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19 December 2025
It is not too late to get your books before Christmas — either as gifts or for your own summer reading.
Perhaps the objects that carry the most meaning in our lives, the ones that are most imbued with the connections we have with the significant people in our pasts, the ones that both store and release the memories that are fundamental to our idea of ourselves, are not so much the precious heirlooms or heritage pieces but rather the ordinary objects that we use every day, just as, perhaps, their previous owners used them every day before us. The kitchen probably holds the greatest concentration of such useful-and-meaningful objects, come to us in many different ways, each with its own story. Bee Wilson’s thoughtful and beautifully written book tells the stories attached to 35 kitchen objects of many origins, and gives insight into the texture of the lives of the people who used them, and their importance to the people who use them now.
The progressive limitation of the habitable world by advancing cliffs of ice constitutes the only real development in Anna Kavan’s final, uncomfortable, remarkable novel, Ice. In what passes for, or stands in for, a plot, and with what pass for, or stand in for, characters, an unnamed man pursues an unnamed woman in endless iterations. He finds her everywhere he looks but the closer he gets to her the harder she is to see. The ‘girl’ (as he refers to her) is never more than a projection, inaccessible to the fantasist, objectification without object, idealised victim for his fantasies of violent possession. “She always appeared as a helpless victim, her fragile body broken and bruised. There dreams were not confined to sleep only, and a deplorable side effect was the way I had come to enjoy them.” The ‘girl’ is mostly ‘kept’ by either her husband or a by man known as ‘the Warden’, themselves plausibly projections of the narrator, their cruelty towards her the outward expression of the narrator’s desires until such time as he can assume these cruelties for himself. Until such time, the narrator cannot manage to be anything but an observer. He is ineffectual, pursuing the ‘girl’ but incapable of closing the gap between them, eschewing opportunity at the last moment. The actions taken by others are projections of his desires, desires that obliterate the ‘girl’, although she is perhaps less obliterated by projection and objectification than she is a dimensionless creation of that projection and objectification. “It was clear that the Warden regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing: her only function might have been to link us together. I felt an indescribably affinity with him, a sort of blood-contact, generating confusion, so I began to wonder if there were two of us.” The pursuit and abuse of the ‘girl’ is narrated in countless iterations and variations, some of which would be inaccessible to the narrator unless they are his fantasies or the husband and the Warden are his projections. Many of the narrative branches terminate, perhaps at the girl’s death, leaving the narrative to return and pick up at an earlier point, the slipped stitches undermining the reader’s trust of the text. Just as there are no characters as such who could fulfil the reader’s expectations of characters by manifesting either depth or change, there is no plot development, the narrative endlessly overwriting itself, reinforcing, obscuring and reinforcing itself in a palimpsest written ultimately on the body of the girl, the receiver of wounds. The entire work constitutes an exposition of a deplorable psychological pattern that pervades swathes of literature and society. The narrator avows his role, he feels cheated when others harm the girl: “I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds.” The girl, so to call her, represents “a passive attitude, suggestive both resistance and resignation.” The narrator both exemplifies and abhors his role as oppressor, he envies the peaceful song-filled life of the gentle indris lemurs, about whom he is writing a study, but he knows that their life is beyond his reach: “I knew that my place was here, in our world, under sentence of death, and that I would have to stay here and see it through to the end. I was committed to violence and must keep to my pattern.” The girl’s tears “did not seem like real tears. She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.” The girl is not real, she is constituted by violence, she loathes the world of the lemurs, anathematic to the complex of which she and her many-faced oppressor are the exemplar. The characters have no history or purpose other than to enact the disease they represent. The narration, in the first person, is a vehicle for an impersonal subjectivity. The repeated eruption of the unconscious into the narrative destroys causality and character and makes development impossible, leaving the narrative curiously disengaged, reminding me somewhat of Kafka’s The Castle. The characters are at once both subject and object, incapable of gaining traction when traction is most intended, animated by suppressed mechanisms that underlie much of literature and art. As the book progresses the walls of ice close around the narrator and the girl, drawing them closer together, “a sheet of sterile whiteness spreading over the face of the dying world, burying the violent and their victims together, obliterating the last trace of man and his works.” Very occasionally in the book, the reality of the ice is destabilised, such as when the narrator glimpses the town he is in, not in ruins and being crushed by ice but bathed in sunshine. The ice is not so much the ice of Ballardian cli-fi, though it is this too, but moves with the force of metaphor (encroaching ice is a motif often experienced by ‘‘Arctic explorers’ such as Kavan who have long-term heroin addictions (forty years in her case (Kavan identified with the fatally doomed, passive girl in this novel))). As the ice comes nearer, the girl becomes yet “thinner and paler, more transparent, ghostlike. It was interesting to watch.” When all else has been obliterated by the ice, the narrator and the girl are finally forced into actual contact in a beach house surrounded with wilted palm trees covered in rime. Kavan then provides three endings on top of each other: does the narrator pursue the girl into the ice, where they perish; does he attack her and leave her for dead; or does he reform (“I wondered why I had waited so long to be kind to her”) and flee with her towards the last unfrozen, equatorial zone? This last ‘happy’ option is so implausible as to finally erase the narrator, who retains only the reassuring weight of the gun in his pocket.
Every summer Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä escaped to Klovharun, their island. In Notes From an Island, Jansson gathers memories, notes, snippets of writing about the place and their antics on this barren remote skerry, and Pietilä’s atmospheric illustrations contrast with the seaman Brunström’s no-nonsense diary entries. This is a lovely book, from its attractive cover which features a delightfully drawn map by Jansson’s mother, to the paper stock and layout. It’s enticing in all its tactile qualities as well as its content. Jansson had been heading to the Finnish archipelago most of her life with her family. They would year-on-year visit a small island with charming beaches and a small wood, but each year the number of guests increased as they invited more friends and family to share in this summer pleasure. In her late 40s, Tove craved an island of her own. Somewhere she and Tuulikki could be alone to focus on their creative work, away from interruption and the pressures of life back on the mainland. Klovharun was rocky and inhospitable — just right for being away from it all, and for the two women an invigorating environment with the sea in all directions. Arriving on Klovharun they pitched a tent and, shortly after, met Brunström — a taciturn seaman — who would help them build the cabin. The initial step — finding a suitable flat space. A flat space that needed to be carved out by dynamiting a massive boulder. A dynamic action for a dynamic landscape. Yet Tove and Tuulikki liked their yellow tent so much that they continued to sleep in it and reserved the cabin for work and for guests. How do you claim an island in the Finnish Gulf? You place a notice on the door of a shop at the nearest local settlement stating your intention to lease the land and hope that most people will place a tick in the Yes column rather than the No. And hence a quarter-century relationship with the island began. In Jansson’s writing you get a sense of refuge, but not idle respite. Living on the island between April and October required stamina and industry — fishing, maintenance of the cabin and boat, keeping the various machines ticking over, collecting driftwood from the sea as well as the surrounding islands and rolling rocks. These were productive times — the women would work on their respective art and writing projects, and sometimes collaborate on a project. Pietilä recorded their experiences in this natural wilderness on Super8 film which was later made into a documentary. This book provides a thoughtful exploration of their island life and their relationship with nature. Tove Jansson’s writing is both philosophical and straightforward (it is never lyrical or florid). giving the land, the sea and the weather their primacy. Pietilä's 24 illustrations — some etchings, others watercolour washes — are muted in their ochre monochromes, but hold the power of the sky and water in them as though at any moment these elements might cast away the moment and shrug off these human interventions.
It is not too late to get your books before Christmas — either as gifts or for your own summer reading. We advise the following cut-offs:
Urban delivery: high confidence: Monday 22nd, 3PM / possible: Tuesday 23th, 3PM
Rural delivery: high confidence: Friday 19th, 3PM / possible: Monday 22nd, 3PM
Collection from our door: you can collect books on weekdays 10—5 until Tuesday 23th, and then a brief window on Wednesday 24th: 9—11
Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton $33
Intimate with chlorinated space; weightless yet limited; closed off to taste, sound, and most sight; acutely aware of the clock: this is a swimmer's state. When ten-year-old Leanne Shapton joins an Ontario township swim team with her brother, she finds an affinity for its rhythms — and spends years training, making it to the Olympic trials twice. Swimming Studies reflects on her time immersed in a world of rigour and determination, routine and competition, pairing together contemplative essays and paintings. Vivid details of an aquatic life appear: adolescence in suburban Canada, dawn risings for morning practice, bus rides with teammates, a growing collection of swimsuits, dips in lakes and oceans. When she trades athletic pursuits for artistic ones, the metrics of moving through water endure though her relationship to it becomes more relaxed. In these elegant and potent meditations, Shapton renders swimming as a mode of experiencing time, movement, and perspective, capable of shaping our lives in every environment. A delightful book, filled with Shapton’s own artworks and photographs of her swimsuit collection. [New paperback edition]
”Expresses what it's like to be haunted by the person one used to be, and the search for how that person exists in the present. Leanne Shapton writes with such curiosity, ruefulness, intelligence, and grace.” —Sheila Heti
>>Look inside!
Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka (translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori) $28
In the dying days of the War, children Seita and Setsuko must fend for themselves. Firebombs have obliterated their home in Kobe, leaving them searching for shelter, and scrambling to survive in the depths of the countryside. But, as their suffering becomes a constant companion, so do the lights of the fireflies — shining from the bomber planes, and the insects glowing by the lake at night. This unforgettable semi-autobiographical tale was written by Akiyuki Nosaka as an apology to his young sister, who died of malnutrition in the period after the firebombing, and won him the Naoki Prize, cementing his place in the Japanese cultural canon. Published here for the first time as a standalone story, Grave of the Fireflies illuminates the untold sorrows of ordinary people who lived in the shadow of war. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>The story was made into a memorable anime film.
A Room above a Shop by Anthony Shapland $33
From a new voice in Welsh literature, an atmospheric and poignant story of a relationship between two small-town Valleys men during the late 1980s. When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has inherited his family's ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts. As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above — the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip. Unfolding in South Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut. [Hardback]
”It was a joy to read, such a tender story, the finespun prose and meticulous description.” — Sara Baume
”An atmospheric portrayal of gay, working-class life in a South Wales Valley, to read A Room Above a Shop is to feel held within the hands of a master craftsman in control of his form. I dare anyone to read this and not feel the ache of M and B's story, their solitude and their desire.” —Joshua Jones"
“There's a moving uncertainty, a vulnerability on the page that allows the reader to hear, and to listen. There's a quiet, brave strength in that.” —Cynan Jones
>>Landing in a scene, writing yourself out.
Greyhound by Joanna Pocock $37
Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism. In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers — Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz — who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the privatisation of public space, as she navigates two very different landscapes — an earlier, less atomised America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. [Paperback with French flaps]
”In Greyhound, Pocock takes us on an epic road trip through American landscapes, through urban dreams and nightmares. Along the way, she asks: how can our material comfort coexist with the impoverishment of nature? How much degradation do we have to witness before we change our way of living? With an exquisite and beautifully reflective prose, Pocock explores a heart of darkness, and expresses a deep desire and need to connect with the earth. It is a wonderful and vivid text from one of our most important ecofeminist writers.” —Xiaolu Guo
The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun $30
Into the world of 1950s Ireland — a lushly green, windswept landscape studded with holy wells and the decaying country houses of a vanished ruling class — arrives Ithell Colquhoun. An occultist and a surrealist painter, Colquhoun's travels around the island are guided by her artist's eye and her feeling for the world beyond our own, as well as her spikily humorous view of the people she meets. We encounter faeries and pagan rituals, ruined churches and Celtic splendour, rowdy bohemians and Anglo-Irish landowners fallen on hard times, as the author carouses through Dublin and tramps the hills of Connemara in this classic travelogue. Through her unique perceptions we discover a land that is fiercely alive and compelling. It is a place where the wind cries, the stones tell old tales and the mountains watch over the roads and those who travel on them. By intuiting the eerie magic of Ireland, Colquhoun offers up a land of myth and legend, stripped of its modern signs, at the same time offering herself to the reader in this portrait of the artist as a young woman. Richly visual and full of sly wit, this is an account of Ireland as only Colquhoun could see it, a land where myth and magic meet wind and rain, and the song of the secret kingdom is heard on city streets. [Paperback]
>>Also available: The Living Stones: Cornwall.
Against Identity: The wisdom of escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas $50
Modern life encourages us to pursue the perfect identity. Whether we aspire to become the best lawyer or charity worker, life partner or celebrity influencer, we emulate exemplars that exist in the world — hoping it will bring us happiness. But this often leads to a complex game of envy and pride. We achieve these identities but want others to imitate us. We disagree with those whose identities contradict ours — leading to polarisation and even violence. And yet when they thump against us, we are ashamed to ring hollow. In Against Identity, philosopher Alexander Douglas seeks an alternative wisdom. Searching the work of three thinkers — ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, Dutch Enlightenment thinker Benedict de Spinoza, and 20th Century French theorist René Girard — he explores how identity can be a spiritual violence that leads us away from truth. Through their worlds and radically different cultures, we discover how, at moments of historical rupture, our hunger for being grows: and yet, it is exactly these times when we should make peace with our indeterminacy and discover the freedom of escaping our selves. [Hardback]
”A profound meditation upon the way we perceive ourselves and the pits we frequently fall into, either as individuals or as groups, from the schoolyard to the nation state. Against Identity is revelatory, written with singular clarity and granite purpose, using little-known philosophies to think better and live with less turmoil, self-torture and aggression. In times of pessimism and chaos, it is a welcome voice of optimism and possibility.” —Richard Whatmore
”A philosophically rigorous yet impassioned critique of identity as both metaphysical error and social pathology. What the book offers is not an ethic of self-expression but a practice of disidentification: a way of letting go that is neither defeatist nor escapist, but attentive to the costs of identity and the possibilities that open up when we cease to grasp. Against Identity is generous, incisive, and quietly radical.” —Christine Tan
Two Lights: Walking at dawn and dusk on a turning planet by James Roberts $28
With acuity and insight, James Roberts paints a portrait of a life and its landscapes, creating connections with wild creatures and places, from swans in the Cambrian Mountains to wolves in the Pacific Northwest. By walking at dawn and dusk, in the two lights of awakening and deepening — through the stripped, windswept hills of Wales, and the jungles and savannahs of Africa — he navigates from a soul-stripping sense of loss towards hope in the future. In the presence of wild creatures he finds a way back to life. [Paperback]
”A beautifully written, wonderfully tender — and ultimately hopeful — journey through all that we stand to lose on this ever-more-challenged Earth.” —Sharon Blackie
”Deeply personal yet always outward looking, James Roberts delights in the world he discovers about him. Yet he also trembles, because he understands like winter light, that world is diminished... and diminishing. Two Lights reveals why all of us should be writers.” —Robert Minhinnick
French Windows by Antoine Lauraine (translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie) $28
Nathalia Guitry is an enigma that psychotherapist Doctor Faber can't solve. A photographer who can't take photographs since witnessing a murder, she is self-assured, self-aware, and seemingly impervious to his usually effective techniques. He hasn't been able to stop thinking about her since she walked into his consulting room and shattered his predictable professional routine. Desperate to break through Nathalia's uncrackable façade, he proposes something unusual: she'll write him a story about each resident of the building opposite, moving up floor by floor. But as the therapy progresses, he finds his own mask beginning to slip as he becomes consumed by her tales. How does she know so much about these strangers' lives? And what's waiting on the final floor? [Paperback]
”Admirably concise; intriguing, comic and poignant by turns, this is a sheer delight.” — The Guardian
State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg $38
It’s another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother’s home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she’s contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button. Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself. A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction. [Paperback]
"The novel form may be a 'pretty outdated technology’, as the narrator laments. But once a writer like van den Berg gets its creaky gears turning, it can still do what it's always done best: reflect our selves back at us and into the world, in all their wildness and weirdness." —Ruth Franklin, The New York Times
"With exquisite prose, smart lines on every page, a building sense of growing strangeness tinged with dread, and surprises all the way to the end, State of Paradise might be van den Berg's best novel so far — and that's saying a lot. A narrative that constantly feels like its dancing on the border between fiction and nonfiction despite all the weirdness it contains, this book is at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida's psychogeography and a creepy story about ghosts, missing people, cults, and technology. Don't miss it." —Gabino Iglesias
>>Haunted by the old self.
>>Merging autofiction with speculative fiction.
>>This is not the novel its author set out to write.
I Was a Rat! Or, The Scarlet Slippers [and] The Scarecrow and His Servant by Philip Pullman, illustrated by Peter Bailey $37
”I was a rat!” So insists a scruffy boy named Roger. Maybe it's true, but what is he now? A terrifying monster running wild in the sewers? The Daily Scourge is sure of it. A victim of 'Rodent Delusion'? The hospital nurse says yes. A lucrative fairground attraction? He is to Mr. Tapscrew. Or is Roger just an ordinary little boy? Only three people believe this version of the story, and it may take a royal intervention — and a bit of magic — to convince everyone else. A playful parody of the press, I Was a Rat! is a magical weaving of humour, fairy tale, and adventure.
