The boy's voice, to my ear, is flawless and brilliantly sustained. The diction, the syntax, the sudden cliff-edges Kelman brings us to, where language fails — these are the product of years of careful listening to people who're never listened to.' —Kathleen Jamie, Granta
>>Read an excerpt.
>>The war against silence.
Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette (translated ffrom Fench by Kate Briggs) $42
In an opulent villa near the English channel lives a well-to-do family. A man--a husband, father, and employer--has been shot dead. The bullet is from his own gun, which he got from the Germans during the war. In this family, the father has a safe, a monkey wrench, a wife, and a maid named Rose. The son has a swing, a croquet set, a rain coat, and a car. They all read detective novels to fall asleep (the father), to stay awake (the son), to distract herself from an empty marriage (the mother). Packed with brutal revelations, the novel centers on the twenty minutes of silence it takes for the family to alert the doctor (who lives next door) of the father's death. Everything in this high-octane drama is subject to change, including the setting and the characters, who are truer to life than might at first appear. But who if anyone is the true criminal and who is the victim? In this marvelous and sui generis novel, written in Bessette's signature taut and stripped-back prose, the detective novel is turned inside out and wholly on its head. Introduction by Kathryn Scanlan. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Twenty Minutes of Silence is a sublimely rare thing: a feat of experimentation that defies comparison. Helene Bessette's phrasings (translated by the brilliant Kate Briggs) pulse with a bass drum and freewheeling speed, as she upends the sentence so that we can reconsider our relationship to language and the stories we tell with it. Thrilling.' —Makenna Goodman
'Discovering Helene Bessette through Kate Briggs's incredible translations has felt like having a light switched on. I can feel so many of us excitedly learning and re-exploring the potential of the novel, which as a form, multiplies in Twenty Minutes of Silence. The brilliant modernist and anti-commercial styles that run through it feel perfect for us now and I am grateful we get to write and think in the extraordinary milieu of Bessette and Briggs.' —Holly Pester
>>With the revolver in the library.
Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno $42
Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child's life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more. [Paperback]
”Kate Zambreno's oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an interrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence.” —Paris Review
>>Worthwhile ghost.
>>Writing postpartum.
The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Alison L. Strayer) $25
One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women's conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie's memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. The Other Girl explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ernaux repeatedly stuns by the depth and honesty of her psychological observations, as she does by her frugal and unsentimental language. This book, beautiful and profound, attests to what we already knew from her other works — that Ernaux is one of the great writers of our time, and a truly worthy Nobel.” —Magdalena Miecznicka, Financial Times
”Across over twenty books and for the better part of the last five decades, Ernaux has gathered, broken and reassembled the infinite, singular matter of her history. Perhaps no other literary figures, save Proust or Knausgaard, have come as near to achieving so Promethean a project.” —Jamie Hood, The Baffler
>>Other books by Annie Ernaux.
Maybe Baby by Emma Neale $39
Nate, a grieving widower, is determined to honour his late wife and find a way to have the child they were desperate to raise together. After various attempts to identify a suitable surrogate come to nothing, Nate is compelled to try something radical. He travels to London to take part in a groundbreaking medical trial. As things progress, he becomes caught in the complex hinge of three powerful desires: his loyalty to his late wife, a primal urge to be a father, and his knee-weakening attraction to Sadie, who has her own reasons to resist starting a family. [Paperback]
”An irresistible story of grief, hope and the miracles we dare to chase.” —Catherine Chidgey
>>By page 25 she is dead.
>>Grief and desire.
Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora (translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery) $40
An archaeological novel that digs into the strata of the European soil, and uncovers a long history of oppression, expropriation and erasure. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European feudalism is starting to crumble. Newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small Prussian town to claim a plot of arable land and the simple life of a freehold farmer. Digging a grave for his wife’s body, Redo finds the body of a soldier. The next day, Redo uncovers two soldiers from an earlier time, perfectly preserved. This novel contains the story of Redo's mysterious life, and the great love at the heart of it, revealed in chapters of increasing length: as the bodies proliferate, the story gets more complicated. What will be excavated from the earth, and what will remain buried? Astounding, bursting with ideas and novel thoughts. [Paperback]
‘Mora embarks on a radical adventure in a Europe ravaged by wars and revolutions that has no reference in our current literature.’ —La Vanguardia
>>Hidden and revealed delights.
