Read our 501st newsletter! (Still going!)
2 October 2026
Is it possible to be terrified as you read a novel? You know you can close the book, that it is merely words. Tīhema Baker lets you in easy. The door is opened wide to the domestic scene of father, mother and child. The baby, Wī, not sleeping, the parents Āniwa and Hōhepa sleep deprived. Nothing unusual here, aside from Hepa’s vivid dreaming. Everyone is feeling trapped, the grind of life with a small child, a first child and all the changes this entails. None more so than Hōhepa: bereft at moving from the public service of Wellington central to up the coast at the city council, a little at sea with fatherhood, and isolated from his past social circles, as well as his tūrangawaewae. Add to that the pressure of never enough money, and Hepa’s desire to be a good father and partner – to be a good role model to his son, to both protect and provide, and be sensitive to the needs of his family, while juggling work, protesters outside the office, racism at work and in the news, and a sense of panic at all the evils that could befall his son. If you have read Turncoat, you’ll recognise a few familiar themes – concerns over the degradation of te Tiriti, institutional racism, Pākehā ignorance — and Baker’s ability to slice humour into his books without degrading the serious and confronting aspects of his novels. Unlike Turncoat, and Baker’s young adult novels, there is no sci-fi here. This is a contemporary setting, well bogged down in the quotidian life of a middle class Māori father. But this is Tīhema Baker writing, so expect the unexpected. There’s another entity, one that comes in dreams, who like One Day a Taniwha seems relatively benign at first. The pāua-shelled eyes appear to look with curiousity from the face of the lizard; it is silent, appearing in Hepa’s dreams at first as a bystander, a witness. Yet Hepa is right to be wary of this visitor. Talking to Uncle Bush, he finds out you can travel in your dreams, some believe to actual places and people. The dreams become more vivid, the taniwha less benign, the pāua shell eyes teasing and bullying, the creature shapeshifting, its voice inside Hepa’s head goading him, to the point where Hepa’s is looking for a way to have dreamless sleep. As Hōhepa’s lack of sleep and the pressure he puts himself under pushes him to the edge, the darkest emotions and actions take place in his dreams. There is a violence there that is difficult to read without being shaken; it is a violence of frustration, the violence of colonisation and its ongoing consequences, and a battle of ideas about masculinity. The edges are fraying, unravelling at pace, and when dreams and reality merge, the consequeces are frightening. In One Day a Taniwha, Tīhema Baker examines fatherhood, masculinity, and male Māori mental health. Deceptively playful at first, this crescendo of a novel, is a powerful piece of writing.
For some reason it had become a habit for him to write his reviews of books in the style of the books themselves, or as near a style as he could manage, a habit or an affectation, he wasn’t sure which, but this habit or affectation, if it was indeed a habit or an affectation, did have a serious intent, and was therefore not really a habit although it still could be an affectation, in that he somehow seemed to believe that a review written in the style of the subject of the review might reveal to him, and possibility to the readers of the review if there chanced to be any readers of the review, if such things could be left to chance, really such things were always left to chance, what was he saying, he seemed to believe that a review written in the style of the subject of the review might reveal something otherwise unnoticed or essential or incidental about the book in question, perhaps he was attempting to remove himself from a position of agency or of responsibility for the review by enticing, if that is the word, the book to write a review of itself. Form generates content, he shouted, frightening the cat, I want to write like a machine, I want to tinker with form until it purrs like a literary motor, then I will be able to put anything at all into the hopper, switch it on, and out comes literature. The cat was quick to resettle, she was used to this kind of excitement. If I were to write a review of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus in the form of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus I would also be writing it in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he thought, I would be writing it in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus because Signe Gjessing has written her book in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in order, he thought, to see what kind of poetry could be generated by such a form, in order to use form as a machine for the generation of text, in order, he thought, to test the limits of language, to see what it is and is not good for, just like Wittgenstein, or just like Wittgenstein thought he was doing at the time he wrote that book. If Wittgenstein made no distinction between form and content, the same must be true of poetry, he thought. If for Wittgenstein the limits of knowledge are the limits of language, what are we to say of poetry, always straining as it does, or as it should, he thought or thought that perhaps he thought, into the unsayable? If Wittgenstein sought the limit of what can be said, through progressing out linguistically from the obvious towards that limit, pushing at it and establishing it, he thought, he entails that beyond that limit there exists not nothing but rather that about which nothing can be said. What cannot be said is signified by the complete exhaustion of that which can be said. Gjessing also is obsessed with the limit with which Wittgenstein was at the time he wrote his book obsessed, but she stands at that limit as if from the habitat beyond, both Wittgenstein and Gjessing are concerned to discover the nature of the limit inherent in language, if there is such a limit and such a limit is inherent, but Gjessing wants, he thought, to destroy that limit or even to show that the destruction of the limit inherent in language is itself inherent in language. He had written in his bad handwriting in his notebook that Gjessing had written in the introduction to her book that “The poem is a modification of the universal — as though the sayable were an incapacity of the unsayable,” and, he thought, Gjessing is running Wittgenstien’s machine in reverse to see what poetry comes out. If the world is comprised not of things but of states of affairs which are the grammatical relations between things, there is no reason to think that that which is not the case is not governed by or, he thought, even generated by this universal grammar. Texts are comprised not of words but of grammar, he shouted, but the cat was long gone. Well, he thought, if I was going to write my review of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus in the form of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, I should have started earlier, I should have started, as does Gjessing, as does Wittgenstein to whose text Gjessing’s text is a response and a rejoinder, with a number of numbered statements on the first level to which another number of statements numbered to the first decimal respond or are implied and to which another number of statements numbered to the second decimal respond or are implied and so on until perhaps the fourth decimal or what we could call the fifth level, I’m not exactly sure if this is clear, a shining rack of cogs used in Wittgenstein’s case to generate philosophy, if he believed at that time there even was such a thing, and in Gjessing’s case to generate poetry, or whatever we might choose to call it, if I had written my review like this, he thought, what would I have written? Perhaps if I can devise such a grammatical machine to write reviews, a machine I can just turn upon any text, I can perhaps be relieved of certain of my duties, except perhaps to now and again apply a little oil, and perhaps get sometimes earlier to bed.
In this thoughtful science-fiction thriller emerging from te ao Māori, a research scientist and her friend struggle to hold their community together after the discovery of human remains in a local cave reveals a devastating history dating back to the 1800s that threatens to undermine their restoration of a Wairarapa forest. A very effective and enjoyable blend of time travel, environmentalism, local humour, whakapapa, rongoā, and immediacy.
>>Find out more.
>>Speaking to our current moment.
>>A new chapter.
>>Not ticking a box.
>>Read an extract.
>>The artwork on the cover.
>>Solid, but fluid.
>>Books from Spoor Books.
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
LIFE OF M by Rachel Cusk $37
Rachel Cusk’s new novel continues her project of applying stress to the conventions of the novel in order to make fiction reveal truths about life that we are conditioned to avoid. In Life of M a character who observes and writes describes or defines the life of a character who performs and is observed, a film star who finds no more autonomy in the role of herself than she does when she is acting.
ON THE EQUALITY OF ALL THINGS: Physics and philosophy by Carlo Rovelli $50
”Carlo Rovelli is the best thinker out there articulating physics, philosophy, and literature. There simply are no scientists of his caliber who also are humanists of the first order. His prose has the enviable ability to expand the realm of the utterable and, with it, the reach of our intellectual experience.” —Hernan Diaz
EXIT PARTY by Emily St. John Mandel $38
”What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel's imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights. Extraordinary.” —The Guardian
HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY: The story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple $40
”Vast in scope, elegiac in prose, this book brings to life the profound humanity of those who stood up to the blood soaked ethno-nationalisms that led to so many of the twentieth century's storied horrors. All the while, Crabapple never lets us forget that they were also fighting for a world that would not give rise to such evil. This book is many things: an ode to the grand legacy of anti-Zionist Jewishness; a profound reflection on whether history has morals; and an essential resource for anti-fascist history, concepts and tools.” — Jason Stanley
DIRTY WORK by Nicky Hager $35
An exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right, to use race politics to create division, and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. "I do not care and New Zealanders do not care about this topic." —Christopher Luxon
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.