When, in A Scarecrow and His Servant, a bolt of lightning brings Scarecrow to life, he proves to be a courteous but pea-brained fellow with grand ideas. He meets a boy, Jack, who becomes his faithful servant and the two embark upon a terrifying series of adventures — including battles, brigands, broken hearts, and treasure islands. But little does the Scarecrow know that he is being followed by a family who desperately wishes he'd never sprung to life.
Two much-loved illustrated tales in a beautiful cloth-bound gift edition. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives by Alice Loxton $28
At eighteen, your life is full of what-ifs and why-nots. You have everything to look forward to — unless you've got the plague… What happens if the First World War breaks out while you're at university? How does a young woman, born without arms or legs, make a living in Georgian London? What turns a rugby-obsessed teenager from a Welsh mining town into Richard Burton? In this unconventional and witty history, Loxton delves into Britain's past, exploring the country through eighteen notable figures at that most formative age — eighteen. From a young Elizabeth Tudor facing deadly intrigue at court, to Empress Matilda already changing the fate of nations, Eighteen invites readers to join an eclectic cast of young Britons across the nation and throughout its history. [Paperback]
A selection from our shelves of books that match image and text. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
On the Calculation of Volume: III by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith) $30
The third volume of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-volume novel concerning a person trapped in an endlessly repeating 18th of November has arrived. We and many customers have found reading these books a unique and entrancing experience, opening up new possibilities of reading and of thinking.
Do not read the following description: it has spoilers:
”I have met someone who remembers. Yesterday. That is to say, I met him yesterday. But he remembers yesterday, too. He remembers that we met yesterday.” Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern: a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale, and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind — trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone. Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world. Henry sees things differently from Tara: he does not think that time will put itself back together and he does not think that the future will come around. But he makes her realise that she is no longer the same person she was before this fault in time. And he makes her believe that there may be others to find within it. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration.” —Nicole Krauss
"Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time-and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day." —Hernan Diaz
>>It has taken thirty tears to write a novel about one day.
>>Stranded in time.
>>How to make a time-loop endlessly interesting.
>>Get the third volume in the New Directions edition (more stock due soon).
>>Get all the volumes so far (choose either the Faber or the New Directions editions).
>>Read Stella’s review of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the first volume.
Absence by Issa Quincy $38
A stunning, atmospheric debut novel about memory, death and the many ghosts that inhabit the present moment. A child is beguiled by a poem read to him by his mother. The poem follows this elusive narrator like a whisper throughout his life, echoing across the years in the stories and lives of others as they are recounted to him: an enigmatic and beloved schoolteacher who leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman who lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man shunned by his family, who finds solace and freedom in the letters from an estranged aunt; a black-and-white photograph that tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy. With fierce imagination, Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating a symphony of memories, murmurs and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life. [Hardback]
"Quincy's prose is deftly lyrical and imaginative. He observes the fragility of memory, and what remains after our encounters, however fleeting, with people, say a schoolteacher or an estranged aunt; you might think of him as a counterpart to the novelists Rachel Cusk and Teju Cole." —Jason Okundaye, The Guardian
"Absence challenges readers in the best way: it demands their attention, but offers in return a moving, artful examination of what it means to exist in a space vacated and left behind by others. Its contemplative, poetic style invites readers to ponder the beauty and pain in everyday absences and objects. Through a poem, letters, a photograph, and especially stories told and retold, the characters in Absence are able to recall and relive bits of the past long lost to time. Not in a way that sinks into sentimentality, but one which points to the future and leaves space for things that are not-yet." —Brock Kingsley, Chicago Review of Books
"In combining rare, enthrallingly poetic prose with a decidedly detective-noir influence, Absence hints that perhaps the meaning of presence itself is an archive's greatest mystery." —Kyla D. Walker, Electric Literature
"A thoughtful, imaginative work of fiction. Absence might be described as a chimeric blend of Sebald's Austerlitz and Bolano's 2666. The book combines the retrospective gaze of the former with the disparate superstructure of the latter. Quincy's debut is an inspired one: there is no denying the sheer inventiveness and detail of his architecture." —D.W. White, Necessary Fiction
>>An embodied archive.
The Expansion Project by Ben Pester $38
Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing — its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work. Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees — unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with. Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was?? A dizzying, haunted satire of the late-capitalist workplace. [Hardback]
>>On the business bus.
>>Surreal scrutiny.
The Effingers: A Berlin saga by Gabriele Tergit (translated from German by Sophie Duvernoy) $60
A monumental epic of German-Jewish life in Berlin over four generations, translated into English for the first time. Germany, 1878: young brothers Paul and Karl Effinger leave the German provinces to seek their fortune in Berlin. Ambitious and talented, they soon establish themselves as entrepreneurs and marry the daughters of high-society families. A flourishing horizon opens before them, but the Great War and the youthful rebellion of the 1920s lay waste to bourgeois certainties, and, as the generations pass, a rising antisemitism begins to shadow their bright world. With dazzling historical sweep, Gabriele Tergit tells of the family's changing fortunes within the vibrantly evoked, ever-changing metropolis of Berlin. Full of parties, drama and the most delicious gossip, The Effingers is a vibrant, monumental portrait of Germany's Jewish life, in all its richness and complexity. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>”A wonderfully vivid social portrait of pre-Nazi Berlin.”
The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward $45
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch- this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life. Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother, while Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts--together. In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that Black women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, "How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?" Short-listed for the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize. [Hardback]
”A lyrical, meta, intriguing novel that unfolds and keeps you guessing. Daley-Ward is one of those impressive writers who blends a gripping plot with truly unique prose.” —Roxy Dunn"
”A fantastic, shimmering work. Ysra Daley-Ward's rich exploration of Black womanhood and familial complexities is a must read.” —Irenosen Okojie
”Totally original, entirely compelling and astonishingly well crafted, The Catch solidifies Yrsa Daley-Ward as one of Britain's best and boldest voices.” — Yomi Adegoke
”The Catch is a wonderfully dark, twisty collision of complicated sister-love, grief, and memory. With prose that is lyrical and electric, Yrsa Daley-Ward takes her characters through a journey where absence and longing remake reality in haunting and beautiful ways.” —Essie Chambers
”An inventive novel about family from a risk-taking writer. Daley-Ward explores the tension between the twins beautifully. The novel ends with a genuine shock, but it's earned-it's a surprising conclusion to a beautifully written and structured book. Elegant and unpredictable in the best possible way.” —Kirkus
>>On balancing the public and the private.
>>All correct.
One Aladdin, Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson $45
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin, Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? In her guise as Aladdin — the orphan who changes his world — Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as a fact. Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future — an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew. [Hardback]
”Enchanting, unexpected and razor-sharp. Jeanette Winterson and Shahrazad are the perfect co-pilots to take us into new worlds on the wings of old stories.” —Kamila Shamsie
>>Winter sun.
Firefly by Robert Macfarlane and Luke Adam Hawker $35
Written in lyrical verse, this story follows one sun-seeking child who discovers a meadow illuminated by fireflies: "fallen constellations" that dance like stars among the summer grasses, setting fears to flight. Enchanting to read aloud and exquisite to hold in the hand, each scene is illustrated with spellbinding etchings by Luke Adam Hawker, showing the power of hope in a world steeped in darkness. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
How to End a Story: Collected diaries by Helen Garner $60
Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Her many books display her rare sensitivity to the experiences of others, her indomitability, and her grasp of detail and context. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best. Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s. How to End a Story reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, it offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written entirely in private. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf's.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
”Marvellous, all eight hundred pages of it.” —Colm Toibin
”With sharp eyes and ears, Garner is a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses.” —James Wook, The New Yorker
Fatherhood: A history of love and power by Augustine Sedgewick $40
An ambitious history of masculinity and family, from the Bronze Age to the modern day, Fatherhood dares to offer a more caring and affirmative vision of the roles men currently play in society. What is fatherhood, and where did it come from? How has the role of men in families and society changed across thousands of years? What does the history of fatherhood reveal about what it means to be a dad today? Chronicling the intimate stories and struggles of some of history’s most famous fathers, historian Augustine Sedgewick explores the origins and transformation of one of the most potent ideas in human history: fatherhood. From the anxious philosophers of ancient Athens and Henry VIII’s obsessive quest for an heir, to Charles Darwin’s theories of human origins, Bob Dylan’s take down of ‘The Man’, and beyond, Sedgewick shows how successive generations of men have shaped our understanding of what it means to be and have a father, and in turn our ideas of who we are, where we come from and what we are capable of. [Paperback]
”An invigorating, impressively researched and honest read. Anyone doing the work of dismantling and reframing the heavy role of the father will find something here.” —Raymond Antrobus
”A richly absorbing piece of history embedded in a wealth of wonderful storytelling. A pleasure to read.” —Vivian Gornick
Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant $27
In this fiery, theoretical tour-de-force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health. Written by co-hosts of the hit ‘The Death Panel’ podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalised health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as ‘surplus’, regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the ‘unfit’ to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this ‘surplus’ population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health. Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one's willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy. Capital, it turns out, only fears health. [Paperback]
”This book changed the way I think about health, power, state capacity, extraction, social welfare, and resistance. It is an immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions facing our movements in these terrifying times. Readable and filled with concise histories and clear examples to illustrate nuanced analysis, it will no doubt become required reading among those struggling against the death cult that is racial capitalism.” —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
”Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant bring us a galvanizing proposition: Unlike the rest of us, capital is not alive; it merely animates itself through our host bodies. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick.' Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength.” —Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child
>>Stay alive another week.