>>Freedom through structure.
>>Melville in miniature.
Repetition, A novel by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $25
As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange. It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Hjorth writes with the feminist bluntness of Annie Ernaux, the psychic precision of Javier Marias and the lyrical repetitions of Jon Fosse.” —S.C. Cornell, The New York Times
”For Freud the 'compulsion to repeat,' as he called it, was an unconscious expression of what had been repressed by memory. Here, Hjorth brings that compulsion to life in prose, making the reader feel, at once, the desire to remember and the desire to forget, which battle it out on the field of memory. The novel's explosive power comes from the tension between those competing desires, and its suspense comes from the presence of the unnamed trauma, which sits outside the family's house like a hungry beast in the darkness. If Will and Testament shows us the process by which a repressed truth rises to the surface, Repetition shows us how it gets repressed.” —Madeline Gressel, Parapraxis
>>Never let it go.
>>Finding words.
>>Familiar and strange.
>>Unfolding the past.
>>Other books by Vigdis Hjorth.
>>Other Repetiton.
When the World Sleeps: Stories, words and wounds of Palestine by Francesca Albanese (translated from Italian by Gregory Conti) $38
The spirit of a place lies in the people who inhabit it, in the stories that intertwine through its streets. And this is especially true of a land like Palestine, the witness to defining historic transitions to one of the most painful chapters in contemporary history. With a voice both authoritative and deeply human, Francesca Albanese (who lived in Palestine for many years while following the legal battles of numerous Palestinian families and is currently a United Nations Special Rapporteur) takes on the role of narrator of the ongoing conflict, starting with the stories of the people she met. Anyone following the harrowing events that have unfolded in the Middle East who wants to understand Palestine will discover in When the World Sleeps a gallery of stories, characters, and places that allow us to understand what Palestine was like until recently, and what it has become today. [Paperback]
Motherland: A feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy by Julia Ioffe $40
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home mothers. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women. [Paperback]
'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia. Julia Ioffe tracks the transformation of Russia from dictatorship to democracy and back again in sharp, engaging prose, filling in the blanks, telling the stories left out by so many others.' —Anne Applebaum
Search and Find: Alphabet of Alphabets [and] Number of Numbers by Allan Sanders $30
There are hours of fun in this epic search-and-find activity book! Children can practise their letters and numbers in this interactive activity book designed to engage and entertain. There are over fifty fully illustrated 'search-and-find' activities, each themed on a number or letter of the alphabet. In Alphabet of Alphabets, you'll take a ride through twenty-six fully-illustrated alphabets, from an A to Z of Birds to an A to Z of Zoo. Then, flip the book over for Number of Numbers, where you can count the animals going into Noah's Ark two-by-two, spot thirteen scary skeletons at the haunted house on Halloween, visit Farm Fifteen and more. Dip in and out of the pages or do each one in order for a unique reading experience. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Being: Why its harder to be a human than a hamster or a herring by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies $40
From early childhood, we start to become aware of the difficulties we must all inevitably face. We will battle an inner critic across the entirety of our life. We will never truly know those around us and time will destroy all we create. Death becomes a reality, and we cannot escape the knowledge that it is coming for us all. These are the problems of being; the existential truths that make it harder to be human than a hamster or a herring. Many other problems emerge from the knowledge of our own mortality. How do we find meaning, choose a life path, form an identity, face uncertainty, cope with hardship and, ultimately, bear the loss of all we love? How do we make peace with the inner voice that won't stop attacking the choices we've made and the opportunities we've missed? How do we deal with the uncertain and unpredictable nature of the world and our future? [Paperback]
'Few books capture so powerfully the paradox of being human: that self-awareness both elevates us and unsettles us. Being is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand anxiety, identity, and the shadow of mortality.' —Professor Thomas Heidenreich, Esslingen University