Bedford Street by Ross Murray $35
The much-anticipated new graphic novel from the author of Rufus Marigold, Bedford Street is a darkly comic exploration of social decay, hardship, recklessness and the ways in which we care for one another. Eight loosely interwoven stories create a mosaic of lives lived in the growing maelstrom of 21st century Aotearoa, where some submit to their worst impulses and others try their best despite it all. Beautifully done. Subtle. Devastating. [Paperback]
'This is one of the most deeply truthful depictions of humanity I've ever read. Beautifully bleak and chocka with delicious moments of dark humour, Murray has created a truly captivating cast of (highly) flawed yet loveable characters.' —Tom Sainsbury
”Bedford Street is not just a moving and beautifully presented graphic novel but, as with Rufus Marigold, it invites us to think about relationships, how we conduct ourselves, caring and being responsible.” —Graham Reid, Elsewhere
>>Look inside!
>>Read an extract.
>>What has happened in our society?
>>Deeply flawed.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Rufus Marigold.
>>Other superb Aotearoa graphic novels from Earth’s End.
Whose Knowledge Counts? From warp drive to waka huia by Pounamu Jade William Emery Aikman $20
‘The miracle of knowledge is that it speaks across time and space, from tūpuna to descendant.’ Knowledge takes many forms, but not all are valued equally. Pounamu Jade Aikman shows how particular ways of knowing underpin life in Aotearoa, to the exclusion of others. Ranging from Foucault to Spock to school lunches, Aikman traces the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge systems. He looks at the impact of this on our economy, prisons, politics and constitutional relationships, asking is knowledge, like space, our final frontier? Challenging, optimistic and ever curious, this Text explores how we value knowledge, and what that means for us all. [Paperback]
A Guide to Making Fragments from Diaries by Joshua Beckman $45
Joshua Beckman's new book, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries, gathers poems found or made in various forms — chapter summaries of non-existent books, body poems, an assemblage of his mother's remarks while painting his portrait, lists of thoughts and things (one of all the uninvited animals and insects who entered his house over the course of a year!). The book culminates with the guide, including light instructions toward finding fragments within a notebook or diary. [Paperback]
”If you take a broad squint at our nation's new poets you can find two general strategies: poets who are carrying the torch, and poets who are using it to start fires. And then we have Joshua Beckman. He seems to be doing everything.” —Daniel Handler, The Believer
>>Early 1984.
>>A sequence of prompts.
Brother BrontBrontë by Fernando A. Flores $37
The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech-industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of its mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick's pockets. Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Proserpina and Neftalí. One of Three Rivers' last literate citizens, Neftalí hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalí's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick's forces, Neftalí and Proserpina, with the help of a wounded Bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel aunties, rise up to reclaim their city — and in the process, unlock Rivas's connection to Three Rivers itself. A mordant, gonzo romp through a ruined world that, in its dysfunction, tyranny, and disparity, feels uncannily like our own. [Paperback]
"Flores's style has an exhilarating punk, D.I.Y. aplomb; it's as if he feels he's inventing literature for the first time." —Mark Leyner, The New York Times Book Review
"This crazy, cakey world-making of Fernando A. Flores is all of literature: wide, plaintive, melancholy, and full of feminist fellow joyousness and ways." —Eileen Myles
>>Read an extract.
Land, Race, and the Settler Imgination by Liana MacDonald $20
Liana MacDonald exposes how settler colonialism is sustained by the places we move through, the institutions we work in and the stories we tell. Deconstructing the ‘settler fantasy’, she reveals how a settler understanding of race, land and power is made to seem natural, even inevitable. Well-meaning efforts to challenge it can reinforce the very thing they oppose. Once we recognise our part in these stories, MacDonald argues, we might begin to remake our relationships with one another, in our everyday lives and workplaces. [Paperback]
Noriko Smiling by Adam Mars-Jones $30
'Late Spring, directed and co-written by Yasujiro Ozu, was released in 1949, which makes it an old film, or a film that has been new for a long time...' So begins this remarkable essay in narrative reconstruction, which elicits a world of meanings from the reticences of one classic Japanese movie, and reserves to the very end a resolution of its mystery. Adam Mars-Jones gives a virtuoso performance as that lost figure from the earl days of cinema: the film explainer. There has never been a film book like this one. [Hardback (clothbound)]
>>The light is sixty years old.
>>Demystifying the master.
>>Watch Late Spring.
Kupe me te Wheke nui a Muturangi nā Mat Tait $30
Te haerenga a Kupe ki Aotearoa! I ako a Kupe mō te wheke nui, mō te wheke wehi nāna tonu ngā ika o te moana i kai, arā, kua kore ngā kaimoana hei kai mā ngā tāngata o Hawaiki. Nā, ka whāia taua wheke rā e Kupe, ka whiti atu i Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Nāwai rā, ka kite a Hine-te-Aparangi i tētahi whenua me tētahi ao tea roa: Aotearoa! Ākona ngā kōrero mō te pakanga nui i waenga i a Kupe me te wheke nui. [Uhi mārō]
>>Tirohia ki roto!
>>Kupe and the Giant Octopus of Muturangi.
Hinterlands: journeys through Europe’s unfinished frontiers by Hannah Lucinda Smith $55
Long before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, conflict was simmering on Europe's borders. In overlooked territories in eastern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus — from the Balkans and Cyprus to Abkhazia on the fringes of Georgia — local disputes spiral into regional crises, global alliances are forged and broken, and power is brokered while the West looks elsewhere. In Hinterlands, correspondent Hannah Lucinda Smith draws on vivid first-hand encounters with politicians, spies and ordinary people caught in the crosshairs to paint a gripping portrait of Europe at its edges — and the struggles that will define its future. [Hardback]
”Brilliantly reported and sharply analysed, Hinterlands shines a light on the disputed on the disputed regions that are on the frontline of great power conflict.' —Gideon Rachman
'A gripping and elegantly written exploration of Europe's little-understood frontiers. Hannah Lucinda Smith reveals why the continent's borderlands matter — and how they are quietly reshaping the future of the continent.' —Peter Frankopan
’An important book which provides a compelling reminder of Europe's half-forgotten border conflicts, each of them capable of erupting once again into war’ —Sam Miller
The Hidden Globe: How wealth hacks the world by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian $28
Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist's riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens' rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had — bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centres where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by foreign governments and multinational corporations — and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids. [Paperback]
”This book did nothing less than make me re-see the world. Original, and very clever.” —Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
”In describing insidiously interconnected global regimes of inequality and injustice, Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.” —Pankaj Mishra
Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks $38
Philip Deval, a soldier recently returned from the beaches of Normandy, arrives in Palestine on a ‘peace-keeping mission’ in the final days of the British Mandate. The Sea of Galilee glitters in the distance as war-weary troops marvel at the novelty of oranges and sun — a paradise that belies a fierce new conflict about to erupt. Some years later, Philip begins work teaching at a school in the English countryside and meets the enigmatic music mistress, Frances Darwood. Over long evenings spent listening to records in her music room, they grow close. But Philip is a changed man, and must confront the secrets and scars of all he has lived through — which threaten, even now, to upend his future. Farewell to Eden is a portrait of an embattled post-war Britain. It asks the question: how, after great suffering, do we retain our humanity, learn to love again, and believe in the promise of a better life? [Paperback]
”A fascinating, timely and densely pleasurable novel, written with measured and impressive intelligence and tremendous narrative aplomb.” —William Boyd
”A beautifully written and deceptively deep novel of moral choice set in the aftermath of the Second World War. The characters are as utterly convincing as the story.” —Antony Beevor
”Faulks is one of the titans of historical fiction and has this gift for really bringing to life the minutiae of the suffering of war and violence. It's a really arresting book and important work of storytelling.” —Afua Hirsch
The Jewish Bakery: Over 100 family recipes from East London’s oldest Jewish bakery by Jennifer Rinkoff $65
From Rinkoffs, a family-run Jewish bakery in London's East End, comes The Jewish Bakery, an exciting selection of their tried-and-tested recipes, all of which bring the joy of the bakery into your kitchen. Ranging from simple treats to more involved recipes, you'll find traditional and celebratory Jewish items, with something for everyone. Try your hand at much-loved specialties, including challah and beigels, as well as more modern creations, like matcha babka and vegan chocolate banana bread. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
This is 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.
Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel $38
2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party. Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong. Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality — and may hold the key to a very different world. Exit Party is an electrifying novel about freedom and surveillance, art and survival, love and loss in a broken world. From the author of Station Eleven. [Paperback]
”Ambitious and captivating, the novel will rightly entrance new readers while gripping Mandel's existing ones. Exit Party feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author's early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven.” —The New York Times
”What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel's imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights. Extraordinary.” —The Guardian
>>Disagreeing on basic reality.
>>Don’t blame Emily St. John Mandel.
>>Seeking joy at the end of the world.
The Star Path by Witi Ihimaera Smiler $35
A young whale searches for the whale rider's heir and a teenager takes an epic voyage to Antarctica with a fleet of waka hourua to claim his lost inheritance, in this breathtaking return to the world of The Whale Rider, over thirty years on. Sixteen-year-old Teva has grown up between worlds. Raised in France, he knows almost nothing of his father's Polynesian heritage — only that a family rift has kept them apart. But when his astonishing talent is discovered by a circus master, Teva's journey leads him across the Pacific and towards a destiny older than memory. Deep within Antarctica's treacherous ice mazes, the royal tribe of Mysticeti whales fears their ancient leader has brought them there to die. Decades earlier, he stranded them on the east coast of Aotearoa. As winter closes in, they must find the whale rider's heir, the only one who can lead their chief back to warmer waters. But nobody knows who that is, let alone where they can be found. Sweeping from France to French Polynesia, Aotearoa and Antarctica, myth and reality, past and present, meet in an unforgettable story of identity, belonging and hope. [Paperback]
>>Get this edition of The Whale Rider.
The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje (translated from Dutch by David McKay) $48
Inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë, this 700-page book — acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century — pulls readers into a narrative that redefines time itself. In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May's only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it's labelled as 'ghastly' and 'immoral'. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own. In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May — both before and after her death — unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister's letters; her biographers' words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later. In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontës themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death. [Paperback]
"The reader advances across Mr. McKay's superb translation as though compelled by a fierce highland wind. In the book's telling, the Drayden sisters' imaginative visions are so powerful that they reshape the way people experience reality. Readers, too, will finish this vast, teeming novel with a sense of a world transformed." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"A sprawling meditation on death, sisterhood, and the mysteries that refuse to be buried. Daanje boldly grapples with unsettling questions, challenging our conception of time and the ways it governs our experience of death and grief. The Song of the Stork and Dromedary stands as another example of Daanje's brilliant storytelling, cementing her status as a writer to watch for years to come." —Chicago Review of Books
>>A gothic puzzle across time.
>>The translator’s passage.
This Dark Night: The life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz $50
Emily Jane Bronte was 27 when she started writing the wayward novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire. Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Lutz reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë's days, bringing us closer to the great and fierce writers, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art. This book has much to reveal to readers of Wuthering Heights, as we accompany Emily Brontë around the wild moorlands she loved so much. Also threaded through with the contemporary politics and events of the era (from the early labour movements of the Chartists and reformists, to the slave uprisings in the colonies), and authors and locals that Emily Brontë read about or knew (from proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the masculine lesbian Anne Lister). Featuring illuminating readings of her poems, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily Brontë's irrepressible spirit and wild imagination. [Hardback]
”Emerald Fennell 's hallucinatory adaptation of Wuthering Heights invited us to consider Emily Bronte in one light; Lutz's painstaking account shows her in quite another. Far from the eccentric, isolated genius , Lutz's Bronte is grounded in her material reality, from everyday household tasks to illness and grief.” —Guardian
”It says much for Lutz's skills as a writer that she succeeds in creating such a seamless and compelling narrative out of her materials. Her insight and sensitivity as a critic, as well her deep knowledge of the sources, allow her to open up the inner life of her famously reclusive subject. The result is a convincing portrait and an impressive achievement.” —Lucasta Miller, The Spectator
Hometown by Shaun Tan $38
You need to know who I am. What I think and how I feel. Then you'll know why I did what I did. Imagine living in a perfect world. You have a loving family, a beautiful home and awesome friends. Everything is just as it should be. Until one day, when a stranger arrives. A stranger who looks just like you. A stranger with a troubling message... From the creator of The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia comes a visually stunning, moving and humorous meditation on all the things that make us who we are and how we choose to live. [Hardback]
'Loved it!! Chockfull of magic!!' —Guillermo Del Toro
'I can't overstate how much Shaun's work has meant for me and my family over the years. And now, his latest is a passionate, clever and inspiring tale about how we choose which family to love. I am so excited to share this one with mine.' —Darren Aronofsky
'Where The Arrival was about leaving home for the strange but hopefully welcoming new world, Hometown is about what makes us what we are—family, friends, environment. A joyful, surprising, marvellous book.' —Kelly Link
'Here is a cornucopia of a world to set beside the densely realised imaginings of Topor or Miyazaki — a many-splendored thing.' —Dave McKean
>>Look inside!
>>Twenty years in the making.
>>Just an ordinary day.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translate from Danish by Martin Aitken) $28
In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who comes to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they perform unchristian acts and can steal people's happiness, cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake. Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe. Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources, such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires. [Now in paperback]
”Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There's nobody else doing quite what she does.” —Samantha Harvey
”I gulped The Wax Child down and dreamed wild dreams about it. Just brilliant.” —Max Porter
”An incantation that explores womanhood, motherhood and bodily autonomy. Martin Aitken's mesmerising, exquisitely precise translation is, literally, breathtaking. To be read in one sitting, on a dark winter's night.” —The Irish Times
>>Holding the skin girdle.
>>Witch trials and wax narrators.
>>Get the hardback!
>>Other books by Olga Ravn.
