Here are three new picture books that help children address change, their worries, or fears. These are books that wil resonate with young children and help them feel brave, reassured, and capable. Each can open a door to a conversation about difficult situations or the emotions we have when things are different.

In Rebecca Stead’s Anything a young child moves to a new aprtment with her father. Things are just not right! They are not the same as ‘home’. This is subtle and charming book about a new place. The cake isn’t right, the rooms smell of paint, the closet is too small to hide in, the bathtub isn’t big and blue. Daddy lets the child have three wishes; they can wish for anything! A rainbow on the bedroom wall, pizza for dinner, but a wish for home needs a good resolution, and Daddy comes up with the best journey. The illustrator Gracey Zhang’s signature style of ballpoint-pen drawing and gouache create detail and fluidity. Some pages are spare, while others have wonderful bursts of colour reflecting the ups and downs of the child’s emotions. The predominantly line-drawing style captures the uncertainity of the new apartment and the surrounding neighbourhood, while the colourful bursts reflect the chld’s imagination — her ‘anythings’ and as we move to the last few pages, the adjustment to Aprtment 3B. The colours settle into the landscape, juts as the child settles and breakfast is served. Her new favourite kind.

Another book about home — not about moving but about what is missing. A cat. In My Friend May , written and illustrated by Julie Flett, we meet a child whose everyday companion has disappeared. Margaux and May have been the best of friends and have grown up together. She is understandably distraught that her pet is missing and, no matter where they look, how many times they call, May is nowhere to be found. And not only that, but her favourite auntie Nitôsis is moving to the city. Margaux helps her pack the last of her belongings into boxes. The next day, no May, and Margaux is worried. What if she is hurt, alone or hungry? In a city far away Nitôsis, is tired and hungry after her long journey. As she settles down, unpacked boxes around her, to have some soup, she hears a faint meow. This quiet, gentle story about familial relationships hits all the rights notes. Flett is a Cree-Métis author, and the book has a bonus glossary of Cree words and cultural information about friendships.

For children who have experienced trauma, frightening situations, or violence, whether directly or as a bystander, being able to find ways to express this fear and feel safe are important. In a world where violence is a daily occurance, it’s vital we have books that do not shy away from the hard issues. I Will Not Be Scared is beautifully and clearly written by Jean-François Sénéchal and sweetly illustrated by Simone Rea. It is a picture books about freedom, war, fear, and courage. A young bunny can’t get to sleep. Something has happened at school to make him feel scared, and unsure of his safety in this new home. Mama gently waits until he is ready to talk about it. With much reassurance, and encourgement, Bunny feels able to express himself, and unpick some of the deeper emotions that underpin his fear. And in freeing himself of these feelings, be able to find the conviction to be brave. A tender story which will not only reassuire, but gives us hope for a better world.

"It is a folk art of sorts, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilised in the form of lifelong controlled suffering,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in Correction. In the ‘autobiographical’ novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship, Bernhard explores the conditions needed for continuing to live in an intolerable world by at once both aligning and contrasting his accommodation of the contradictory impulses for survival and self-destruction with the accommodation or lack of accommodation made between these impulses by his friend Paul Wittgenstein, whose resulting madness periodically incapacitated and ultimately destroyed him. The novel opens with the narrator and Paul both confined to departments in the Baumgartner Höhe hospital in Vienna, “isolated, shunted aside, and written off”: the narrator in the pulmonary department, not expected to live, and Paul in the psychiatric department, receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and kept in a caged bed. The two had met at the apartment of a mutual friend at a time when the narrator was afflicted by suicidal thoughts, when at the height of his despair Paul appeared as his “deliverer”, a man who, like the narrator, ''loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.” Whereas the narrator writes because “I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it,” Paul has no such defence. “Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness: one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. … Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them the mainspring of my existence.” Both the narrator and Paul exhibit neuroses (such as “the counting disease”) as a means of resisting the pull of annihilation, and share a passion for music (‘culture’ itself being a neurotic mechanism for collectively resisting the pull of annihilation). All efforts, though, to act as if the intolerable is tolerable are increasingly difficult to maintain. “As we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise.” The narrator knows that continuing is always only a postponement of the moment at which continuing becomes impossible: “I had behaved towards myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessless that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own overestimation of myself and the world.” Paul is destroyed by their shared madness, but the narrator is not yet destroyed. He survives by, in effect, sacrificing Paul. The narrator at ones both claims and disavows Paul as his alter ego, both emphasises and denies their shared identity (is that not always so with friendships?): “We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into even greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties.” When Paul, debilitated by his bouts of madness and the brutality of his treatment, desperate for some practical demonstration of friendship, invites the narrator to his apartment and the narrator sees in its squalor and hopelessness “the last refuge of a failure,” he feels a sudden revulsion for Paul and flees, leaving Paul weeping on his sofa (the last remaining artefact of his squandered former wealth). The narrator finds despicable what he once found admirable. His own destruction yawns too near his feet and he abandons his friend. He sees Paul as spent, as a man dying. “I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul’s shadow as I had about the real Paul of earlier days. … I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than meet him [for] we shun those who bear the mark of death.” When the narrator returns from a period overseas he learns of Paul’s death in a mental hospital in Linz a few days after attacking his cousin in his final madness, and of Paul’s lonely, abject funeral. “To this day I have not visited his grave,” he states. Paul’s death could be seen as the narrator’s displaced suicide, as a way in which the narrator has continued to exist. “I had met Paul, I now see, precisely at the time when he was beginning to die,” he says. “It seems to me that I was basically nothing but a twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend’s dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival.” He goes on: "It is not far-fetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible." This book is both a tender tribute to a friend, written in guilt, and an unflinching examination of that guilt. 

For three and a half years, calamities hit Elizabeth Knox and family in rapid succession. Her sister suffered a psychotic break and was hospitalised against her will, her husband’s brother died by violence, and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. In time, she was able to write about it. Night, Ma is a book about the net of family which people are held by, but also slip through. About the actual daily work of love; the physical and cognitive work love requires. Knox is a gifted storyteller who has given us other worlds; now she invites us into her own. With characteristic generosity and transcendence, she guides us through time, illness, loss, and the loneliness of unutterable experiences.
”An unforgettable record of love and pain, as wide and deep as the ocean and as mighty. There is such life in this, such wit and goodness. Telling the truth of how we are, all of us, trembling on the edge of a great and terrible mystery.” —Noelle McCarthy 

• Calamities and care.

• Never letting up.

• A year of crises.

• Workshopping.

• The film that laid an egg.

• A maul of rocks.

• The closely noticed husband.