Cat by Rebecca van Laer $23
Rebecca van Laer and her partner purchase a home and move in with their senior cats, Toby and Gus. Their loved ones see this as a step toward an inevitable future first comes the house, then a dog, then a child. But what if they are just cat people? Moving between memoir, philosophy, and pop culture, Cat is a playful and tender meditation on cats and their people. Van Laer considers cats' role in her personal narrative, where they are mascots of laziness and lawlessness, and in cultural narratives, where they appear as feminine, anarchic, and maladapted, especially in comparison to dogs. From the stereotype of the 'crazy cat lady' to the joy of cat memes to the grief of pet loss, van Laer demonstrates that the cat-person relationship is free of the discipline and dependence required by parenting (and dog-parenting), creating a less hierarchical intimacy that offers a different model for love. [Paperback]
“Rebecca van Laer’s feline marvel is at once cozy and mind-expanding. If you’ve never felt a connection with cats before, you will after reading this brilliant book.” —Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat
"In tender, incisive prose, van Laer examines the ways that she has negotiated her relationship to herself, the world around her, and the ever-mysterious wildness she invites in, and reveals the deep and abiding love that is the foundation of what it takes to be in true communion with other life. If you have ever loved anyone, human or animal, let Cat curl up and rest in your heart." —Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed To The Manticore
“Van Laer’s keen eye captures the ineffable charm of our feline friends and investigates humankind’s relationship to cats with great insight and tenderness. A stirring and deeply profound look at what it means to love and lose, and a must-read for cat people and the cat-curious alike.” —Gina Chung, author of Sea Change and Green Frog
>>Cats are our shadows.
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series, revealing the hidden lives of ordinary things.
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12 December 2025
A conversation about hoarding, about collecting scraps of material and balls of wool, lead me to this delightful book. If you are a maker you will understand the problem of, and the desire for, a wardrobe just for fabric, wool, art supplies, and other ‘useful’ materials. You will also know the beauty of changing something from an remnant into an item — something that has a new lease of life, whether that is practical or simply to behold. If I could do one thing, and one thing only, it would be to make. Current sewing projects include recutting a vintage velvet dress (some rips, some bicycle chain grease) into a new dress, and, recently finished, a long-forgotten half-made blouse — fabric a bedsheet from the op shop. So I felt completely at home in Bound. And I devoured it with pleasure over one weekend. This is a book about a sewing journey, and a discovery journey. It’s about the end of things and the beginning of things. All those threads that tangle, yet also weave a story about who we are, where we come from and, even possibly, needle piercing the cloth, stitching a path to somewhere new. Maddie Ballard’s sewist diary follows her life through lockdown, through a relationship, from city to city, and from work to study, all puncutated with pattern pieces, scissors cutting and a trusty sewing machine. Each essay focuses on a garment she is making, from simple first steps — quick-unpick handy—to more complex adventures and later to considered items that incorporate her Chinese heritage. These essays capture the joys and frustrations of making, the dilemmas of responsible making (ethically and environmentally), the pleasure of repurposing and zero-waste sewing, and our relationship with clothes to make us feel good, to capture who we are, and conversely to obscure us. The essays are also a candid and thoughtful exploration of personal relationships and finding one’s place in the world. The comfort of one’s clothes and its metaphorical companion of being comfortable in one’s own skin brushing up sweetly here, like a velvet nap perfectly aligned. The book is dotted with sweet illustrations by Emma Dai’an Wright of Ballard’s sewing projects, reels of thread, and pesky clothes moths. The essays are cleverly double meaning in many cases. ‘Ease’ being a sewing term, but also in this essay’s case an easing into a new flat; ‘Soft’ the feel of merino, but also the lightness of moths’ wings; ‘Undoing’ the errors that happen in sewing and in life that need a remake. There’s ‘Cut One Pair’ and' ‘Cut One Self’. This gem of a book is published by a small press based in Birmingham, The Emma Press, focused on short prose works, poetry and children’s books. Bound: A Memoir of Making and Re-Making is thoughtful, charming and a complete delight. What seems light as silk brings us the hard selvedge of decisions, the needle prick of questions, and the threads that both fray and bind. Bravo Maddie Ballard and here’s to many more sewing and writing projects.
In Suicide, Levé ostensibly addresses a childhood friend, or, rather, the memory of a childhood friend, who committed suicide twenty years ago, at the age of twenty-five. Levé says he has felt closer to his friend after his suicide than he ever did in the days of their friendship, and speculates about how death has rewritten his friend’s life: "I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act," the single detail that retrospectively subsumes all other possible narratives. The text of the novel (so to call it) takes the form of memories and observations structured in a seemingly casual way, all in a second person register, which seems at times projected onto the reader, or a possible reader, but which, as the book proceeds and Levé provides more and more intimations that he could not have had access to, the reader disconcertingly begins to realise is referring to Levé himself, the author addressing himself in the second person register and in the past tense (even when referring to the present), denying his own agency, opening himself up to his own scrutiny (which can hardly be thought of as self-scrutiny), distancing himself from himself, denying his identity at every opportunity and thus excusing himself from responsibility for the arc of his own narrative. The text is full of ironies, self-obsession and slippery logic ("You don't make me sad, but solemn. I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive.") and is stubbornly opaque about the specific motivations (if any) for the suicide (other than simultaneously authentic/inauthentic statements such as “The desire to live could not be dictated to you. The moments of happiness you knew came unbidden. You could understand their sources, but you could not reproduce them.”). Levé is under no illusions about the effects of suicide on the bereaved, but is himself numbed to these effects: “Your regrets would disappear along with you: your survivors would be alone in carrying the pain of your death. The selfishness of your death displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life’s commotion.” A statement such as this is riven: it is at once both undeniable and intolerably wrong. “Everything I write is true, but so what?” wrote Levé of himself in Autoportrait (>you can read my reviews of this book here). Ten days after delivering the manuscript of this book to his publisher, Levé committed suicide (this was also the last day that he and I were exactly the same age). Was Levé's suicide implied by the various strands of his literary and photographic work, all of which seeks to undermine the stability of 'identity' and 'authenticity', or did he make his suicide the "foundational act" of his life, the detail that retrospectively subsumes and rewrites all other possible narratives? In what ways did he take control (from us) of our reading of his work by his act of self-erasure?
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to Mary Roy, the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm”. "Heart-smashed" by her mother's death in 2022 yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her”. And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author's journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and political essays, through today.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben $35
In the ‘middle of life’ — although this is only thirty-six — and with the unsparing eye of a portraitist, Lavinia reviews her frustrations and her solitariness, the grief and the rapture: these are her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the medieval masks of Owl, signifying winter, and Cuckoo, for erotic love. In attendance are dreams of rustic places and once-dear animals. But it is no ordinary procession, for her childhood comes last. The idiosyncratic Dreaming of Dead People was first published in 1979, yet remains as surprising as ever: it is frank, mordantly funny, true to itself and raw. [Paperback with French flaps]
”So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognising a writer who can conjure an inner life and spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer's mind.” —Isabel Quigly, Financial Times
”Her heroine is a solitary woman who tells of her past and recalls, often, the countryside, where being alone is not painful and, if there is no meaning to life, the call to the senses is immediate. The book is beautifully written.” —Hilary Bailey, The Guardian
”Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature. An achievement to celebrate.” —Maggie Gee, The Observer
”From the publisher that brought Ann Quin back into print comes another lost classic from an English visionary. Rosalind Belben's work is both terrific and disconcerting, an essential read for lovers of extraordinary fiction.” —Camilla Grudova
>>”Rivals anything by Virginia Woolf.”
>>Writing ugly.
>>The foreplay of wordplay.
>>No ticks in the long grass.