This Little World: A new history of Tudor and Stuart England by Nandini Das $65
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England Shakespeare's 'scepter'd isle', proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. But beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, lies a more complex and connected reality. England at this time was far from insular. Travelling in and out of the country were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, African innkeepers and Native American envoys. There were people like the Flemish artist Levina Teerlinc, probably the only painter to be employed by four English monarchs. There was William Adams, a Kentish navigator who became Japan's first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the colony in Virginia, who battled in the courts for herself and her son. Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life, yet alive to the sweep of history, This Little World offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England's past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making on the cusp of empire told through the traces of those often written out of it. In reframing England's story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental ideas — about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging. [Hardback]
”Contains a wonderful gallery of precisely drawn yet constantly surprising Tudor and Stuart portraits, like an album of perfect Hilliard miniatures that dazzle us with their cosmopolitan attitudes and globalised lives. Taking us from Italian renaissance scholars in Oxford to English Jesuits in Goa via a Kentish samurai in 17th-century Edo, this is a perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic and provincial terms.” —William Dalrymple, Guardian
”Look into the early modern period with Das as your guide and you will find that strangers, as they were called, were everywhere. Das is so immersed in the material that her imagination can take flight. It is unusual for historians to write with contemporary issues so openly at the forefront of their thinking, but Das is no ordinary historian. This Little World is at once an engaging and entirely fresh look at a period that is a foundational part of our national identity and an impassioned examination of our ideas about inclusion and exclusion, belonging and non-belonging, hope and fear. It works because it is rooted in exciting scholarship and lifted by wonderful writing, pulsing with "the restless energy of the in-between space." —Lucy Moore, Spectator
Reason, Carnival and Honour: An anthropology of free speech by Matei Candea $50
What does ‘free speech’ really mean? How does our understanding of it differ around the world? Why does it divide us — and how can we find common ground? What free speech really means is hotly contested. Is it increasingly under attack in our democracies, or is it being weaponised by the powerful? These debates don't just happen in the news: they divide families, strain relationships. This is because, anthropologist Matei Candea shows, arguments about free speech are not just about abstract principles: they question what it means to be a good person, to have empathy and courage. They involve fears for the future and longings for the past — and they demand that you pick a side, right now! In order to move away from the simple binaries of polarised debate, Candea shows us that we need to start counting to three. Deploying the power of thinking anthropologically, Reason, Carnival and Honour outlines three visions of free speech — Reason, or civil rational debate; Carnival, or the right to be outrageous; and Honour, the duty to stand by one's word. Sometimes supporting each other and sometimes at odds, they entail very different understandings of what language is and does, of what it means to be free. Building on years of research and an exploration of anthropological literature from around the globe — from tales of French cartoonists to Egyptian Bedouin women, Finnish talk-show hosts to Tibetan Buddhist monks — Reason, Carnival and Honour reveals a richer landscape of differences, to help us find new alliances and even answers to the question of what it is we're really arguing about. [Hardback]
”A book like no other on free speech, Candea deftly sidesteps polarised debates, bringing an anthropologist's eye to what people really mean and, in doing so, offers fresh, illuminating ways to understand ourselves and one another.” —Alpa Shah
Hīkoi: A Māori alphabet book for little (and not-so-little) activists [and] Toitū by Pania Tahau-Hodegs and Josie Selkirk $29 each
Inspired by the hīkoi in response to the Treaty Principles Bill, this story draws on the words of resilience and resistance that have inspired generations of Māori in the determination for our land, language and right to live as Māori and shape our own destiny. In the story, a koro and his moko join the hīkoi to parliament and remember past actions and activists who marched for justice. In the march, there are many figures from many communities and many walks of life, but they all walk in the same direction, unified in a vision of the future in which people thrive. The words of the story inspire us to be resilient and remind us that we are not alone, and that in coming together we are powerful. Hīkoi introduces Māori words, with the text in English; Toitū is entirely in te reo Māori. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
The Issa Valley by Czesław Miłosz (translated from Polish by Louis Iribarne) $25
'Thomas was born in the village of Gine at that time of year when a ripe apple thumps to the ground during an afternoon lull.' So a boy's life begins in a winding river valley on the Polish-Russian border where time is measured by seasonal rhythms and ancient songs. For Thomas, the ghosts in the forest are as real as the magical water-snakes that live in the Issa; in the village he is entranced by the women with their cinched waists and the men in their long boots. But when he is shown a map, he discovers a kingdom all his own and starts to dream of leaving the valley behind. [Paperback]
”A lyrical account of a rural boyhood, dominated by family, nature and village life. One is constantly aware of being in the hands of a master — of a talent that is original, unhurried, almost serene. He is a remarkable writer.” —Larry McMurty
”An idyll of immense charm and poetic depth. It takes a masterpiece to reveal the sheer unreality of our modern creative modes and poses, and Milosz's novel is such a masterpiece.” —John Bayley, The New York Review of Books
Capitalism and Its Critics: A battle of ideas in the modern world by John Cassidy $40
At a time when we are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability and morality of the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence. John Cassidy adopts a new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system's critics. From eighteenth-century weavers who rebelled against early factory automation to Eric Williams's paradigm-changing work on slavery and capitalism, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, this absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It looks at familiar figures - Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi - from a fresh perspective, but also focuses on many less familiar, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labour union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; and J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics. Blending biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time. [Paperback]
Whether this is the first VOLUME newsletter you have read, whether you have read all 500 over the VOLUME decade, or whether you have joined the VOLUME community somewhere along the way, thank you for being part of what we do! Thank you for your support and for the purchases that make VOLUME possible.
25 September 2026
As it is our 500th newsletter, we have been casting our eye back over the last ten years of reviews. I was intending to review Tīhema Baker’s excellent new novel, One Day A Taniwha, but I’m still a few pages from the end (you can read my review of Turncoat in the meantime, though). My excuse for the unfinished book: emptying my mother’s house. I’ve been sorting, packing and discarding, and cleaning. While looking back at 10 years of reviews, I came across one of my favourites from the ‘Object Lessons’ series – Shipping Container. I was intrigued by this theme for a number of reasons. Firstly, I live in a city with a port; secondly, I had delivered a Pecha Kucha back in 2008 called ‘Cargo’ about the act of making jewellery and shipping it to Amsterdam for an exhibition; thirdly, if you sell goods, you are aware of the movement of these goods; fourthly, I love history and what it tells you about how we change and adapt; fifthly, containers are a designed object that carries all objects; and sixthly, containers can’t help but be considered in a socio-political context. There are probably quite a few other reasons to be fascinated by the shipping container (e.g. the opening and closing mechanisms — and then I start wondering if I could make these on a jewellery scale…) but back to why I am intrigued all over again. This week is the skip week ( after the sorting, and taking-to-op-shops-and-recycling-centre). Many things in the basement have to go. All those dusty workshop materials that might of been handy and are no longer so, the kitset cupboards that were never quite right and abandoned, the worn-out-but-not-thrown-away-because-there-was-still-some-use-in-them appliances, the tools with blunt ends or sharpened so often they no longer are the objects they started as, the off-cuts, the small pieces of pipe, generally had-it things, well used but now not useful. And as I loaded the skip, and looked back at our reviews, I suddenly saw the shipping container and the skip as sister objects. One bringing in goods, the other sending them away. Our consumption, even of objects well-used over time, a marker of something both personal and universal. And then I started to think about the Gulf and the containers stuck at sea, of the shenanigans of rogue players and what does it mean to control the seas, and who benefits from shortages and interruptions, and who suffers? And then, what’s in all those containers? I hope for useful and/or beautiful objects, but I imagine there is a mulitude of cheap, plastic five minute wonders. But the good news is: books continue to come across the seas, sometimes we wait a while but it’s worth it. And now that we are in the season of publishing there will be a flurry of new arrivals to add to our reading piles.
You can read my original Shipping Container review here. And see the wide range of ‘Object Lessons’ series here. And coming up in October, I’ll be talking about books that feature objects on RNZ.
If the first recorded ‘drawing’ by an animal was a picture by an orangutan of the bars of its cage, what does this tell us about art? Are we ‘creative’ only to the extent that we are constrained, and is that constraint always therefore the underlying subject of our art? Nabokov’s assertion that such a drawing was made at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes zoo cannot be verified by documentation but seems to contain a truth that is too appealing to discredit (possibly this ‘seeming to contain a truth’ is more important to us than an actual truth, expressing a shared subjective state beyond the reach of facts, even though such thinking is the basis of our worst sorts of actions as well as of our best), but it is interesting that this supposed drawing was made by the sort of animal we see as most ‘similar’ to ourselves and that this ‘art’ occurred in a zoo, a place where we, as adults at least, see our own predicament in the constrained lives, boredom, helplessness and frustration of the animals, but are also kept separate from them by the grammar of the cage. The two zones demarcated by a single set of bars differ perhaps in physical scale more than they do in type. Is it for this reason that zoos are "deeply sad”, as Zambreno states in one of their reports that comprise ‘Zoo Studies’, the first half of this little book. “There is perhaps no more pronounced gap of awareness between a child and adult than when visiting the zoo,” writes Zambreno of visiting the zoo with their children, though they acknowledge, too, that children may experience the intense melancholy inherent in the species-alienation and the gazes that pass between the viewers and the viewed, gazes predicated on the bars through which they pass. Do we visit zoos to see in animals that which we are not or do not want to be? Are children more able than adults at seeing the actual individual behind the label on the cage? As adults are we blinded to the experiences of others by the very indignities of separation, classification and containment that we have expressed upon them?