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 Valley: Crime and punishment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
”There were two days to Christmas and Lewis felt like everything was spinning out of control. He wondered what he would say to the judge this time. His client, Rikihana, was already on multiple shoplifting charges. What’s a few more? Lewis thought. These supermarkets were still making a killing.” It’s late 2020. Rikihana Wallace, a prolific shoplifter of no fixed abode, is back in prison with little chance of bail. Nathan Morley, unemployed, is facing burglary charges and hoping his other, as yet undetected, offences don’t catch up with him. Lewis Skerrett, their overstretched legal aid lawyer, is trying to do right by them both. The culmination of over two years of field research and hundreds of hours of interviews, The Valley follows these three Hutt Valley men through courtrooms, prison, hospital, rehab, boarding houses and welfare offices. Told largely in verbatim dialogue, this up-close and personal account brings the realities of the New Zealand criminal justice system to life through the voices of those who experience it first-hand. [Paperback]
”The Valley is an extraordinary psychodrama, untangling the justice system from its impacts on the people who witness it, work within it and are subject to it. Asher Emanuel has made a nationally important contribution to literary reportage, policy analysis and our collective understanding of class society.” —Morgan Godfery 
”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 
”This is journalism at its finest — immersive, meticulous, honest and brave. Asher Emanuel brings the messy, gritty, unfair, uneven, imprecise human reality of the criminal justice system into the light. A unique and important new book for Aotearoa New Zealand.” —Rebecca Macfie 
”The public’s understanding of the criminal justice system is largely shaped by the media, which repeatedly amplifies the voices of politicians and the police. This book cuts through that distorted narrative by giving voice to those on the system’s frontlines.” —Aaron Smale
”I think it's going to be a really important book.” —Toby Manhire
”Possibly even a masterpiece.” —Steve Braunias
>>A new standard of immersive jouirnalism.
>>Join our online discussion in June.

Transcription by Ben Lerner $33
The narrator of Ben Lerner's new novel has travelled to Providence, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor, and the father of his college friend, Max.  But after the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to each other, that store or obliterate the memories that make us who we are. [Paperback]
”Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more.” —Max Porter
”This may be the best novel you'll read all year: brilliant and incisive; intelligent and elegant.” —Telegraph
”A short, smart novel about parenthood and influence; about how much of our lives we have ceded to the black rectangles in our pockets.” —Observer
”Lerner is a linguistic magician and here is another triumphant and beautiful sleight of hand.” —Daisy Johnson
”Slender and subtle.” —LRB
”Transcription is both dizzyingly accomplished and disarmingly tender — an acutely elegant and forensic meditation on the disorientation of what it means to be alive now.” —Sophie Mackintosh
”'Novels of ideas' don't need to wear them on their sleeve. Beneath its superficially simple tale of a man visiting his old mentor, this one has impressive depths: it touches on old age, loss and the double-edged sword of modern technology. Lerner is already, at just 46, established as one of America's leading writers. This book proves why.” —Telegraph
>>Stupifying and overwhelming.
>>Projecting ourselves into the future.
>>The impossible interview.
>>Changing our minds.
>>Also available in hardback: $40 (stock due 12 May).
>>Join our online discussion in July.
>>See you later, alligator.

Light and Thread by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Maya West, e. yaewon, and Paige Aniyah Morris) $35
In this multi-faceted book, her first since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang draws together the threads of her work and life, tracing the connections between her interior and exterior worlds through a sequence of essays, poems, photographs and diaries. A book of reflections, of words and light, it has at its heart the tiny, north-facing courtyard garden at her home, cultivated solely through the reflected sunlight of the mirrors which she must move throughout the day, as the earth turns on its axis. In a poem written at eight years old, Han Kang imagined a 'gold thread' of connection — an idea which she explores here with luminous attention, beginning with her Nobel Lecture. She writes of the wonder of following the thread we call language into the depths of other hearts, and her profound sense of an electric current which joins writer and reader. [Hardback]
”These essays from the Nobel literature winner open up her novels and offer beautiful imagery.” —Guardian
>>The softest thing.

London Falling: A mysterious death in a gilded city and a family’s search for the truth by Patrick Radden Keefe $40
In 2019, teenager Zac Brettler mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment balcony into the Thames. As his grieving parents began to investigate his final days, they were shocked to learn that he’d been leading a double life, in which he was posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. This unsolved case is at the heart of London Falling — at once a family tragedy, a psychological portrait of a young fabulist, and an indictment of the greed for extreme wealth that has transformed one of the world’s great cities: London. Hiding in the shadows of its great architecture and imperial history are the malignant, mercenary forces that have come to influence us all — whether we realise it or not. In his inimitably gripping and forensic style, Patrick Radden Keefe explores what brought Zac Brettler (the grandson of famous rabbi Hugo Gryn) to the balcony that night — and how he became involved with some of London’s most notorious gangsters. Following Zac’s parents on a dark journey of investigation, London Falling unearths the unsettling truths they discovered — both about the sinister underworld on their doorstep, and about their son’s secret world. [Paperback]
”Gripping, rigorous and smart, London Falling takes a terrible mystery with an extraordinary cast of characters and somehow manages to make it perfectly encapsulate the weirdness of how London has mutated these past decades.” —Jon Ronson
”Keefe has a real gift for storytelling, an ability to unfurl the narrative in a way that is completely engrossing.” —Louis Theroux
>>Authenticity and lies.
>>The architecture of a lie.

The Ruin of Magic: Longing and belonging in strange times by Kate Holden $45
Is it possible to live wondrously by fluorescent light? In The Ruin of Magic, Kate Holden joins Katherine May, Maggie Nelson and Andre Aciman in crafting essays of intimate personal experience and sharply informed rumination on life in strange times. Holden meditates on her instinctive yearning for long-ago Europe versus the natural belonging she feels to the Australian landscape, and asks, What is a home? The strongest shelter or the most lethal trap, a museum of ourselves or a showcase of fashions? What, then, does it mean to make ourselves at home in an Australia still finding its way amidst old and avoided truths? Is nostalgia a reasonable mourning of timeless lore lost or a dangerous fantasy? And what has happened to magic and beauty in the glare of modern life? Reading Rainer Maria Rilke, Patti Smith, Walter Benjamin and D.H. Lawrence, dreamers and philosophers and poets, pagan history and new criticism, Holden writes with humour and sorrow of all the ways life today warps us under its glare -— and how to find a haven in the subtle shadows. [Paperback]
”Elegant and whip-smart, The Ruin of Magic is a work of beauty — a sober yet joyful quest to find home and belonging.” —Susan Johnson
”Thrillingly erudite, belletristic, yet necessarily raw. Many readers will encounter this ‘almost private’ book as the mirror they've been walking past their whole lives.” —Gregory Day
”A shimmering book that teases, enchants and provokes while offering balm through language and memory for our modern anguish and fear of oblivion.” —Robert Dessaix
>>Read an extract.
>>Sharp thinking.

Peace and Quiet by Dinal Hawken $25
What use is poetry in times of ecological and political turbulence? Peace and Quiet grapples with this question, invoking both human voices and the voices — ‘the silt and the slash’ — of the natural world. Powerful and illuminating, these poems show that peace, gentleness and reflection are a form of resistance. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Dinah Hawken is the high priestess of pin-drop poetry.” —James Brown
”Hawken is a wholehearted, surefooted poet, a gather and protector of precious things that others may ignore.” —Sophie van Waardenburg, Aotearoa NZ Review of Books
”This is poetry that digs deeply into existence, life and death, peace ahead of war, the power of silence and the power of the spoken.” —Paula Green
”Few writers have the skill to return to the land and the sea with such originality and genuine knowing as Hawken.” —Sarah Jane Barnett

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout $38
Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He goes about his days teaching American history to high schoolers, correcting their casual ignorance, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He spends his free time sailing the beautiful Massachusetts Bay, or with his adult son and his wife of more than three decades — and as Artie does these things, he plans the event that will forever change the world he inhabits. But when a startling accident awakens a new perspective in Artie, and he realizes that life has its own secret it's been keeping from him — along with a lot more to say on the weighty matters of fate and freedom in his home and his country — he charts another course full of grief, hilarity and heart, to a place where the end marks the beginning. [Hardback]
”One of the most profoundly moving books I have read - I envy anyone reading it for the first time. Elizabeth Strout is one of those rare novelists whose books leave you a little wiser, open and more compassionate than you were when you began reading. Emotionally stunning, devastatingly wise, a beautiful read. Her best novel yet.” —Rachel Joyce
”A moving, tender and wise novel about a committed teacher who is utterly confounded by the emotional complexities of daily life. This might be Elizabeth Strout's best yet.” —Clare Chambers
”One of the best novels I have read. I am so stunned by it, how moving and beautiful and perfect it is.” —Anna Funder