Lorem Ispum by Oli Hazzard $40
Lorem Ipsum consists of a single, 50,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction addressed to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, which means ‘following the brush'. This playful, disruptive and digressive novel is written out of and towards a moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely. Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent and a child, of dreams, work, fantasies, reading, happiness, secrets, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of ‘shared time'. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives, and what happens when they are shaken. [Paperback]
>>Should a novel avoid the processes of its own composition?
>>Technology, attention, and the extremely long paragraph.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez $42
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn't want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories — literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma's characters unspool their secrets. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States. The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing." —New York Times
>>From the mouth to the page.
Ice by Anna Kavan $28
Ice will soon cover the entire globe. As the glacial tide creeps forward, society breaks down. Hurtling through the frozen chaos is a nameless narrator, seeking the white-haired girl he once loved, desperate to rescue her - or perhaps to annihilate her. Through nightmarish, ever-shifting scenes, she flees him and his powerful enemy, the Warden. But none of them can outrun the ice. Anna Kavan's masterwork is an apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence, rendered in unforgettable, propulsive, hallucinatory prose. [New paperback edition]
”A strange and compelling classic of dystopian and climate fiction, one that with foreboding and deep compassion maps the psyche and the terrain of dislocation.” —Jeff VanderMeer
”One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future.” —New Yorker
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Self-medication.
Suicide by Édouard Levé (translated from French by Jan Steyn) $33
Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel — it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend — perhaps real, perhaps fictional — more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favour of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé's casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend: it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life. Back in print at last. [New paperback edition]
"With a precision that can be frightening, Leve describes a man who is wholly alienated from the consolations of the outside world, beholden only to the tiniest shifts in his perception and sensations. As the narrator's revelations about his friend's inner life become increasingly complex, the reader comes to see "tu" as a stand-in for the narrator's own self, an externalised form that allows him empathic clarity about the most disturbed parts of his own being." —Hannah Tennant-Moore, n+1 Magazine
"If this irony-laden book contains a message to the reader it may well be this: 'You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm. As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.' If one were to substitute 'reading' and 'reader' with 'creating' and 'creator' one might conclude that it's possible to read Suicide not simply as a veiled cri de coeur by a man looking to air the messy circumstances for which he took his life, but as a controlled work of art by a conceptual artist who wanted to leave us with a lasting document from which we might, paradoxically, muster the strength to carry on." —Christopher Byrd, The Guardian
"Suicide is both fiction and final, nonfictional statement, both novel and memoir. It is we, as readers and participants, who stand at the center of these two mirrors hung opposite each other and find the author infinitely, diminishingly multiplied. Though we'll probably never know whether Levé — who in addition to being a writer was a successful photographer with an interest in conceptual art — killed himself to bring his grim metafiction full circle, it is all but impossible not to read his haunting Suicide in this troubling light." —Laird Hurt, Bookforum
"Suicide reads like a photo album. This is no surprise, considering that Levé was as much an accomplished photographer as he was anything else. The prose is clipped, almost terse; while each line can be seen to represent a single idea in just the same way a photo in an album represents one moment in time. Suicide is at times beautiful, immensely sad at others, and in more moments than one might want to admit there is the potential in the text to be deeply relatable." —Tom McCartan,Three Percent
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Pulverised non-narratives.
>>Also in stock: Autoportrait.
Equality Is a Struggle: Bulletins from the front line, 2021—2025 by Thomas Piketty $45
In this new volume drawn from his columns for the French newspaper Le Monde, renowned economist Thomas Piketty takes measure of the world since 2021: leaders grappling with the aftershocks of a global pandemic; politics shifting rightward in Europe and America; and wars breaking out and escalating, from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Together with an extended introductory essay arguing that an ecological socialism remains the best hope for global equality, these articles present Piketty's vivid first draft of history—on the rise of China, political upheaval, armed conflict, inequity within and between nations, discrimination, and beyond. Despite the gathering clouds, Piketty continues to find reasons for hope. [Hardback]
"In this compelling book, Piketty advocates for ecological socialism. His vision is ambitious but realistic, being based on a majestic understanding of the history of capitalism and detailed pragmatic knowledge of anti-inequality policies." —Ha-Joon Chang
TELENOVELA by Gonzalo C. Garcia $42
Set in Santiago towards the end of Pinochet's dictatorship, TELENOVELA explores the secret lives of a family swept up in this dark period of Chile's history. There is Lucho: bullied by fellow soldiers for his love of poetry, thwarted in his ambitions to become a writer, unhappy at work. He seems like a loving father. He seems plain loveable, in fact. And maybe he is. But as TELENOVELA unfolds, other things come to light about Lucho that are less easy to indulge — or forgive. There is Ramona, Lucho's wife: tormented by anxiety, overwhelmed by self-loathing and body image problems. As a drama student, Ramona once hoped to become a Telenovela star; she secretly daydreams that she might still get her big break. Guileless, gentle, Ramona seems like an innocent. But is she? Then there is Pablo, their son: dreamy, gentle, eager to make friends, to form his own band and write some worthwhile songs. Desperate to be cool. And increasingly, just desperate. Gonzalo C. Garcia makes us feel for these characters and want to understand them — but, as the novel unfolds, come to the frightening realisation of what it really means to have such understanding. And so it is that deeply human and deeply personal stories of mislaid ambition, failure and intergenerational trauma take on national — and universal — significance. [Paperback]
“A unique and breath-taking talent.” —Scarlett Thomas
“Consistently funny — and unexpectedly sympathetic.” —The Guardian
>>Resisting cliche through prose.
There’s a Horse in the Art Gallery! by Sarah Pepperle $25
A delightful new board book introducing young children to the animals living in the art gallery! Full-page colour artworks by amazing artists from Aotearoa and around the world, warm and friendly read-aloud texts, animal names in English and te reo Maori, paintings, sculpture, photography and prints from the 1700s to the present. Artists include Fatu Feu’u, Bill Hammond, Louise Henderson, Eileen Mayo, Ron Mueck, Balthazar Ommeganck, Ani O’Neill, Michael Parekōwhai, Agnes Miller Parker, Michael Smither, Ethel Spowers, Michel Tuffery, Francis Upritchard. [Board book]
>>Look inside!
First Encounters: The early Pacific and European narratives of Abel Tasman’s 1642 voyage by Rüdiger Mack $60
Rüdiger Mack seeks to rebalance our perspective by focusing upon the expedition led by Abel Tasman, in 1642-1643, which ‘discovered’ Tasmania, New Zealand, Fiji and New Britain, and visited Tonga, the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. It also includes the first-ever complete English translation of an important resource for the voyage — from Nicolaes Witsen's 1705 book Noord en Oost Tartarye — as well as preserves excerpts and illustrations from the journal of Tasman's chief navigator, Francois Jacobsz. Rüdiger Mack has uncovered new and fascinating details around this extraordinary exploration, from the reasons for its secrecy, the competitive environment of 17th century exploration, and new insights on first contacts with the indigenous populations of the wider Pacific. The overarching theme is a new and fresh look at the very first beginnings of New Zealand's shared Māori-Pakeha history. The book covers the background, the planning and the European, Māori and Tongan accounts of Abel Tasman’s voyage in 1642-43 during which he was the first European to see Tasmania, New Zealand and several of the Tonga islands. The book is ground-breaking in several ways: —It is the first book that brings together all six known Māori oral history accounts of the first contact between Māori and Europeans. —The book publishes the first complete English translation of an important Dutch source which has previously been largely ignored. —Delving into art history the book has for the first time been able to identify the artist who copied the 45 illustrations into Tasman’s official account after the return of the expedition to Batavia in 1643. —It discusses a Maori place name on the West Coast of the South island which probably refers to Maori seeing Dutch ships at anchor there in December 1642. —The book identifies an archaeological site in Golden Bay, South Island which is connected with Tasman’s brief stay there. —The book discusses the authenticity of two well-known supposed paintings of Abel Tasman and suggests another portrait as a more likely depiction of the famous navigator. [Hardback]
One Pot: 100 simple recipes to cook together by Amandine Bernardi $70
The casserole dish or Dutch oven is an essential kitchen tool for creating convenient meals without compromising on taste. In One Pot, author Amandine Bernardi presents 100 effortless recipes featuring vibrant international dishes. This attractive cookbook offers a range of recipes for every occasion, from quick weeknight dinners to special gatherings. Home cooks will discover wholesome dishes like Ratatouille and Mujadara with Cauliflower; mains, including Beef Bourguignon, Coq au Vin, and Moroccan Fish Stew; and sweet treats, such as Baked Apples with Honey. With a guide to equipment, serving suggestions, and dietary symbols designating vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, and nut-free options, One Pot is suitable for novice and experienced cooks alike. [Hardback]
”As you may have guessed, every recipe in the book can be made in a simple Dutch oven — don't expect a sink full of dirty dishes and finicky specialty tools. Instead, you can revel in simple, elegant takes on ratatouille, beef bourguignon, and coq au vin (did we mention Bernardi is French?) without breaking a sweat.” —Katie Couric Media
>>Look inside.