The second half of Zambreno’s book, ‘My Kafka Method’, considers the actual impossibility of such a separation, through an accumulation of observations and fragments responding to first the life and then the animal stories of Franz Kafka. They see Kafka’s ambivalence about what could be called his ‘animal’ nature (though, when written, this term seems ludicrous) as the source of both his sufferings and his writings. If there is a zoo, Kafka is within the bars, his subjectivity complicated and enriched by the inescapability of his identification with the object of his attention. Our awareness, after all, is primarily a property of that of which we are aware. A text is a kind of cage in which the writer both performs for and avoids the gaze of the reader, a zone of both connection and separation, a space of porous and conflicted subjectivity, but Zambreno shows how, in Kafka’s stories, the circumstances of the writer, of the animal in the story, of Zambreno, of the reader — both of Kafka and of Zambreno — converge and begin to align. “Animals live in an ongoing present tense, the setting, possibly the subject, of this story,” Zambreno writes of ‘The Burrow’. Kafka does not exploit his animals as metaphors (“To make a metaphor of the animal is also to ignore the animal.”); he gives them enough vagueness of description to make them uncageable; he does not burden them with the sorts of meanings that would make their stories ‘signify’. “Don’t call them parables,” said Kafka. “If anything, call them animal stories.” We inhabit a zone of undifferentiated subjectivity. To draw a conclusion is to misrepresent the material.
Catch these five books!
Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.
THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT by Chloe Aridjis $38
'Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.' —Neel Mukherjee
DIRTY WORK by Nicky Hager $35
An exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right, to use race politics to create division, and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. "I do not care and New Zealanders do not care about this topic." —Christopher Luxon
PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $40
‘The novel’s kaleidoscopic structure combines with its chronological sweep to create a portrait of a community that is at once epic and intimate, precise and universal. At times it has the feel of a dark fairy tale, with elements of magical realism and echoes of Hasidic folk legends; at others, we are unmistakably in the realm of historical reality.’ —Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times
U.X.O. by Brannavan Gnanalingam $30
“Brannavan Gnanalingam has become well known for gripping, occasionally gristly, writing about New Zealand society. From the first page U.X.O. he ups the stakes by writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War. And yet, somehow, the book is a page tuner.” —Murdoch Stephens
LIFE OF M by Rachel Cusk $37
Rachel Cusk’s new novel continues her project of applying stress to the conventions of the novel in order to make fiction reveal truths about life that we are conditioned to avoid. In Life of M a character who observes and writes describes or defines the life of a character who performs and is observed, a film star who finds no more autonomy in the role of herself than she does when she is acting.
In 2023 Nicky Hager was accused of writing an exposé of the Taxpayers' Union when he was not in fact writing an exposé of the Taxpayers' Union. This prompted insiders to approach him with information that led to him writing an exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. Driven by wealthy New Zealanders, Big Tobacco, corporate and other interests, and aligned with the Atlas Network internationally, the Taxpayers’ Union has been particularly effective in nudging ACT and the National Party towards espousing their hard-right goals and rhetoric, from dismantling public services to removing restictions on the operations of corporations. Hager reveals how the Taxpayers’ Union deliberately introduced race-based politics as a politcal lever, first to derail Three Waters on behalf of business interests and then to undermine democracy and weaken protections for the environment. Although Christopher Luxon is quoted as saying, “Can I just say up front, thanks to you and all your members for all the work you do. … I really like what you guys do,” not everyone towards the right is enamoured by the Taxpayers’ Union’s operations: this book is based on interviews with former members, employees, and other insiders.
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.
Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and New Zealand’s Hard Right by Nicky Hager $35
In 2023 Nicky Hager was accused of writing an exposé of the Taxpayers' Union when he was not in fact writing an exposé of the Taxpayers' Union. This prompted insiders to approach him with information that led to him writing an exposé of the Taxpayers' Union and the wider spiderweb of lobby groups and astroturf organisations that have been working to push political discourse in New Zealand to the right and to smear and discredit those who oppose them. Driven by wealthy New Zealanders, Big Tobacco, corporate and other interests, and aligned with the Atlas Network internationally, the Taxpayers’ Union has been particularly effective in nudging ACT and the National Party towards espousing their hard-right goals and rhetoric, from dismantling public services to removing restictions on the operations of corporations. Hager reveals how the Taxpayers’ Union deliberately introduced race-based politics as a politcal lever, first to derail Three Waters on behalf of business interests and then to undermine democracy and weaken protections for the environment. Although Christopher Luxon is quoted as saying, “Can I just say up front, thanks to you and all your members for all the work you do. … I really like what you guys do,” not everyone towards the right is enamoured by the Taxpayers’ Union’s operations: this book is based on interviews with former members, employees, and other insiders. [Paperback]
>>”Obsessed with one guy and a book.”
>>A rotten stench.
>>Tugging at the spiderweb.
>>Chiding in plain sight.
On the Equality of All Things: Physics and philosophy by Carlo Rovelli $50
What can we really know about the world around us? With clarity and lightness, physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through the speculative depths of modern physics, unafraid to test their limits, not least because, as he suggests, there may be no final ground to reach. Electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies are not essentially different in nature from one another. They are ideas that illuminate each other. Reality, he shows, is shaped by this continuous play of reflections. From this emerges Rovelli's central insight: the equality of all things. Like the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure whether he is Zhuangzi dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be Zhuangzi, Rovelli invites us to see reality anew, recognizing our knowledge is coherent but also uncertain and circular. We are made of the same stuff as the rest of reality — and so we are, in a deep sense, home in the world. [Hardback]
’A treatise that feels entirely liberating and brings its readers closer to the world around them. The poetic streak Rovelli is celebrated for is fully apparent through its pages, simultaneously enriching and contextualising the complex scientific ideas contained within.’ —AnOther
”’Interesting’ barely touches the sides with Rovelli.” —New Scientist
”Carlo Rovelli is the best thinker out there articulating physics, philosophy, and literature. There simply are no scientists of his caliber who also are humanists of the first order. His prose has the enviable ability to expand the realm of the utterable and, with it, the reach of our intellectual experience.” —Hernan Diaz
>>The poet of physics.
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient literature by Emily Wilson $33
How do we give old words new voices? What must a translator lose — and might she gain — when she moves between languages, bringing ancient stories to modern life? Reflecting on the inspiration, interpretation and (mis)appropriation of words from Antiquity to today, Emily Wilson invites us to explore the translator's art and mind — and gives a wholly fresh insight into the joys and quandaries of her own work. From Athenian comedy and Rome's love of Greek culture to Han Kang's novels, Cardi B's lyrics and the discoveries she made whilst translating Homer, this is a playful and fascinating voyage into the promise, possibility and constant renewal of our founding classical culture. [Paperback]
”Emily Wilson's brilliant reconsiderations of the ancient world — through the figure of Helen of Troy, the remaking of the Iliad by Christopher Logue, the use of comedy to grapple with dark matters, even slavery, and much besides — makes this an enthralling and profoundly relevant book.” —Salman Rushdie
”I adored reading these joyful, illuminating, and engrossing journeys through ancient literature. Wilson's interest is wide-ranging, moving with elegance and insight across genres and millennia. With wit, passion, and clarity, she invites us into each of these fascinating subjects. The final essay especially is required reading for anyone interested in translation, drawing back the veil on how a brilliant scholar and writer approaches her work.” —Madeline Miller
”We're incredibly lucky to have Emily Wilson writing about the art, politics and ethics of translation and retranslation. Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is an impressive display of Wilson's expertise, conviction and wit. Her impact within and without the world of literary translation has been huge.” —Jen Calleja
>>Her Iliad.
>>Her Odyssey.