Original Sin: The genetics of wrongdoing, the problem of blame, and the future of forgiveness by Kathryn Paige Harden $40
As a scientist examining how our DNA shapes differences in temperament, temptation and behaviour, Harden has seen first-hand how we — in public and in our most private relationships — continue to struggle with the ancient tensions between nature and nurture, freedom and constraint, the desire to punish and the longing to forgive. In Original Sin, she weaves together insights from her own experience as a daughter, mother, wife and scientist with cutting-edge research in genetics and psychology to grapple with some of the most important questions in modern life: How do we take responsibility for the people we become, knowing how we are shaped by both biology and experience? How should we respond when people hurt each other — or themselves? And has science made guilt obsolete? Navigating the psychological and biological terrain of addiction, antisocial behaviour and violence, Harden confronts the discomforting ways science unsettles our understanding of wrongdoing and choice. In doing so she asks us not to absolve, but to reckon differently with notions of fairness and blame. An inquiry into the uneasy space where human behaviour meets inherited biology, Original Sin challenges us to imagine a more humane vision of accountability — for ourselves and for one another. [Paperback]
”This is a serious and knotty book, but it can be beautiful. Harden draws movingly on autobiographical material. Ultimately, this is a well-informed attack on an American style of justice that relies on notions of sin and punishment. Harden acknowledges that retribution feels good — we are human. She wants everyone to be accountable for their actions, whatever their genetics. But she calls for rational measures aimed at reducing offending, and for restorative justice over vengeance. For Norway, not Texas. For compassion, not cruelty. A darkly glittering book.” —James McConnachie, The Times
”A book littered with fascinating scientific findings: Harden is exceptionally skilled at interweaving the personal and the scientific. She writes about her own life experiences — leaving the church, becoming estranged from her parents, the challenges of early motherhood — with rare, dangerous honesty. A complex, thought-provoking book.” —Sophie McBain, Guardian
>>An interesting backlash.
>>At the intersection.

Classic India Recipes by Pushpesh Pant $80
A carefully curated collection of more than 140 dishes, drawn from the pages of India: The Cookbook, a book hailed as a definitive companion to Indian home cooking. The selection showcases recipes that reflect the rich cultural and geographical variety of Indian food traditions, including vegetarian and nonvegetarian dishes, sumptuous feasting dishes, and festive sweets. Each recipes is attributed to its associated region, and features a stunning image. There are well-known dishes such as Butter Chicken, Roghanjosh, and Dal Makhani, alongside more traditional and unusual fare Hyderabadi Dum ki Biryani (slow-cooked biryani) and Gucchi Pulau (morel pilaf) in addition to samosas, pakoras, dosas, and chapatis, and a host of accompanying chutneys and drinks. The recipes are perfect for home cooks, yet retain the authenticity that made the original book a global reference point for Indian cooking. Pant offers an essential resource that showcases cultural traditions while embracing simplicity, creating a culinary companion perfect for readers looking for a broad introduction to Indian cuisine. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Stock Photo by Simona Supekar $23
Brochures, billboards, websites, menus, and memes. We are immersed every day in the imagery of carefully-curated stock photography. Stock Photo blends memoir and cultural history to mine how this unique medium has cemented an important place in our cultural landscape. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Stock Photo mines the significance of the stock photo in our everyday lives, from the ads and websites we browse, to the menus and memes that we consume. Through interviews with stock photography experts, photographers, models, consumers, and other stakeholders, Simona Supekar explores the evolution of the industry by tracing the creation of a stock photo from concept to usage while highlighting significant historical moments. Supekar weaves in her own experiences as a keyworder for a stock photography company while reckoning with her Asian American/South Asian identity in a post-9/11 world. Stock Photo also addresses how these images have the power to shape our perceptions about race, class/caste, gender, ability, and more, thus underscoring the importance of representation even in something as innocuous as a stock photo. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Simona Supekar's Stock Photo is a highly insightful and illuminating examination of how culture, commerce, and technology collide to shape our modern visual world. Supekar adeptly traces the powerful lineage of the image, from the human hands of art history and stock modeling to today's endless digital feeds and vast datasets that train artificial intelligence, revealing its immense influence on how we see and are seen. This is an essential, forward-thinking meditation on social change, challenging readers to be inspired to imagine a more diverse, ethical, and dazzlingly inventive new visual era.” —Peter Chow-White
>>Other interesting books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Banned Books: 500-piece jigsaw puzzle by Jane Mount $45
Read and resist with this 500-piece puzzle featuring books that have been banned in the US and abroad.  The Banned Books Puzzle features art from Jane Mount, the brain behind the ‘Bibliophile’ series. With over 65 banned books colorfully illustrated, this puzzle comes with a handy reading checklist and information from PEN America on how to fight book bans, so you can be inspired to resist the pushback and read them all for yourself. [Shelvable box]
>>See the completed puzzle!
>>Some other book-related jigsaw puzzles.

A selection of books for your lap. Click through to find out more:

Physics for Cats

Cat

The Cat Operator’s Manual

Lithium

My Friend May

Cat

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

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1 May 2026

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The case for the benefits of reading is easier to make than the case for the benefits of writing, which seems dubious to say the least except insofar as it enables the benefits of reading to be fulfilled. Although readers may be pleased that a writer has enabled the activity they have chosen and may therefore be inclined to tolerate writers per se, this does not reveal why it is that writers write. Egocentrism and unnatural personal extension into posterity are, really, vices, I would say, but are there reasons to write that are not exactly this sort of vice? If writing is done in the consideration of a reader, however hypothetical that reader, just who does a writer think they are to impose themselves upon this reader and demand the precious currency of their attention? The hypotheticality of a reader makes the impulse on the writer no less actual. Should everyone write, in the same way that everyone should read? Obviously not: already there is an oversupply of writing and the vast majority of it will bring little satisfaction to either its writer or any reader unless the reason for this writing is something other than the connection between these two on which our usual production models attempt to establish their validity. What else is there? Lydia Davis was asked to contribute a lecture and essay on the subject of ‘Why I write’, and soon regretted agreeing to do so. Her attempts to address the circumstance by, really, primarily writing about what she has been reading have produced a companionable and interesting little book, even if she largely avoids the question that provoked it. (Q: Why does she write this book? A: Because she thoughtlessly said that she would.) Davis gives us a good idea of why she reads, what she reads, how she writes (“When I am asked why I write, I instead think about how I write.”), what she writes, what someone else writes and how they write it and, to some extent, why she thinks that this someone might have written what they wrote (a piece of speculation that, I suppose, lies acceptably within the occupation of a reader). Throughout the book Davis does reveal a few what could be valid non-reader-oriented reasons for writing. She does seem to write in order to test and perfect, or, rather, move towards perfection, the transformation of thought into language (the inverse corollary of the activity of a reader), often reducing the size of her palette to the infraordinary contents of her daily experience in order to clarify this process of translation and to further sharpen the technical precision for which she is justly well known. Consciousness, after all, is only achievable through the suppression of the vast majority of stimuli that impress themselves upon us, and Davis similarly makes language alert by the rigour of her composition. Davis admits also that “I also write, sometimes, to figure out something that I don’t understand and that I want to understand,” which, I suppose, is fair enough, and also that she writes to “be rid of” a thought that “bothers” her (she thinks of this bother as a pleasurable sort of bother but I don’t see why unpleasant bothers should not also be a stimulus to writing — maybe even more so). Just as Kafka suggested that we photograph things in order to forget them, it is possible that we write things for the same reason, and this negative achievement is satisfyingly obliterative, at least to me. Davis is known for her cool descriptions, but, she writes, “Though my objective portrayals may not appear overtly loving, there is love in the motivation behind them.” Which is interesting. She also writes, nearly at the end of her book and feeling that she perhaps has still not addressed the question that provoked it: “It must be that relieving myself of the burden of strong feelings, by taking them out of myself and putting them into an objective form, a form that can also be shared by others out in the world, is just another reason why I write.” Writing “it must be” does not convince me that this last ‘reason’ has any particular validity, especially for this fine, clear writer whose finesse and clarity is achieved in part by the rigorous avoidance of exactly this sort of cliché. 