For the People: Resisting authoritarianism, saving democracy by A.C. Grayling $39
Around the world the foundations of democracy, freedom, civil liberties are being eroded — what can be done? Are we living through the end of the democratic moment? The past few decades have revealed a fragile reality. Once liberal countries are turning to authoritarianism, wealthy individuals and corporations are interfering with elections evermore flagrantly, and faith in democracy has plummeted among every demographic. What happened? From gerrymandering and partisanship to corporate interference and tainted donations, A. C. Grayling reveals the forces undermining our democratic ideals and offers some solutions. [Paperback]
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews)
Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short — sometimes very short — stories. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere. The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader's mind, Kristof's penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Pure genius.” — Max Porter
”Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up.” — Publishers Weekly
”Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power—part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive.” — Kirkus Reviews
”Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form. The brevity of The Illiterate alone tells you that this is not her whole story. It is simply the one she tells.” — Jennifer Krasinski, The New Yorker
”For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction.” — Missouri Williams, The Nation
>>We can never express precisely what we mean.
>>Deprivation exercises.
>>The uses of illiteracy.
>>The Illiterate.
>>Read Thomas’s review of The Notebook.
Electric Spark: The enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson $55
The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is 'puzzling'. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as 'Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes'. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code. Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art. [Hardback]
”Joyously, brilliantly intelligent. In Wilson, Spark has met her true match.” —Anne Enright
”A revolutionary book. When Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, it was recognised as unique — something that quite simply had never been done before. Wilson's achievement in Electric Spark is equally remarkable: an entirely original method of life writing which leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust. Electric Spark heaves with ghosts and furies, burglaries and blackmail. It is disquieting and absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn't put me down.” —Lisa Hilton
”Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam — and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
”I raced through Frances Wilson's whip-smart Electric Spark.” —Ali Smith, Guardian
>>Odd things happened when she was around.
>>World-beating buster-upper.
A State of Siege by Janet Frame $37
After the death of her invalid mother, a retired art teacher leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerising exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live. SoS was first published in 1966, and is now back in print with an introduction by Chris Kraus. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Intensely personal, Frame’s writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.'' —Hilary Mantel
>>Woman alone!
>>Wouldn’t you like to be normal?
>>The book was made into a film by Vincent Ward (1978).
>>Some other books by Janet Frame.
The Good Economy by Craig Renney $20
”The problems we face are a consequence of the economic model we have built up in Aotearoa over the past forty years. But that model is a choice — one that we can change if we wish to.” Aotearoa is grappling with tough economic challenges. The Good Economy asks what kind of economy we want – and who it should serve. Through sharp analysis that centres the experiences of New Zealanders, economist Craig Renney explores the values shaping our current system and asks what it would take to build a better one. Grounded, accessible and hopeful, this text invites readers to rethink the purpose of economic policy — and to imagine a future with wellbeing, fairness and opportunity at its core. [Paperback]
>>Other BWB Texts.
Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine by Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah $25
A critical examination providing clarity on the intertwined relationships of global capitalism, energy politics, and racial oppression, and challenges readers to rethink their understanding of Palestine. Dismantling the simplistic narratives that dominate mainstream discourse, Hanieh, Knox and Ziadah present a nuanced materialist analysis grounded in anti-imperialism. The authors argue that the Palestinian situation cannot be fully understood without considering the broader historical and regional dynamics of Western imperialism and capitalist accumulation. By integrating the roles of imperialism, fossil capitalism, and racialisation, this book offers a thorough critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project and the unwavering support it receives from Western powers. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>We teach life, sir.
Rock, Paper, Incisors (A ‘Skunk & Badger’ story) by Amy Timberlake, illustrated by Jon Klassen $28
Skunk’s and Badger’s life together has an easy rhythm — Skunk cooks! Badger cleans! — when they take in two orphaned rat pups, Zeno and Zephyr. Badger is working on an Important Rock Work article for Rock Hound Weekly and needs focus, focus, focus to write it. But how much trouble could two tiny rats really be? Some scheduling, a few strategically placed naps, and all will be well! But it's winter, and nothing goes to plan. Hibernation threatens every routine. Articles refuse to write themselves. And rats in the rock room? It will take a North Twist village to raise these rats! Featuring cosy drawings and full-colour pictures by bestselling artist Jon Klassen, Amy Timberlake's delightfully off-kilter adventure explores the complexity of friendship and the meaning of family in a wintery world where chickens wear parkas and Yard Sheep host spaghetti dinners. And wait! Is that a dinosaur? [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Read Stella’s reviews of the other ‘Skunk & Badger’ stories.
Legenda: The real women behind the myths that shaped Europe by Janina Ramirez $40
Ramirez peels back the layers of time to reveal how the identities of real women have been co-opted by those intent on crafting national identities. Their names are well known, and summaries of their achievements have been recited in classrooms for decades, but medieval women like Joan of Arc, Lady Godiva and Isabella of Castile have been misrepresented, their stories twisted and weaponised. Meanwhile, ground-breaking 18th and 19th-century women who blazed a trail through revolutionary Europe have been forgotten, their legacies too easily dismissed or ignored. Questioning established narratives and searching for the real women behind the legends, Ramirez interrogates what defines a nation and who gets to build it, shining a light on how history is so often hijacked to serve the ideological and political interests of the present. [Paperback]
"Janina Ramirez fearlessly deconstructs the dangerous historical myths and legends that have been shamelessly created to stoke division and hatred, finding complexity, truth and inspiration in this stunning — and shockingly relevant — new analysis of medieval history.” —Alice Roberts
”This is a history like no other, a top-down story of nationhood and mythology, a dazzling assessment of the past through the lens of the present and a rallying cry for the importance of history. Most of all, it's a plea to consider the real flesh-and-blood women who made the world rather than their sanitised, mythologised counterparts. A fabulous, invigorating and beguiling read.” —Kate Mosse
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt $38
For the first time since university, James and Roland's paths through life — one drawn in straight lines, the other squiggled and meandering — began to cross. James Drayton has always found things too easy. By the time he leaves university, he's still searching for a challenge worthy of his ambitions, one that will fulfil the destiny he thinks awaits him. Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive risk-taker, a charismatic drifter with boundless enthusiasm but a knack for derailing his own attempts to get started in life. When a chance encounter in a pub reunites these old acquaintances, it sets them on an unpredictable course through the upheavals of the 21st century, and triggers an unlikely alliance. Against the backdrop of the financial crash and its aftermath, they strive to create something that outlasts them, something that will matter. Drayton and Mackenzie is an immediately engaging and ultimately moving novel both about trying to make your mark on the world, and about how a friendship might be the most important thing in life. [Paperback]
"Drayton and Mackenzie is simultaneously a breathtaking conspectus of the 21st century, an exciting rags-to-riches adventure and a deeply moving story of male friendship. A novel has not done so much so well since Michael Chabon's friendship epic, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)." —The Financial Times
>>Tidal power.
The Transformations by Andrew Pippos $38
In the fading glow of Australia's print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper-it's an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a poetic streak and a painful past, George is one of nature's loners. As George grapples with shifting newsroom dynamics, the legacy of clerical abuse at his childhood school resurfaces, and a late-night encounter with a journalist named Cassandra begins to unravel his carefully managed solitude. As his colleagues depart and the final decline of the paper plays out, George is obliged to navigate an affair, learn to care for a daughter who has only recently become part of his life, and reckon with his own childhood trauma. The Transformations is a witty, melancholic, and very human novel about the stories we tell of ourselves. With an anthropologist's eye for detail and a novelist's grasp of emotional complexity, he explores generational change, grief, guilt, and the strange intimacy of workplace life. [Paperback]
”Andrew Pippos is one of Australia's best novelists. The Transformations shows his perfect emotional pitch, his gift for folding big things into small baskets of domestic life in prose that goes straight to the heart. Who knew he could write another novel as good as Lucky's? Here it is.” — Malcolm Knox
”In this intelligent, disarming and capacious novel, Andrew Pippos pulls the covers back on the public and private self. As we follow the gloriously messy lives of George, Cassandra and Elektra, we're reminded that the antidote to solitude lies in what we long for or desire. With its mysterious undertow, its delight in human fallibility, its backdrop of momentous social and technological change, The Transformations is a searching, fate-filled epic for our times.” —Mireille Juchau
”A novel of great clarity, precision and feeling. Whenever I wasn't reading it I wished I was.” —Robbie Arnott
Sabzi: Fresh vegetarian recipes for every day by Yasmin Khan $57
Irresistible vegetarian and vegan recipes inspired by award-winning food writer Yasmin Khan s travels — and the cooking she does at home for family and friends. Lifting its name from the Persian word for herbs , Sabzi brings you more than 80 accessible plant-forward recipes that celebrate the best of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian flavours. From bountiful salads to fragrant soups, colourful mezze, and heart-warming mains, Khan invites home cooks to make delicious meals that are good for the health of both people and the planet, while staying connected to the traditional food cultures that make us who we are. With easy-to-make recipes that put vibrant vegetables at the heart of a meal, dishes in the book include- Halloumi Lasagne; Stuffed Aubergines with Pomegranates, Walnuts and Feta; Smoky Tofu Shakshuka; Sweet Potatoes with Pistachio and Mint Pesto; Rhubarb and Cardamom Tart... and many more. [Hardback]
“An invitation into Yasmin's treasure trove of a kitchen, Sabzi is a celebration of the life-affirming and nourishing power of plants. In the world of food, Yasmin Khan is a beacon of humanity and light. This generosity and kindness is represented on every page of Sabzi, resplendent with bountiful vegetable dishes that beg to be eaten and shared. There isn't a recipe that I don't want to devour!” —Hetty Lui McKinnon
”You need this book in your life. Yasmin Khan comes to our rescue with Sabzi, packed as it is with bright, fresh, faff-free recipes.” —Nigella Lawson
”Pure poetry and joy. When I ask people what they're cooking, Yasmin's name always comes up.” —Meera Sodha
>>Look inside.