Kua Tau: A life in stories by Tainui Stephens $50
‘When we’re young, we learn the stories of others. / When we’re adults, we create our own story. / When we’re old, we tell our story.’ From the beginning, Tainui Stephens has been finding stories. In people, in place, and in the shifting shape of Māori life in Aotearoa. And through a career in filmmaking, broadcasting and cultural advocacy, he has been finding himself. Kua Tau gathers up a kete of his best writing on these subjects, drawing from his much-loved essays for the online magazine E-Tangata. From the turbulence of the 1970s and 1980s to the powerful iwi Māori of today, Stephens writes about the people who shaped him. Kaumātua of the old world. Marae aunties. Rangatahi finding their place. Activists, artists, whānau and friends. The essays travel through reo and tikanga, identity, leadership, racism, grief and joy. Warm, direct and deeply grounded, this is writing from a superb storyteller, and a book about the stories that make us whole. [Wrappered paperback]
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers) $25
”beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert...” These are the words the Professor finds, scrawled in nail polish, above the mutilated corpse of a man. She reports the crime to the police and becomes the first informant in an investigation led by the Detective, who has a new-found obsession with poetry. As the bodies of more men are discovered alongside cryptic lines of verse, it becomes clear that this is only one in a string of crimes — all connected, all with literary clues. As the Professor becomes wrapped up in the murders, the boundaries of story — and of genre — break down. Can the Detective decipher the meaning of the poems in time to stop the spread of violence? [Paperback]
”This detective novel radically scrambles what we think of, and how we relate to, the genre. The case is ‘full of psychological nooks and crannies. Of poetic shadows. Gender traps. Metaphors. Metonyms.’ That also describes Rivera Garza's exceptional style, and the deeply rewarding experience of reading Death Takes Me. The novel is dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow. A harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.” —New York Times
”Rivera Garza, who won a Pulitzer prize last year for her memoir of femicide in Mexico, plays with form, blending fiction with an essay complete with footnotes, satirising media coverage, incorporating comments on the publication of the book we're reading, and generally having fun. Her exuberance is contagious. ‘Reading shouldn't be so complicated,’ says one character. ‘A matter of turning the page.’ Of course, it's both.” —Spectator
The Strangers by Naomi Alderman $38
They came from nowhere, and now they are everywhere. A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents' home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long, trunk-like nose. Suddenly these ‘mimmoths’ are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they've come from. As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief — a place with its own logic and rhythms — the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes. Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to 'mimmoth psychosis'? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably? From the author of The Power, The Strangers is a original and moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. [Paperback]
”In the same way that a gravestone is an attempt to give form to an absence, Alderman's structural ingenuity allows the reader to wrangle some of the ineffable aspects of grief into something more coherent and bounded.” —Guardian
”An entirely new species of writing about grief. I loved this weird, warm-blooded, and inquisitive book.” —Eleanor Catton
The Home of the Drowned by Elin Anna Labba (translated from Swedish by Elizabeth Clark Wessel) $38
Every summer, Inga, her mother Ravdna, and her Aunt Anne travel west to their village on the lake. But the summer Inga is thirteen, they arrive to find their home and possessions have disappeared under water, the land flooded by a dam built to supply hydropower to a society that has continually stolen from them. The Home of the Drowned follows these Sámi women's fortunes over forty years — from 1942 to 1982 — as the water their people have lived near for centuries is transformed into a menacing force that threatens all they hold dear. Defying the authorities, Ravdna decides to build a house on the lake to replace what was lost, becoming an unlikely activist. Meanwhile, Anne's health is in decline, and a concerned Inga merely longs to live like everyone else — an impossible wish when the Swedish state is relentlessly drowning her world. Drawing on her own family's history of forced relocation and violent colonial dispossession, Elin Anna Labba's debut novel brings Sámi history to the fore. The Home of the Drowned reveals connections between land, water and people that hauntingly reverberate with the question: what is it that makes a home? [Hardback]
”Powerful. The book explores memory, marginalisation and what happens when collective wisdom is washed away by modernity. One of the novel's most delightful aspects is the way Labba conveys not just a Sámi way of life, but a Sámi perception of the world.” —Financial Times
>>Also by Labba: The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The forced sisplacement of the Northern Sámi.
My Tiny Universe by Maryam Master $19
Leif is named after a valiant Viking. But being a two-foot nothing, fraidy-cat kid with a thousand and one phobias is about as far from valiant as you can get. He's a Certified Science Enthusiast and has a brain as large and mysterious as the universe. He's not one of the cool kids at school. Or the geeks. He's not even one of the misfits. (Have you ever heard of a misfit who didn't fit in with other misfits?) Leif's different in every way, but especially because he was the first kid to be born with CIA (Climate Induced Anomalies). He didn't have a single friend at West Hershey College, before Albie came along. And that's when all the trouble really began. [Paperback]
The Korean Vegan Cookbook: Reflections and recipes from Omma’s kitchen by Joanne Lee Molinaro $75
The single most frequent question Joanne Lee Molinaro gets asked is "How can you be vegan and Korean?" Korean cooking is, after all, synonymous with fish sauce and barbecue. And although grilled meat is indeed prevalent in some Korean food, the ingredients that filled out the bapsangs of Joanne's childhood — doenjang (fermented soybean paste), gochujang (chili sauce), dashima (seaweed), and more — are fully plant-based, unbelievably flavorful, and totally Korean. In her debut cookbook, Joanne shares recipes and narrative snapshots of the food that shaped her family history. Some of the recipes come straight from her childhood: Jjajangmyun, the rich Korean-Chinese black bean noodles she ate on birthdays, or the humble Gamja Guk, a potato-and-leek soup her father makes. Some pay homage: Chocolate Sweet Potato Cake is an ode to the two foods that saved her mother's life, Kale & Ramen Salad with noodle "croutons" and a dressing akin to ramen broth. With the intimate storytelling and stunning photography she's become known for on social media, The Korean Vegan Cookbook celebrates how deeply food and family shape our identity. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
Redwood: The untold story of the Cold War’s most extraordinary spy by Ben Macintyre $40
The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah's fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response contemplated in the secret chambers of American power — unknown to the public — would be to strike with nuclear weapons. Redwood is the story of how, at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, whose intelligence reached the highest levels of American and British governments, cracked open the KGB, revealed the Kremlin's secret plot, and prevented Armageddon. "Redwood" was the MI6 codename for this unsung, hitherto-unknown hero of the Cold War, a highly trained, six-foot-four Russian intelligence officer who chose to expose the KGB's deepest secrets, compelled to swap sides by a shaming secret of his own. Facing exposure, with both the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and his own KGB colleagues closing in, he demanded that MI6 try to smuggle him out of Iran in a high-stakes escape plan. This is the gripping tale of one man's courage, and its unintended consequences that still shape our world today. It's about a moving friendship between spies on opposite sides of the global conflict; about marriage, loyalty, betrayal and sexual dysfunction; and about how decisions made in secret can have huge, long-term ramifications. Drawing on never-before-seen material from archives in multiple countries, and interviews with the participants including officers from MI6 and MI5, the KGB and CIA, Redwood plunges readers back into the shadowy world of The Spy and the Traitor. It lifts the lid on an unknown and highly significant Cold War victory, on the machinations of history's Great Game, and on how espionage really works. [Paperback]
"John le Carré's nonfiction counterpart." —The New York Times
Wiggling Words by Kate Rolfe $20
An inspiring story about a child lost in a forest of letters. Action words, can be pesky things to master and nobody understands the struggle better than the young child in Wiggling Words. Skip, trip, fumble and fall with them as they discover that even though words can be tricky, they can be fun too! The perfect book to share with children with dyslexia and other neurodivergence to encourage problem-solving and build confidence. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
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.
U.X.O. by Brannavan Gnanalingam $30
An Indian soldier recounts to his young grandson in Aotearoa his time as a member of the Indian Peacekeeping Force in Jaffna, Sri Lanka during the Sri Lankan Civil War (1987-1990). As his narratives develop, the novel digs deeper into a very contemporary problem: what it means to be complicit in violence during wartime. As the book progresses, readers are confronted with the question of whether this is a grandfather’s stories for a curious grandson or an honest recounting of life during wartime? Or maybe it is a great confession, told in fragments? U.X.O. is a powerful investigation into the mind of an occupying soldier, and the extent to which people — through literature — can be held to account for war crimes, decades later in a country on the other side of the world. [Paperback]
“Brannavan Gnanalingam has become well known for gripping, occasionally gristly, writing about New Zealand society. From the first page U.X.O. he ups the stakes by writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War. And yet, somehow, the book is a page tuner.” —Murdoch Stephens
>>Other books by Brannavan Gnanalingam.