Walls, straight roads, borders, maps, places in the landscape, a meeting place, construction on taken land, roads dismissed, control, histories overwritten, obliterated, questions of the past for the present and the future, justice, the disappeared, the unnavigable, violence, justification, denial, displacement, erasure.  In Minor Detail Adania Shibli takes us to the desert. It’s 1949 and the military have set up camp near the Egyptian border, to stake their ground, and to wipe the remaining Arabs from the new state of Israel. Told from the perspective of the officer in command of a platoon, the observation is crystal clear in his description of the landscape — the Negev both brutal and awesome, his encounter with a scorpion — the wound on his swelling leg repulsive, as are his actions towards the young Bedouin girl the soldiers have abducted and raped, and he has killed. The horror of this crime is never glazed over, and the actions of the officer are never questioned by those around him. In fact, his fellows fight to get in the queue. The horror of this event is voiced by an increasingly agitated dog. The motif of the barking or howling dog continues into the second part of this novella. A young Palestinian woman in Ramallah on discovering this event when the archives are opened is compelled to travel to the place of reckoning. Compelled by compassion, and a minor detail: her birthday is the Bedouin girl's day of death. To travel to the zone she must borrow a fellow worker’s ID, and rent the car in another’s name. As she travels with two maps overlayed, one historic showing the villages and roads that have now been almost completely obliterated, and the other the zones of the Israeli state, she drives to museums, settlement villages and towards the military-controlled zones, the new roads burn their straight lines and codes of engagement into the landscape, as well as her psyche. She is haunted by the girl, and there is always a dog pacing or howling nearby. You question her sanity in carrying out such a mission, and then question your own judgement. Should confronting an injustice be abandoned because it is dangerous? As she passes through each checkpoint, each glance at the borrowed ID, it feels as if a knife is being drawn slowly over a whetting stone, its edge sharper each time. And you realise that living under an authoritarian regime where you are a person without freedom of movement, where you are marked as unwanted, means that your last breath could be at any moment — a gun always trained on you. Shibli’s writing is sparse and evocative, the tension tautly held — there is no let up. Minor Detail is a powerful display of resistance. 

High in the Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekija escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most. Years later, as Bekija – now Matija – tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realisation of all that might have been. She Who Remains has been short-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

• Read an extract.

• Read another extract.

• Read an interview.

• An extract performed.

• A larger conversation.

• Rites and wrongs.

• The inability to read.

• The challenges of translating free-flowing text.

• Booker reading guide.

• The book has been adapted into a suitably unsettling film.

• Visit the Accursed Mountains.

A negative selection. Don’t not click through to find out more:

Could, Should, Might, Don’t

Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?

Do Not Erase

We Do Not Part

Things I Don’t Want to Know

Why Fish Don’t Exist

I Don’t Care

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 Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self $38
In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self's pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. The disaffected, middle-class, middle-aged urbanites that populate the novel seem helpless to stop the decay of their intimate, self-conscious social circle. And yet, as Self's skewering (and self-skewering) grows ever more wildly imaginative, targeting faith, death, money, queerness, Jewishness and nearly every piece of our social fabric's connective tissue, it becomes all too clear that the decay cannot simply be cut out - their lives are rotten to their core. With recurring - if defeated - appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, this new work shows Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humour and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. The Quantity Theory of Morality delicately bookends his award-winning story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, which Martin Amis likened to “a cross between a manic J. G. Ballard and a depressed David Lodge.” Although, as ever, “Will Self's world is all his own.” [Paperback]
”Reads like early Nabokov: barbed, provocative, virtuosic in his performance of linguistic jokes — rollicking, unsettling and furiously intelligent.” —Guardian
”While dripping with acidic satire, The Quantity Theory of Morality is also full of pathos and penetrating insights into the best and worst in human nature. A consummate performance, it's a book that might finally silence Self's critics.” —Spectator
”This new novel stretches this critic's adjectives. It is deliriously poignant. It is heartbreakingly antic. It is sincere and wry at the same time. Self's funniest book for some time.” —Stuart Kelly, Scotsman
>>Is morality a zero-sum game?

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley $38
Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world. Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: he has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon 'call me Shove' Halfpenny. Laura has her own problems: a prickly mother and a tricky past, and in a beautiful and indifferent city, her day-to-day life is precarious. But as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back. A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley's trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us — somehow — with a curious sense of possibility. [Paperback]
”This pristine book confirms Riley's position among the finest novelists working today. Her sentences are crystalline and perfect, and her attention to the world is always acute and occasionally tender - I love this book, and am awed by Riley's accomplishment.” —Sarah Perry
”Riley writes with a poet's control, her prose so purely distilled that it appears artless. What is new is the gentle delicacy she brings to the deep and unshowy solace of friendship, moments of tenderness so exquisitely and exactly rendered that they are almost too intense to bear.” —The Guardian
”Outstandingly brilliant.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”The Palm House on almost any page will give you more delight than most other novels published this year.” —John Self
>>Don’t mind me in my coffin.
>>Carted off.
>>Eight lanes of traffic.
>>The wreckage of middle age.

Facing the Bridge by Yoko Tawada (translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani) $33
Amo, an African kidnapped to Europe as a boy, and Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in Germany, live in different countries but are being followed by the same shadow; Kazuko, a young professional tourist, is lured to Vietnam by a mysterious postcard; on the Canary Islands, a nameless translator battles a banana grove and a series of Saint Georges. In the three stories in Facing the Bridge, obsession becomes delight as the reader is whisked into a world where identities flicker and shift. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.” —Sara Baume
”Magnificently strange.” —Rivka Galchen
”Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.” —Madeleine Thien
”What propels Tawada's stories is the unassailable logic of dreams and fairy tales, coupled with verbal energy. Tawada's images resonate simultaneously on different levels.” —Village Voice
>>A genius in any language.
>>Other books by Yoko Tawada.

Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding home in the 21st century by Ece Temelkuran $38
”Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?” Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a political Cassandra, warning those convinced it couldn't happen in their country that fascism is coming. Now, as oppression spreads and temperatures rise — as we face competing crises and learn, again and again, that no institution is so concrete it can't turn to dust, and no home is too strong to be destroyed — she has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another. Politically attuned and deeply personal, this extraordinary, heartening correspondence is a gift to treasure in uncertain times. As poetic as it is precise, it is a book for anyone who feels alienated by an ever-more monstrous world. It shows how, as we all become strangers, our home will depend on the strength we find with one another. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”Nation of Strangers is perhaps the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times. To read it is 'to stiffen the sinews.'" —Michael Morpurgo
"Nation of Strangers is essential reading — a bold reminder, a stern warning, a soft prayer and courageous song. Without doubt, Nation of Strangers is my number one favourite book of these times, navigating the truth of who we really are and who we pretend to be. It is a most exquisite narration of the sense of belonging in the unbelonging. Nation of Strangers is a critically honest observation of us, of you and me in the now and here, our fragile notion of home, the homes we leave behind, the home we carry with us. I have been walking around with Ece's book in my bag like a friend, I keep re-reading it, I feel like she is writing to me personally, teaching me to be stronger and much more resilient." —Selena Godden
"A new book from Ece Temelkuran is a new way of understanding the world. She is lucid, honest and often wryly funny about where we are now, and who we are becoming. And Nation of Strangers is her most ambitious and dazzling book yet." —Brian Eno
"Ece Temelkuran, with her beautiful, elegiac new book on becoming 'unhomed', is in serious danger of becoming the new Hannah Arendt." —Yanis Varoufakis
"Homelessness, both literal and spiritual, is increasingly the contemporary human condition, and in Nation of Strangers, Ece Temelkuran gives it the sustained and close attention it deserves. She not only elegantly and movingly diagnoses our shared plight; she describes the wise and viable solutions we so desperately need. No one baffled and estranged by our age's relentless shocks can afford to miss this book." —Pankaj Mishra
>>The pace of change.
>>An antidote to loneliness.

The Migrants: A memoir with manuscripts by Chrisopher de Hamel $65
Christopher de Hamel is one of the world's best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realisation that they too are migrants far from home. The Migrants explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonisation and the migration of culture — of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters — bringing us face-to-face with history. We meet the colonial governor on his paradise island, the shipwrecked accountant, the nonagenarian who cut up manuscripts, the magnate who unknowingly bought Becket's Boethius, and the early settler who inscribed his Book of Hours in the Maori language in 1842. We travel with the author today back to where these manuscripts began their own lives, through France and Poland and medieval England, discovering their first owners and following the longest journeys on earth. [Hardback]
”Christopher de Hamel combines enthusiasm with scholarly precision and a conversational style that sits surprisingly easily with the fund of knowledge he has gradually accumulated. The joy of this book are de Hamel's true 'intimate companions', the manuscripts, and his ability to evoke the thrill and wonder he feels as he encounters them, whether it's a 12th-century copy of Boethius he finds in Wellington, probably designed for Thomas Becket, or a Bible in Auckland, which he traces back to a Cistercian monastery in north-central Poland.” —Mark Bostridge, Spectator

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel $38
Harlow Donne has sacrificed his life to the study of the Classical world. So when he is invited to Oxford University to work on an obscure collection of papyrus fragments it is an academic's dream come true. He must leave behind his daughter and wife in Canada, but offers like this don't come twice and he badly needs a change of fortune. Then, while studying in the Bodleian Library, he unearths a completely undiscovered account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilisation itself. He names the poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a commoner identified only as Psoas, the son of nobody. As sole translator and author of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter Helen, allowing the text to unlock the echoes of the ancient Greeks into the present day, and to share a personal message with his beloved child. Despite the two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn't frayed — the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief. [Paperback]
”A brilliant novel of ideas: a powerful meditation on life, death, and the vanity of human wishes; all illustrated by a poem that would do Homer proud. A stunningly imagined revisitation of an ancient past that is every bit as awful as the present.” —Kirkus Reviews
>>Both epic and intimate.
>”I hate the rich people of this world — of which I’m one.”
>>On work-life balance.

Hotel Exile: Paris in the shadow of war by Jane Rogoyska $45
The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only 'grand' hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. Andre Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service - and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps. Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”An exceptional work of non-fiction — you couldn't just call it a history book, it's more than that. Rogoyska captures the historical moment with a rare combination of urgency and empathy. She has trawled memoirs from hotel staff and ex-officers, unearthing stories that are peculiarly resonant. This is a scintillatingly good book. I think it will win prizes — not least because it is subtly experimental. It slips in and out of the present tense like a contemporary novel, and feels thrillingly immersive. In fact, I've rarely felt such a sense of the historical moment. Or indeed the present moment. Because if ever a book were about now as well as then, it's this one.” —James McConnachie, The Sunday Times
>>Hotel/hostel/hospital.

Snack by Eurie Dahn $23
In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial perhaps even childish especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savoury treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even at places like home improvement and department stores, speak to the popularity of snacking. But the ubiquity of snacks is relatively new and not common to all countries. Eurie Dahn traces the story of snacking culture through specific snacks, including Flamin' Hot Cheetos, cheese crackers, and Choco Pies, and in the contexts of ethnicity, popular culture, diet culture, and even parenting. Snack is an idiosyncratic cultural history that offers surprisingly filling food for thought. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This tempting morsel of a book invites you to consider the history, culture, and even theory of those little bites we snatch between meals. Dahn's lively storytelling and digestible research invite us to slow down and take a hard look at that aisle full of temptations at the convenience store. With her help, we now see behind the colorful packages a surprising history of food, leisure, and pleasure.” —Sean Latham
>>Affective connections.
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a failing system by Wolfgang Streeck $27
After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated. In How Will Capitalism End? Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector's excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is seemingly no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalisation of the markets. Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand. [Paperback]
”Neoliberalism continues to delimit political choice across the globe yet it is clear that the doctrine is in severe crisis. In Wolfgang Streeck's powerful new book How Will Capitalism End? Streeck demonstrates that the maladies afflicting the world-from secular stagnation to rising violent instability-herald not just the decline of neoliberalism, but what may prove to be the terminal phase of global capitalism.” —Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism
”At the heart our era's deepening crisis there lies a touching faith that capitalism, free markets and democracy go hand in hand. Wolfgang Streeck's new book deconstructs this myth, exposing the deeply illiberal, irrational, anti-humanist tendencies of contemporary capitalism.” —Yanis Varoufakis

The Expedition by Tuvalisa Rangström and Klara Bartilsson (translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $40
A band of intrepid explorers embarks on a voyage through a strange frontier filled with mystery and beauty: the human body! Donning his frock coat and ruffle collar, Tusseson documents everything that happens in his logbook: traveling by boat across the Stomach's Stormy Sea, paddling through the Small Intestine's Emerald Green Canals, camping at the Lungs (despite all the wind!), climbing the Muscle Mountains, escaping through the Nerve Forest to marvel at the night sky, Iris, reflected in the Pacific Tear Channel. As his fellow travelers return home one by one, Tusseson is left to carry on alone... but he won't give up until he finds the Mystical Meadows of the Brain. Featuring lush and surreal illustrations, The Expedition renders the systems of the human body into wondrous landscapes that take readers on a fantastic voyage like no other. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Sourdough Everything: sweet and savoury recipes for beautiful breads and other bakes by Rachel Pardoe $55
While it's part science and part craft, baking sourdough is actually very easy — create a starter, feed it with care, and then combine it with a few simple ingredients to make something truly magical. Even if you already have your own starter languishing in the fridge, Sourdough Everything will reinvigorate your sourdough experience and elevate your baking skills with an array of recipes ranging from artfully crafted loaves to flavorful rolls, sweet breads, and pastries. Featuring over 70 recipes, including sourdough raisin bread, pumpkin chocolate rolls, French crullers, and sourdough pretzels, Sourdough Everything will help you slow down and savor the experience of creating flavorful sourdough that is also a feast for the eyes. With step-by-step instructions, you'll learn how to: Create and care for your starter; Use proper baking techniques; Confidently navigate more advanced recipes; Use simple, everyday tools to create beautiful designs. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Pardoe is a good and clear explainer.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Despite it all, there is no shortage of good books. Whether you want to engage more deeply with the world or seek refuge from it, a book opens a door at your fingertips. 