>>Food is about connection.
>>Off to Sabzi school.
Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My adventures in neurodiversity by Robin Ince $40
A personal exploration of anxiety, ADHD and neurodiversity, Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal reminds us all — no matter how weird we feel — that it’s OK to be a little different. We all are. What if being a bit weird is actually entirely normal? What if sharing our internal struggles wasn’t a sign of weakness, but strength? For over thirty years, broadcaster and comedian Robin Ince has entertained thousands in person and on air. But underneath the surface, a whirlwind was at play — a struggle with sadness, concentration, self-doubt and near-constant anxiety. But then he discovered he had all the hallmarks of ADHD and his stumbling blocks became stepping stones. In Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, Robin uses his own experiences to explore the neurodivergent experience and to ask what the point of ‘being normal’ really is. Packed with personal insights, intimate anecdotes and interviews with psychologists, neuroscientists and many neurodivergent people he has met along the way, this is a quirky and witty dive into the world of human behaviour. [Paperback]
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5 December 2025
I entered The Rose Field with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. The long-awaited third instalment of ‘The Book of Dust’ trilogy has been much anticipated by fans of Lyra Belacqua and her daemon Pantalaimon. Six books and several novellas later, we finally are in Lyra’s world again, and at 600+pages the final book is quite a journey. We left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth in a dangerous place without Pan, and intent on reaching the Red Building, on finding her daemon and her imagination. Lyra is now twenty, and in many ways takes a more measured approach to her journey, sometimes heeding the advice of her guide, but still the Lyra of Northern Lights remains — now more determined than headstrong. Yet the same questions prevail. Who can be trusted? Why are the Magisterium making alliances and gathering an army? What is the connection between Dust and the red building? And who wants to covet it and who wants to destroy it, and why? And where is Pan? As Lyra Silvertongue and Pantalaimon travel, one across land and sea, the other high into the mountains, we meet the gold-loving gryphons, the witches return, and Lyra has a strange encounter with an angel. Pullman draws us to characters both appealing and not, he creates situations where the intentions of some are unclear, and puts us inside the minds of some we would like to escape. Like Lyra, we are bound to move forward towards the questions that need stories, rather than answers. Along the way there are intriguing characters. The charming and powerful Mustafa Bey, a merchant who holds in his palm all the intricacies of connection and trade throughout the region. Malcolm Polstead returns — scholar, spy, artisan, and protector of Lyra. While there is no Serafina Pekkala, there are other witches as admirable, and there are the gold-loving gryphons. But best of all, and my favourite charcaters of The Rose Field, are Pan and Asta. The daemons are the heroes of this book. Yes, there is adventure, danger, crazed autocrats (Delamare is a fanatic), there is disorder in places and in people (Olivier Bonneville being the most damaged and possibly the most dangerous), there is the emotionally charged relationship between Lyra and Malcolm, and the possibility/impossibility of a future for them, and as always the question which will always remain, even at the conclusion, of the windows to the other worlds. What do they mean? Why they are feared by some, yet strike curiosity in others? And for others are portals that stoke their power and greed. As Lyra sees the world in all its destruction, can she also harness the good in it?
As with all high anticipated ‘finals’ there is commentary galore, and I avoided this until I closed the back cover. I was curious to find some disappointed — they wanted to come full circle back to the stories of a youthful Lyra. A sentimental journey which I was pleased was avoided. (In fact, there were unexpected twists, yet all in keeping with the essence of the series.) While others felt the conversations about consciousness and self were overplayed (strange — as this has always been a core aspect of the series, especially considering the relationship between a person and their daemon). Another theme that annoyed some was the focus on the environmental destruction due to greed and power. This again, is a core aspect of the whole series. In Northern Lights, what they were doing in the north, through either the desire for wealth or scientific discovery created a constant tension between the greater good and the short-term ill effects for some. I was pleased to see the concept of Dust still held that mysterious quality, now joined in memory with the highly sought-after rose oil, and the beauty of the roses although we only encounter this in myth. Curiosity remains, and like all good stories, there is no ending, and the possibilities for interpretation are endless.
A puzzle, he said, noticing that I was attempting a rather easy and common sort of puzzle, one which I nonetheless was finding challenging, possibly due to the fact that he was observing me, a puzzle I was in any case doing only to fill in the time as I waited for him to stop talking, a puzzle is a poor sort of puzzle because everyone recognises it as a puzzle, he said, unlike language, which is a stronger sort of puzzle because it is not obvious whether it is a puzzle or not. I knew better than to ask him what he meant by this statement, partly because I didn’t really want to encourage him to deliver one of his long-winded explanations but mainly because I knew that once he had made a statement like that he would deliver one of his long-winded explanations whether he was asked to explain it or not; it seemed not to occur to him that any long-winded explanation delivered by him might not be received with the enthusiasm with which it was delivered. At least it was good to see him enthusiastic. He had just finished reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Parade, and was now, it seemed, ready to explain it to me, although not yet having finished it had not stopped him explaining it to me as he was reading it, or at least from frequently exclaiming about it in such a way that was not sufficiently coherent to pass as an explanation, not that his explanations were in themselves generally in any case coherent. Parade, he explained, splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distil, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations (here he made that irritating gesture in the air with both hands about and throughout the phrase as if to indicate that if anybody were to transcribe the phrase they should put it in inverted commas (even though italics would be to my mind more appropriate)), the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the intimate and societal scales, or so he said. Parade, he said, continued Cusk’s project of the ‘Outline Trilogy’, of withdrawing the narratorial involvement from the novel, sometimes perfecting an entirely non-participatory, characterless ‘we’, without assuming, or presuming, really, access to the minds of any of the characters other than as evidenced by their actions or their words. “To see without being seen: there was no better definition of the artist’s vocation,” he read suddenly from a place he had marked in the book. Cusk achieves a wonderfully clean and perfectly flat style, he said, achieving an impeccable neutrality, almost an anonymity, on the most passionate and involving subjects, reporting conversations without contributing to them, but from a near perspective, like the parent in the novel filming her child in the school play so closely and so exclusively that, at least in her representation of it, the play itself made no sense other than that contingent upon the performance of her child. “Pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity, reveals the pathos of identity,” he read again, or had memorised, or was pretending to read or to have memorised in order to give his opinions more authority. There is no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive, he shouted, I think now lost to his own metastasising speculations, at best only barely suppressed, no self, no absolute, no identity, no definitive other than as they exist in language! There are no persons, no characters, he said, and I think he was referring to our lived reality as much as to the book that he had read. It reminds me, he said, calming a little, of Nathalie Sarruate's Planetarium, in that persons are unimportant or are at least shown to be entirely constructed by phrases and thoughts and attitudes clustering together and adhering to each other, a phenomenon that is more the province of language than a property of any living actuality. Again, the impulses, motivations and attitudes that may or may not exist in the unconscious, so to call it, he said, or in the preconscious, and we cannot say anything about these states, which cannot be said even to be states because to do so would be to make them or at least their existence to some extent conscious, he claimed, these impulses, motivations and attitudes require and are also formed by the language that is used to express them in order to be expressed. Was he even making sense, I wondered, but he did not pause, seemingly untroubled by such a possibility. Cusk’s practice, kicking away the novelistic crutches, so to call them, he said, removing the distractions of plot, the illusions of character, or at least by demonstrating that plot is a distraction and character an illusion, helps us to see more clearly, to be both present and not present, both involved and uninvolved, both when reading a novel and when reading our own lives, for want of a better term to call them. Language contains the inclinations, he said, that we usually and by mistake apply to persons. I suppose that this is what he may have meant when he spoke of language being a puzzle of a stronger sort, but he did not give me a chance to ask him this. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels, he continued, and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction, Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. I exercised my concentration, finished my rather easy and common sort of puzzle, which at least was readily identifiable as a puzzle, and left the room despite his continuing explanation.