Pākehā Metaphysics by Murdoch Stephens $30
Perhaps best known for his work on refugee protection, Murdoch Stephens turns his mind inwards with a new book Pākehā Metaphysics. In this new book, he employs fresh introspective and speculative thought in a table turning attempt to better understand the unique identity of the Pākehā people. In turn, the book aims to revitalise some aspects of metaphysics which have been ignored with the rise of scientific explanations. These aspects include the relation between appearances and essences, the three omnis — omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience and whether metaphysics can be grounded in something other than universals or specific places. The book is structured around the old rhyme used to direct a bride’s comportment for a wedding: something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. These four chapters both describe the implicit Pākehā metaphysics as they have come to exist while also gesturing at what direction Pākehā metaphysics should take for optimal existence. Not content to survey the past or dabble in futurism, the book also asks: How Pākehā can escape the metaphysical blues of the West? And, what, if anything, can Pākehā legitimately borrow from place-based and indigenous metaphysics? [Woodgrain paperback (each copy unique)]
"A witty and entertaining antidote to the navel-gazing angst of recent Pākehā accounts of living in Aotearoa. Stephens uses the decidedly unfashionable philosophical branch of metaphysics to re-cast how we all could think about how we engage with our place in this country." —Brannavan Gnanalingam
“What does it mean to be Pākehā? In a way, Stephens takes a very un-Pākehā approach to answering this question — by completely avoiding the placement of himself and his experiences at the centre of it. Instead, Pākehā Metaphysics is a refreshingly existential unpacking of Pākehā being. Incisive, funny, and somehow nihilistically hopeful, this is a welcome addition to Pākehā identity discourse.” —Tīhema Baker (Raukawa te Au ki te Tonga, Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira).
La Tarttoria: Intuitive Italian cooking by Dara Klein $85
Rustic southern Italian cooking inspired by la cucina povera of Puglia. Raised in the hustle and bustle of her parent's Italian restaurant, Dara Klein, the chef behind Tiella trattoria & bar, has been helping to build lasagne and stealing spoonfuls of tiramisu since early childhood. After her two-year stint as resident chef at London's famous Compton Arms pub, Dara returned to her home kitchen ready to distil a life of culinary experience into unfussy, honest recipes like Sugo di pomodoro (slow cooked tomatoes), Braised Ox Cheek and the perfect seasonal side salad. A natural teacher, Dara presents her kitchen know-how in the same way she trained her team of chefs to really interrogate how to build flavour into your cooking. You'll enjoy the process and learn how to cook instinctively, just like an Italian mamma. Featuring insights into life behind the scenes at London's buzziest eateries and the tips and tricks you can use to get exceptional quality food at home, La Trattoria is an indispensable guide to Italian cookery and an ode to family restaurants around the world. Dara Klein has a New Zealand connection: her childhood shaped by her family’s restaurant in Wellington, before heading to Melbourne and then London to cook. This is her story, her heritage, and in these pages she will teach you how to use all your senses to improve your cooking knowledge and bring to the table irrestistable eating delights. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Browse other cookbooks.
Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason $38
Sophie Pattison is such a lovely person. Warm, kind, amazingly positive. She works as a freelance sound technician for literary festivals. She is a massive reader and was recently forced to moved house. She is bracingly lonely. But then, Sophie discovers an author through work, and comes to adore her. Her books, her interviews, podcasts, and wisdom and brilliance, her beautiful words. It's like, solace and company. It's almost like love. And Sophie would love to meet her, although she never will, obviously. The author would never come to her festival. She's too famous for that. Too brilliant, too beautiful. And in a way, thank goodness, because that would change everything. Sophie's entire life. But ... what if she did? From the author of Sorrow and Bliss. [Paperback]
'So smart, so funny, so moving — Mason has done it again, this time using behind the scenes of a literary festival to reveal the complexity of loneliness and how one woman attempts to dig herself out. I absolutely loved it.' —Bonnie Garmus
>>Can books save your life?
A Fortunate Man: The story of a country doctor by John Berger and Jean Mohr $28
In 1966 John Berger spent three months in the Forest of Dean shadowing an English country GP, John Sassall. Sassall is a fortunate man — his work occupies and fulfils him, he lives amongst the patients he treats, the line between his life and his work is happily blurred. In A Fortunate Man, Berger's text and the photography of Jean Mohr reveal with extraordinary intensity the life of a remarkable man. It is a portrait of one selfless individual and the rural community for which he became the hub. Drawing on psychology, biography and medicine A Fortunate Man is a portrait of sacrifice. It is also a profound exploration of what it means to be a doctor, to serve a community and to heal. With a new introduction by writer and GP, Gavin Francis. [Paperback]
”It's one of my favourite books in the world, an ongoing inspiration as to how books should be written (and photography used).” —Alain de Botton
”A genuine tour de force. The intimate portrait of one man and his microscopic world reveals the faults and strains of a whole society.” —Observer
”This extraordinary book unravels the tangled branches of the everyday to reveal the brightness within. It inspires me to think more slowly, more deeply, to wear acquired knowledge lightly, to open my senses more fully to the wonders in the plain and close-at-hand.” —James Meek
>>Look inside.
Mrs. Orwell by Andrea Chalupa and Brahm Revel $49
The Roaring Twenties are over, fascism is on the rise across Europe, and the dream of a workers' paradise is all but dead. But in the midst of these turbulent times, a love story unfolds — one that will forever reshape our political language and how we view the future. Mrs. Orwell follows poet Eileen Blair and her husband, George Orwell, as they forge the professional and romantic partnership that will eventually bring us Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. From a honeymoon fighting in the Spanish Civil War to narrow escapes from Stalin's agents and the London Blitz, the Blairs' campaign against fascism brings them face-to-face with some of the greatest threats of the 1930s. But while George struggles to make his voice heard despite political censorship, Eileen must fight to preserve her own voice within a marriage that threatens to consume her. This sweeping account of Eileen Blair's brief but dazzling life casts a light on a long-overlooked figure and her persistent defense of that most beloved, most vulnerable principle: the power of the pen. [Hardback]
"This energetic portrait brings to vivid life a critical influence on the work of Orwell — and the personal costs of activism." —Publisher's Weekly
>>Look inside.
>>Wifedom.
How to Resist Guilt: On what’s holding women back by Mona Chollet (translated from French by Emily Boyce) $39
A powerful exploration of self-blame, where it comes from, why women are prone to it, and what we can do about it. Many of us regularly hear a sarcastic, malevolent voice echoing in our heads, attacking us, lecturing us, putting us down. It tells us that whatever we do, we’re wrong. It says we’re worthless. We don’t deserve anything good. We’re fundamentally flawed. Our very existence is unjustified. It’s a voice that rings out particularly loudly if we’re women and belong to a minority group. In How to Resist Guilt, Mona Chollet shines a light on this enemy within. What exactly are these fears that have managed to enter the deepest recesses of our minds? How can they be identified? And, importantly, kept at bay? Exploring the guilt-tripping of women, especially mothers, the cult of work, which indexes our worth strictly in terms of our productivity, and the resurgence of mindsets intent on punishment or retribution, this is a powerful book about that little voice inside us and how to silence it. [Paperback]
Loneliness is a Molecule by Helena Fox $35
Miri was whole, once. She had a best friend, once. She knew who she was — or she thought she did. But now she is a million lonely molecules, flying through the air to a new life on the other side of the world. Rome is light and loud and cobblestones and gelaterias and ancient buildings next to modern ones. Rome is new people and a chance to get out of her head. Or is it into her head she needs to go, to find herself again? A poetic novel about friendship, family, forgiveness, trauma, love and happiness. [Paperback]
Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Camille de Peretti (translated from French by Hildegaard Serle) $38
Painted in Vienna in 1910, Gustav Klimt's 'Portrait of a Lady' was purchased by an anonymous collector in 1916, retouched by the master a year later, then stolen in 1997 before reappearing in the gardens of an Italian modern art museum in 2019. No art experts, museum curators, or police investigators actually know the identity of the young woman in the painting, nor the mysteries that surround the turbulent history of her portrait. From the streets of Vienna in 1900 to Texas in the 1980s, and from Manhattan during the Great Depression to contemporary Italy, de Peretti imagines the destiny of this young woman as well as that of her descendants, and creates a masterful fresco that intertwines family secrets, disappearances, and thwarted loves. [Paperback with french flaps]
"A remarkable melange of mystery and art crime malfeasance." —Financial Times
"A magnificent and unforgettable adventure." —Buzz Magazine
Against Identity: The wisdom of escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas $32
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. [Paperback]
”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
Aviarium by Dominic Couzens and Teagan White $60
Aviarium is a stunning showcase of the world of birds, in all their diverse glory. Fly high with gulls and terns, swoop and dive with swallows and flycatchers, go hunting with owls and eagles, swim with penguins and ducks, and take a stroll with kiwis and ostriches. Written by renowned bird expert and nature writer Dominic Couzens and breathtakingly illustrated by the artist Teagan White, Aviarium is a must-have gift for all bird lovers! [Large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!