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24 April 2024

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I read Swimming Studies when it was released in hardback back in 2017. It’s one of those books that stays with you. I enjoy Shapton’s writing and her quirky book projects, and my first discovery was her relationship breakup novel told as an auction. Swimming Studies is a series of essays on swimming, through word and art. Whether it’s the act of swimming, Shapton’s history of competitive swimming, her daily dips, the other swimmers, or descriptions of water, the science of water, the ocean, the pool, each encounter with the act and the world of swimming is intimate and perceptive. There’s the delight of swimming in the essays, alongside immersive layers exploring memory, adolescence, drawing, obsession and solitude. Aside form Shapton’s particular eye, one of the things that lifts this book above others in the ‘swimming book’ genre is the inclusion of artworks — Shapton’s own. There are abstract watercolours of swimming places, the movements of the bodies in the water, and portraits of swimmers. And being Shapton, there are objects (she was one of the authors of Women in Clothes — out of print at the moment but a new edition looking likely in 2027) — her swimsuit collection. And of course, the stories that come with them. Luckily, Swimming Studies is available again as a lovely Daunt Books paperback with french flaps, complete with all the artworks and a new foreword by author Rita Bullwinkel.

Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nestled in a mouthwatering exploration of food, language, history, and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of its cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear.
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
”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.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation

• On food, power and structure

• Listen to translator Lin King

• A Reading

• Read an Extract

• Author Q&A

• The Meta Process

Nothing drives an obsession to unsustainable extremes more than the unnameable terror that a more moderate degree of enthusiasm would be overwhelmed by its complementary revulsion. Our so-called cultural artefacts and so-called social institutions are, likewise, mechanisms for privileging one chosen pole of an ambivalence, mechanisms for giving a (usually) positive cast to what we think of as our individual or communal selves. For some individuals, including, seemingly, Leonid Tsypkin and, especially, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (the ostensible subject of Tsypkin’s novel), whatever it is that separates the existential extremes is either exceptionally rigid and brittle or unusually permeable when unattended or in some way unreliable or, possibly, sporadically assailable, which enables, for those individuals, transports both of remarkable insight and of terrible psychological risk. In Tsypkin’s novel, the narrator Tsypkin (or ‘Tsypkin’) is travelling by train from Moscow to Petersburg to visit the Dostoyevsky museum. As he travels, he reads the diary of Dostoyevsky’s young second wife Anna concerning their time spent in Europe, mainly staying in various German towns and suffering, often, from the financial consequences of Fyodor’s gambling addiction (which he had written about in The Gambler and practiced thereafter). Tsypkin’s astounding book, in which each paragraph is a single virtuoso sentence building, often, to hysterical length, dissolves the distinctions between the author (or ‘author’) and his subject, slipping, unnoticed and often within a few clauses, over a century in time and deep into the inner life of Dostoyevsky, revealing the sufferings, tensions and passions that both caused hardship for Dostoyevsky and his wife and enabled Dostoyevsky to write novels of such psychological penetration. The uncommon access that the past has to the present and to cause harm there, what we might call memory, repeatedly damages Dostoyevsky — for instance the humiliations visited upon him during his imprisonment lead him to repeatedly set himself up for humiliations that replay that he had received at the hands of the commandant — but also provide him and us with an intimacy with aspects of human experience that might otherwise be inaccessible. Dostoyevsky’s cycles of enthusiasm and despair are described with great sympathy, both for him and for Anna, and Tsypkin’s unsparing portrayal of the faults of his literary hero produce a suitably ambivalent effect, often within a single sentence, moving at once towards both ridicule and sympathy (readers of Thomas Bernhard will appreciate the mastery here). How is it possible to love another (as Tsypkin loves Dostoyevsky, as Anna loves Fyodor) despite their faults, despite, even, their unforgivable faults? “Why was I so strongly attracted and enticed by the life of this man?” asks Tsypkin, who, like many other Jews, has found that Dostoyevksy and his novels possess a “special attraction” despite Dostoyevsky’s antisemitism. “It strikes me as strange to the point of implausibility that a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this jealous defender of the insulted and the injured … despised me and my kind.” While keeping to biographical fact, Tsypkin has written a novel that provides the sort of psychological insight that is only available through fiction.     

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.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
Who was Gertrude Stein? And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy's latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out about the avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home there and became godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. In Paris, the narrator meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks — about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language — how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. This is a book about how we put ourselves together — an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire, and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself — a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world. [Hardback]
”In one short and sly book after another, Levy writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both.” —Atlantic
”Wonderfully entertaining; a witty scherzo of a ‘fiction’. We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy — this is ‘a fiction’, after all — but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is — odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining — triumphantly proving her wrong.” —Guardian
”Ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but, at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don't need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story. Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve.” —AnOther Magazine
”A boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud. It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original. As Levy's narrator observes of Stein: ‘Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.’ A compelling contemporary fiction.” —The Conversation
>>In search of Gertrude Stein.
>>Why the novel matters.

No Ghosts by Max Lury $40
After being reunited at Annie's memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead — faces, gestures, glances — in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. The friends' journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie's — and the ghosts' — disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Read an extract.

Hell of Solitude: Selected writings by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (translated from Japanese by Ryan Choi) $40
Hell of Solitude presents a varied and eclectic selection of writings by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of the most important and beloved Japanese writers of the twentieth century. Bringing together fiction, poetry, and philosophical prose – much of it appearing in English for the first time here – this collection showcases the range and intensity of Akutagawa’s imagination. Moving from the whimsical and fantastical to the grave and introspective, the pieces reveal a writer of extraordinary clarity and psychological depth. Interwoven throughout are poems from a prolific body of verse, examples of which are sparse in English, alongside ‘Art and Other Things’, a fragmentary essay in which Akutagawa expounds his aesthetic views while drawing on examples from world literature and art. Translated with sensitivity and precision by Ryan Choi, Hell of Solitude offers a vital reintroduction to a writer whose lucidity, irony, and existential unease continue to resonate across cultures and generations. The collection includes a foreword by writer and translator Polly Barton, questioning why it is that Akutagawa’s work isn’t better known among anglophone readers, and celebrating his ambivalent relationship with the traditional practice of story-telling. [Paperback]
“Perhaps what we have, when we are given less of a story than might be expected, when we have an unstorylike story or a desolate poem, is more of ourselves. We have things as they are, our selves as they are, and life as it is, and sometimes that is hell. Nevertheless, Akutagawa shows us that sharing that hell with others can be electric.” —Polly Barton
”One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa’s style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing.” —Haruki Murakami
”The quintessential writer of his era.” —David Peace
”Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in the style, which is always crystal-clear.” —Jorge Luis Borges
”At long last, a new volume of Akutagawa’s writing has been ushered into English by the consummate translator Ryan Choi. He has rendered the master storyteller’s previously unavailable prose pieces and poetry more readable than ever. The exquisite subtlety and inimitable charm of the tales, sketches, and poems in this volume will captivate new readers and scholars alike.” —L. S. Popovich
”For the past decade, Ryan Choi has quietly been doing the heroic work of bringing Akutagawa’s lesser-known writings into English. What we are given in this collection are impressions and observations, anecdotes, philosophical digressions, stories that read like poems that read like dreams remembered the morning after. The writings are restrained, understated, precise and fractured. The surfaces of these texts crackle with the charge of Akutagawa’s inimitable mind. Choi’s translations are a revelation.” —Stephen Mortland
”Choi is Akutagawa’s boldest – and best – translator. Hell of Solitude restores Akutagawa, the most daring architect of modern Japanese literature, to his rightful state: bewildering beauty, a cascade of shifting rhythms and forms, and the penetrating alertness of a truly aesthetic mind. Akutagawa’s soul is here in this book-shaped vessel, waiting to be known.” —Dreux Richard
>>What do we have when we do not have a story?