After the death of her invalid mother, a retired art teacher leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerising exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live. SoS was first published in 1966, and is now back in print.
”Intensely personal, Frame’s writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.'' —Hilary Mantel
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş $29
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love. [Paperback]
>>Building a bespoke culture.
>>The melancholic textures of feeling alive.
John Reynolds: The Lost Hours by Laurence Simmonds $85
The book frames and documents a series of paintings and collected associated writings from John Reynolds’s Lost Hours project. This idiosyncratic investigation delves into the mysterious 28-hour disappearance of Colin McCahon, a renowned New Zealand artist, in autumn 1984. The event occurred on the eve of McCahon’s major retrospective launch at the Sydney Biennale. The project not only pays homage to McCahon but also explores themes of time, memory, and the impact of dislocation on artistic consciousness. The book can be started either at the dark end or the bright end, with McCahon caught somehow in the pincers between the two. Impressive, beguiling, and nicely produced. [Wrappered paperback]
>>Look inside!
Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry $40
”There was relief, and there was loss — it was the saddest thing we'd ever seen, and the best thing we had ever done.” This is the story of the last days of Sarah Perry's father-in-law David's life, and also in its way the story of all our lives, and what we have in common. David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man — he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was. Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses — but his disease progressed so quickly that often they were alone with him. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives. Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief — it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love. [Paperback]
”What a luminously beautiful book, an instant classic. Every page is suffused with such honesty, tenderness and love. Few people have written about dying with such clear-eyed accuracy and immense humanity. Never flinching, never sugar-coating, Sarah has captured brilliantly how caring for someone you love in their final days can upend everything you thought you knew about living. Please read this book. It may very well change how you live.” —Rachel Clarke
”I have just sat and read Sarah's wonderful book, nodding and agreeing with so many tiny details that she has noticed and reflected on with a writer's eye and a loving daughter-in-law's heart. Just beautiful. I hope her luminous writing will console and encourage her readers, all of whom are mortals. This book is a slice of reality that comforts even as it confronts us. It is a book filled with love and human frailty, and I was spellbound.” —Kathryn Mannix
Fatherhood by Caleb Klaces $39
Following the birth of their first child, a couple move out of the capital to the northern countryside, where they believe the narrator's great-grandfather, a Russian emigrant, was laid to rest. The father dedicates himself to parenting, writing and conversation with his dead ancestor, newly conscious of the ties that bind the present to the past. It is a time of startling intimacies, baby-group small talk, unexpected relationships and tender rhythms, when every clock seems to tell a different time, and the solidity of language is broken. As his daughter begins to speak, the father's gentleness turns to unexplainable rage. He begins to question who he must protect his child from - the outside world or himself. Their new house, the family discover, is built on a floodplain. Moving between history, memory and autobiography, its shifting form captures a life and language split open by fatherhood. An experiment in rewriting masculinity, it asks how bodies can share both a house and a planet. [Paperback]
>>Life and language split open.
>>Cascading generations.
>>Great expectations.
>>Metaphorical breakdown.
>>Caleb Klaces’s latest book, Mr Outside, is also remarkable.
Loren Ipsum by Andrew Gallix $38
Writers are being murdered. Heads are rolling; ponytails are chopped off; victims tarred and feathered. The French literary world lives in fear of the next attack. A nihilistic terrorist group takes responsibility, but their objective remains obscure. Loren Ipsum is an English journalist, who moves to Paris to research a monograph on an underground writer called Adam Wandle. The terrorists' slogans are all culled from his works. Has Adam been co-opted as their guru, or is he actually their eminence grise? And what of Loren Ipsum herself? Will they ever be able to leave the 21st century and make it to the mythical Blue Island? Set on the Riviera and in Paris, Loren Ipsum is a darkly comic satirical novel. [Paperback]
>>Gleeful scorn on the pretensions of contemporary literary life.
Lost Evangeline (A ‘Norendy’ tale) by Kaye DiCamillo, illustrated by Sophie Blackall $28
When a shoemaker discovers a tiny girl (as small as a mouse!) in his shop, he takes her in, names her Evangeline, and raises her as his own. The shoemaker’s wife, however, fears that Evangeline has bewitched her husband, so when an opportunity arises to rid herself of the girl, she takes it. Evangeline finds herself far from her adopted father and her home, a tiny girl lost in the wide world. But she is brave, and she is resourceful, and with the help of those she meets on her journey—including a disdainful and self-satisfied cat—she may just find her way again. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>The other Norendy tales (they are not a sequence; they can be read in any order!).
>>Read Stella’s review of The Puppets of Spelhorst.
>>Read Stella’s review of The Hotel Balzaar.
All Consuming: Why we eat the way we eat now by Ruby Tandoh $45
Being into food — following and making it, queuing for it and discussing it — is no longer a subculture. It's become mass culture. The food landscape is more expansive and dizzying by the day. Recipes, once passed from hand to hand, now flood newspaper supplements and social media. Our tastes are engineered in food factories, hacked by supermarkets and influenced by Instagram reels. Ruby Tandoh's startlingly original analysis traces this extraordinary transformation over the past seventy-five years, making sense of this electrifying new era by examining the social, economic, and technological forces shaping the foods we hunger for today. Exploring the evolution of the cookbook and light-speed growth of bubble tea, the advent of TikTok critics and absurdities of the perfect dinner party, Tandoh's laser-sharp investigation leaves her questioning: how much are our tastes, in fact, our own? [Hardback]
”A fascinating, sometimes shocking, eye-opener that is also brilliantly funny.” —Claudia Roden
”Endlessly inspirational.” —Nigel Slater
>>Endless hype queues.
>>Too many recipes already.
>>Digested food culture.
Building People by Craig Moller $48
Building People is a playful collection of Ngāti Haua architect Craig Moller's lockdown-era drawings, where buildings come to life with human and animal traits. Blending humour, warmth, and charm, Moller turns architecture into a personal, expressive art form — reminding us that buildings, like drawings, are ultimately about people. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>Cheese scones.
This Way Up: When maps go wrong (and why it matters) by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Forman $40
Packed with humour and fascinating facts, This Way Up takes a deep dive into the world’s most intriguing and baffling map blunders. From ancient miscalculations to modern mishaps, each chapter uncovers a unique tale of cartographic chaos and the people responsible for it. These aren’t just ordinary mistakes – they are spectacularly wrong maps that tell a story of adventure, error and unexpected humour, with each one offering a new piece to the puzzle of ‘What on earth happened there?’ [Paperback]
”The funniest book on geography ever written.” —Rufus Hound
>>Meet the Map Men.
Japan: An autobiography, II by Peter Shaw $48
Following the success of his first volume, Peter Shaw continues his entertaining musings in answer to the question why he goes to Japan so often. Both novice and seasoned travelers to Japan will find invaluable insights and information to guide them on their next journey. The author takes the reader into rural Japan in the footsteps of the much-travelled poet Basho (1644-1694). Ranging far beyond the usual tourist traps, he explores easily accessible temples and shrines, delights in Japan's unique regional cuisine and engages with interesting people. The nicely presented and illustrated book also considers topics such as the place of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japanese life and unexpected connections between Japanese and Māori culture all from a uniquely New Zealand perspective. It is punctuated with anecdotes, tips, and recipes. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>Get the first volume, too!
Behind the Hill by Robin Robilliard $40
Behind The Hill is a social history, recording people’s lives from interviews, from one end of Golden Bay to the other. Every portrayal has something to say about the values and norms of the time. The book follows the revolutionary changes that affected one of New Zealand’s most isolated areas over succeeding decades — with the arrival of hippies, worldly foreigners, IT specialists, retired professionals and bearded environmentalists. Robilliard identifies the advantage to children brought up in the pre-digital age, with little money, but with the freedom to run wild and take risks, to develop character and survival skills. Equally important, life behind the physical and psychological barrier of the Tākaka Hill, has forced residents to become resilient and develop leadership ability, that might not, in easier circumstances, and larger populations, have been discovered. From the author of Hard Country. [Paperback]