A selection of books from our shelves that aim for at least the 600-page mark. Click through to find out more:
Read our latest newsletter!
18 September 2026
You may well ask why I am only reading the second in this series, when four have already been translated. I’ve been saving it, and I am pacing myself, becuase i know I will be disapppointed when the seventh and final instalment arrives and is read. I was captivated by the premise of Solvej Balle’s books. A woman stuck in a repeating day; well in fact her day doesn’t repeat — everyone else’s does, her days go on, but the date remains the same. As soon as I was back in November 18th Iwas hooked all over again. I love the mundanity of this book, her endless time, her inabiliity to hold onto things unless she sleeps in them or she tucks them under her pillow. Luckily, after a while objects stay with her. In this segment of her strange life, she is craving Christmas and New Year, and turns up at her parents, explains her predicament, and insists on Christmas. The next morning, they having forgotten about her being there and what happened, she explains her situation again. This time (her next day, their ordinary November 18th) there are only Christmas leftovers. As I was reading, I had all sorts of questions. Why didn’t her parents call her partner to alert him to Tara’s strange behaviour? Why did they not attempt to interfer in her, for what must have seemed to them, pyschological episode? But then I had the answer: they have forgotten. And then Tara is gone, in their minds never been there. She keeps moving, chasing the winter, going north looking for the cold, wanting to wear a winter dress. On her travels, she at first remains outside of others’ lives, but slowly she is allowing herself to become part of other people’s happenings. I wondered, is this dangerous? How will it change another’s experience, or will her interaction leave no residue? Or will Tara Selter end up divided across time and space if everything returns to normal? if we can understanding time at all, that is. Eventually she tires of this endless quest. She knows, despite her written record of the days that are going by, that it is November 18 and she can no longer pretend a winter that does not exist. She heads to warmer climes, and at the close of this book we find her settled in a flat, an invisible person, attending lectures at the university. She has a new hobby: an obsession with the Romans. Here we leave her and she teases us with her knowledge that there are others just like her. Tempting to read book three right now!
Fresh cookbooks for your hungry shelves have arrived at VOLUME. What’s not to like about a new Ottolenghi or exploring the delights of vegan cheese? The excellent Jeremy Lee dishes up another delicious morsel, and you can head to Italy with La Trattoria.
In SIMPLE TOO, Yotam Ottolenghi and colleague Verna Lochmuller embrace the simple act of cooking as a panacea for our noisy world, and for the pleasure of good food. From breakfast to supper, Simple Too is packed with everyday recipes rooted in good ingredients, time-saving tips and one-pot wonders, alongside that Ottolenghi innovation.
In KITCHENING, Jeremy Lee brings us his signature style in writing and cooking through the seasons. You know you will have a delighful time submerged in this cookbook when the author’s opening notes state: “When it comes to adding salt, pepper and aromatics to dishes, caution is advised at all times as seasoning can happliy be adjusted if required, though woe betide the cook who blithely seaons too much for, as with life, it is the very devil to correct”. His previous book, Cooking, took out a swathe of awards, so expect more good food, enthusiasm and impeccable taste in this one.
Delve into classsic Italian dishes with chef Dara Klein. LA TRATTORIA: Intuitive Italian Cooking is packed with fresh, Pugliese-inspired cuisine. Hearty and comfortable, this is food to cook together, slow down with, and share. Dara Klein has a New Zealand connection: her childhood shaped by her family’s restaurant in Wellington, before heading to Melbourne and then London to cook. This is her story, her heritage, and in these pages she will teach you how to use all your senses to improve your cooking knowledge and bring to the table irrestistable eating delights.
Vegan diary expert Miyoko Schinner shares her knowledge and philosophy in THE VEGAN CREAMERY: Plant-based Cheese, Milk, Ice Cream and More. Keen to try your hand at plant-based milk, yoghurt, soft and hard cheeses, ice cream and butter? This is a superb book with excellent instructions and delicious recipes. Ingredients include watermelon seed kernels, chickpeas, barley and potatoes, as well as the expected nuts ranging from almonds to walnuts, so there’s plenty to explore. The 75 recipes include a paneer (soy and watermelon kernels), a truffle cheese (almonds and pumpkin seeds), a sharp cheddar (made from potato), and cashew-rice icecreams.
“I am inexhaustible on the subject of myself,” states Édouard Levé in this book which is nothing less than an attempt to exhaust everything that he can think of to say about himself, no matter how banal or embarrassing, with relentless objectivity. In one long string of seemingly random declarative statements without style or development or form (other than the form of the list, if a list can be said to be a form), the details accumulate with very fine grain, but the effect is disconcerting: the author comes no closer to exhausting his observations, and the idea that there is such a thing as a 'person' beyond the details seems more and more implausible. The list is not so much an accumulation as an obliteration: facts obscure that which they purport to represent. “I dream of an objective prose, but there is no such thing.” Levé’s style is deliberately and perfectly and admirably flat throughout (all perfect things should be admired (whatever that means)), like that of a police report. “I try to write prose that will be changed neither by translation nor by the passage of time.” The constructions often feel aphoristic but eschew the pretension of aphorisms to refer to anything other than the particulars of which they are constructed. There is no lens formed by these sentences to ‘see through’, no insight, no intimation of personality other than the jumbled bundling of details and tendencies assembled under the author’s name, no ‘self’ that expresses itself through these details or is approachable through these details, because we are none of us persons other than what we for convenience or comfort (or, rather, out of frustration and fear) bundle conceptually, mostly haphazardly, and treat as an entity or ‘person’. The more fact is compounded (or, rather, facts are compounded), the stronger the intimation that any attempt to exhaust the description of a person will approach what we usually think of as a person. “If I look in mirrors for long enough, a moment comes when my face stops meaning anything.” As well as demonstrating the impossibility of the task that it attempts, description also cancels itself by implying for each positive statement a complementary negative statement. Each statement of the self-description of Édouard Levé functions to include those of us among his readers who are similar and to exclude those who are dissimilar. We find each statement either in accord or in disagreement with a statement we could similarly (or dissimilarly) make about ourselves. The reader is charted in the text as much as the author. The reader is continually comparing themselves to the author, finding accord or otherwise, exercising the kind of judgement concealed beneath all social interaction but typically hidden by content and mutuality. In Autoportrait, the author’s self-obsession is matched by our fascination with him, with the kinds of details that may or may not come to light in social interchange. Because the author is not aware of us and is not reciprocally interested in us, or feigning reciprocal interest in us, as would be the case in ‘real life’ social interaction, we feel no shame in our fascination, our fascination is dispassionate, clinical. He is likewise unaffected by our interest or otherwise in him. But as well as bundling together an open set of details that we may conveniently think of as facts (“Everything I write is true, but so what?”) about Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’), the text also conjures an inverse Édouard Levé (or inverse ‘Édouard Levé’) who is the opposite to him in every way, the person who nullifies him (in the way that all statements call into being their simple or compound opposites, their nullifiers). Levé’s obsession with identity, facsimile and the corrosive effects of representation reappear throughout the book, and towards the end he mentions the suicide of a friend from adolescence, which would form the basis for Levé’s final book, Suicide (after which Levé himself committed suicide). Édouard Levé was born on the same day as me, but on the other side of the planet. In Autoportrait he writes, “As a child I was convinced that I had a double on this earth, he and I were born on the same day, he had the same body, the same feelings I did, but not the same parents or the same background, for he lived on the other side of the planet, I knew that there was very little chance that I would meet him, but still I believed that this miracle would occur.” We never met.