Ashimpa: The mysterious word by Catarina Sobral $40
One day, a researcher makes an important discovery. A mysterious word buried in an old dictionary: ASHIMPA. Quickly the news spreads. Everyone wants to use the new word, but no one knows what it means or even what part of speech it belongs to. A 137-year-old is certain that it's a verb: people ashimped and would always ashimp. A linguist is convinced it's a noun. Soon there would be people who claimed to have seen live ashimpas — and in colour. "They still exist abroad. They're green!" From renowned Portuguese author and illustrator Catarina Sobral, Ashimpa is the story of language that takes on a life of its own, leading young readers through the hilariously ashimpish life and grammar of a mysterious word. [Hardback]
"A tongue-in-cheek treatise on the elasticity of language, Sobral's latest sparkles with profound wit thanks to a wonderfully bizarre premise. Ashimpishly delicious fun." —Kirkus Reviews
>>Look inside!

The Original by Nell Stevens $40
Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle’s home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls. Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena. After years missing at sea, Grace’s cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live. Deftly-plotted and shimmering with distinctive intelligence, style and wit, The Original is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original. [Hardback]
”What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell herself.” —Olivia Laing
”A delightful, playful puzzle of a novel, and a brilliant twist on the nineteenth century orphan-makes-good story. THE ORIGINAL asks whether, sometimes, faking it is the right thing to do.” —Claire Fuller
”A wonderful novel about identity, creativity, money and belonging. It's so witty and propulsive you will forget how brilliantly constructed it is, this tale that brims with the beauty of art, of how to triumph in a difficult world.” —Jessie Burton
”Intricate, and endlessly intriguing. The reader is kept guessing until the very end; as Stevens deftly raises the stakes, the pages seem to turn themselves. The narrative captivates intellectually, too, probing questions of authenticity, imitation, and self-realisation, in love and in art. The overall effect is of an author boldly stepping out on her own, pursuing themes that were hers all along.” —Observer
>>Written by the light of a lava lamp.

Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin (translated from Russian by Roger and Angela Keys) $28
A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator — Tsypkin is on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything ‘right’. Nothing is invented; everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay, Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and gives an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel. New edition. [Paperback with French flaps]
"A short poetic masterpiece." —New York Review of Books
"Gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving." —The Los Angeles Times
”While keeping to biographical fact, Tsypkin has written a novel that provides the sort of psychological insight that is only available through fiction.” —Thomas     
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Loving Dostoyevsky.

Chain of Ideas: Great Replacement Theory and the origins of our authoritarian age by Ibram X. Kendi $45
Throughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies 'great replacement theory', which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities. In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi shows how this conspiracy theory has mutated from the extremist fringe into a global ideology, embraced by leaders as varied as Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. He traces its historic roots in slavery, segregation, colonialism and Nazism, and shows how these age-old prejudices have been dressed in new language for a digital age. But this is not a book about extremists on the margins. From Anders Breivik's massacre to the chants of the Charlottesville marchers, from Brexit slogans to the Christchurch shooting, Kendi shows how these ideas have crossed borders, inspired terror and are now re-shaping parties of government. Chain of Ideas is a penetrating history of how reactionary ideas have been repackaged as common sense, and how they shape the globe today. [Paperback]
>>In twenty years most of the world could be racist dictatorships.
>>A renovation of Nazi ideas.

The Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich $38
”It was as though I was chosen-marked out by the python's kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.” Written over two decades, Erdrich's story collection features a range of characters — a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass; immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged; and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father. Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe — a creative collaboration between mother and daughter. [Paperback]
”One of the greatest American writers.” —Guardian
>>Talking animals and the analogue world.
>>Little travels.

Is a River Alive? A journey with water by Robert Macfarlane $30
An exhilarating exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings who should be recognised as such in imagination and law. The book flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. Macfarlane takes readers on these unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days. Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is the River Alive? is Macfarlane’s most personal and political book to date, reminding us what is vital: the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has. Now in paperback. [Paperback with French flaps]
” A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.” —Elif Shafak
>>’The river is writing me’ — Q&A
>>The Power of Rivers
>>Poetry and Adventure
>>The Rights of Nature
>>Read an extract
>>Can personhood recue a river?
>>Also available in hardback.

Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, tragedy, and history’s greatest Arctic rescue by Buddy Levy $39
In 1908-09, American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, in separate expeditions, both claimed they'd reached the North Pole first, but their claims were seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian Roald Amundsen — who'd made history and a name for himself by being the first to sail through the Northwest Passage and the first man to the South Pole — attempted to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location. However, Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, and launched a major rescue operation. [Paperback]

Te Ahikāroa: Artists and stories of Dunedin Public Art Gallery $70
This stunning book displays Ōtepoti’s Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s significant collection of artworks made either in Aotearoa or overseas, from the Renaissance to the present, and is full of both iconic works and suprises. Te Ahikāroa is the result of collaboration between the Gallery, mana whenua and other writers from around Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. A joint introduction by Director Cam McCracken, alongside Claire Kaahu White, Robert Sullivan and Paulette Tamati-Elliffe creates a foundation that places Kai Tahu values in relation to the journey of the Gallery since its establishment in 1884. Essays by curators Lauren Gutsell and Lucy Hammonds explore the history and vision of the Gallery. Each artwork in the book is brought to life by subject experts, who contribute new perspectives on everything from beloved historic artworks through to recently acquired contemporary works. This publication brings together written contributions from Ruth Buchanan, Komene Cassidy, Gina Cole, Sophie Davis, Edward Ellison, Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds, Rauhina Kohuwai-Banks, Moewai Marsh, Ngahiraka Mason, Sophie Matthiesson, Finn McCahon-Jones, Cam McCracken, Anna McLean, Olivia Meehan, Gerard O'Regan, Hana O'Regan, Joanna Osborne, Bridget Reweti, Anya Samarasinghe, Robert Sullivan, Taarati Taioroa, Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, Claire Kaahu White. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:

Fourteen Ways of Looking

The Way by Swann’s

The Way to Colonos

Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook

Ways of Being

All the Way to Summer

The Bird Way

Ways of Seeing

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $42
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The cult of Solvej Balle.
>>The Faber edition of this volume is also available, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.

My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden) $45
A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods. With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. [Paperback]
"Djabbarova debuts with a potent portrait of illness and gender oppression in contemporary Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia . . . This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch." —Publishers Weekly
"Essential feminist, anticolonial reading. My Dreadful Body is about power. The power of one nation to colonise another, which is in turn echoed by the power of men to control women. It is about having the power to be in control of one's own body. But it is also about having the power to fight back." —Full Stop
"A woman maps cultural expectations and desires onto her ailing body in Egana Djabbarova's singular novel. An incisive novel, My Dreadful Body celebrates women's agency, mourns physical losses, and rebels against inherited boundaries." —Foreword Reviews
>>Tongue.
>>Silence speaks.
>>Illness as a sometimes-liminal space.

Discipline by Larissa Pham $40
When two people fall apart, who gets to tell their story? Christine is a young writer touring her debut novel — a thinly disguised tale of the affair she had with her professor ten years earlier. He was magnetic, domineering, both the sponsor of her early promise and its destroyer. But he surely forgot her long ago, and the temptation to exorcise her past was overwhelming. Then, between hotel rooms and bookstores, formal dinners and road-trip hook-ups, she receives a series of sly, unsettling emails and finally an invitation to visit the professor's isolated house on an island off the coast of Maine. Against her better judgement, Christine is drawn back into his orbit, risking forever losing control of the narrative she's worked so hard to create. [Hardback]
”Discipline coolly questions the ethics and processes of fiction and art, examining the toll they take both on the practitioner and anyone unlucky enough to be in their orbit” —Financial Times
”A deceptively quiet and beautifully written story, Discipline plays masterfully with issues of consent, memory and artistic licence. It asks its readers to judge which is more real: what actually happened in the past, or how we feel about it in the present.: —Buzz Magazine
”A story of ideas, but it combines deep philosophical inquiry with thriller vibes.” —Crack
>>Protect that pain.
>>Writing toward the void.
>>”I want to lie.”

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec (translated from Fench by David Bellos) $30
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface — What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity — and possibly his sanity — as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed — but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s novella presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968. [Paperback]
”Perec's novels are games, each different. They are played for real stakes and in some cases breathtakingly large ones. As games should be, and as literary games often are not, they are fun.” —Los Angeles Times
>>A one-sentence review.
>>Questioning the quotidian.

False Calm: A journey through the ghost towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff (translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver) $28
With time I have reached the conclusion that, as it is in my personal history, isolation is present in everything I have ever read about Patagonia . . . I returned to write an account of this eminently Patagonian characteristic. I wanted to see the shapes it takes today; I wanted to locate it at its furthest extremes. Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next. Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia's complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld. [Paperback with French flaps]
”An artful, atmospheric, thought-provoking depiction of life between silence and open space.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
”It has a magical quality, an intimate journey, so humane, one that opens the imagination and reminds us of who we have been and what we have, and have lost.” —Philippe Sands

Women Without Men: A novel of modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (a new translation from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh) $40
An internationally acclaimed novel that traces the interwoven destinies of five women — including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher — as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, the novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men. Originally published in Persian in 1989 and banned in Iran ever since, Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Foreword by Shirin Neshat. [Paperback]
”Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
"Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer." —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepoplis
"Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Parsipur continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming, powerful novella." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.
>>An interview with the author and the translator.
>>The book was made into an astounding film by Shirin Neshat.

Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal el-Mohtar $45
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. [Hardback]
"An essential collection of work from one of today's most poignant speculative writers. El-Mohtar creates immersive worlds with beautiful language." —Library Journal
"A collection of 14 stories and four poems that shine both individually and as a whole, while still showcasing El-Mohtar's characteristic lyricism and striking imagery. There's not a false note here." —Publisher's Weekly
>>Womanhood, identity, and fairy tales.
>>There is no art that is separate from politics.

Cello: A journey through silence to sound by Kate Kennedy $30
Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic and ultimately fatal concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world's greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his 'Mara' Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked off Buenos Aires. Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author's reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy's own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello and, crucially, the absence of the cello had meant to some other cellists, past and present. [Paperback]
”This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life.” —Hermione Lee
”Kate Kennedy's quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power.” —Jenny Uglow
>>A different life.
>>Kammersonate.
>>The ’Mara’ Stradivari.

Nocturnal Apparitions by Bruno Schulz (translated from Polish by Stanley Bill) $28
A fantastical collection of short stories by one of the twentieth century's most iconic cult authors. The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical. Contents: August / Visitation / Birds / Cinnamon Shops / The Street of Crocodiles / Cockroaches / The Gale / The Night of the Great Season / The Book / The Age of Genius / My Father Joins the Fire Brigade / The Sanatorium under the Hourglass / Father's Last Escape / Undula. [New paperbback edition]
 “One of the the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” —John Updike
”One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
”Schulz redrafts the lines between fantasy and reality.” —Chris Power
”I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life.” —David Grossman
”Bruno Schulz has this weird sense of humour, this tenderness, and at the same time his writing is very complex. Reading him for the first time was something totally unique. That is still what I feel when I read him.“ —Alejandro Zambra

Black Bag by Luke Kennard $38
A penniless out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation. A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane. [Paperback]
”Gleefully absurd, a triumph of deadpan comedy. From his gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life. Kennard is superb at capturing a chaotic interior life. The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters, and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
”Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair — through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other.” —Joe Dunthorne
>>Theories of attraction.
>>Waiting for it to happen.

MEDesque: Everyday recipes with Mediterranean roots by Georgina Hayden $60
”Warmth, boldness, approachability and a general sense that all is good in the world. All this applies to the food in MEDesque. It's joyful, generous and drenched in olive oil.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
”With this wonderful new book Georgie takes us on a dream tour around the Mediterranean and picks up all the best bits so that our meals can be sunnier, happier, easier and infinitely more delicious — what a treat!” —Itamar Srulovich, Honey & Co.
”Irresistible recipes that spark cravings on every page.” —Yasmin Khan
Includes: Lamb, apricot and feta sausage rolls; Gnocchi puttanesca; Spiced lemony roast chicken with crushed baby potatoes; One-pan 'nduja, pepper and three cheese lasagne; Double chocolate pannacotta with cherries; Salted honey butter madeleines. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>All of Hayden’s cookbooks should be on your cookbook shelf.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we’ve been reading and recommending. Choose from our new releases bulletin. Read our interview with Lynley Edmeades.

17 April 2026

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A Skinful of Shadows is an immensely compelling novel for children and adults alike. Frances Hardinge creates wonderful characters, intriguing plots, and ideas that will stay with you long after you shut the covers. A Skinful of Shadows is set in England in the 1640s, the English Civil War is brewing, Puritans and Catholics are at loggerheads, and so are the King and parliament. In a small village called Popular, Makepeace lives with her mother. Making a piecemeal living from lace-making and odd jobs, they live in a small barren room in the home of her aunt and uncle, barely accepted by them or the village. When her mother dies, Makepeace is sent to the home of the aristocratic Fellmotte family, where she becomes a kitchen skivvy. Makepeace, an illegitimate child, has the Fellmotte gene, one that enables them to possess ghosts. The Fellmottes have dangerous and dark plans for her — ones that will consume her in their obsession to preserve the family line, the Fellmotte power and property. Not everyone is an enemy, though, and she makes plans with her half-brother James to escape Grizehayes. After many failed attempts, the chaos of the Civil War gives them the perfect opportunity to escape. When James lets her down, Makepeace finds herself in an even more precarious situation, but with the help of a bear and her overwhelming desire to survive she begins a journey across England to find a document worth more than gold, a document that will grant her freedom from the Fellmotte family and ensure their fall from grace. Like all good mysteries, there are plenty of turns and forks on the road, and those that help and those that hinder. Yet the more intriguing elements are those that involve the ghosts or the souls that are possessed, some of which are malevolent, others helpful. Makepeace is an excellent heroine and her relationship with Bear is endearing. A story about power, possession and purpose.