NEW RELEASES
Here We Are by Graham Swift $33
A relationship triangle between a young show magician, his assistant, and their compère threatens not only their show (in Brighton, in 1959), but also those things they hold most dear. Both intimate and coolly observed, Swift's writing retains its economical power.
"The variety of voices and its historical and emotional reach are so finely entwined, it is as perfect and smooth as an egg. Passages leap out all the time, demanding to be reread, or committed to memory. It is perhaps too simple to say that Swift creates a form of fictional magic, but what he can do with a page is out of the ordinary, far beyond most mortals’ ken. —The Herald
Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty $85
The much-anticipated new book from the author of the incisive and influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which was made into a film), exposing the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. With this in mind, he outlines a pathway to a fairer economic system.
Bad Island by Stanley Donwood $30
A striking lino-cut graphic story, telling the prehistory, history and fate of an island and the ravages wrought upon it by 'civilisation'. An angry and memorable work from this cult graphic designer and Radiohead collaborator.
>>Stanley Donwood's website.
>>Nothing will ever get better.
Adults by Emma Jane Unsworth $33
"This smart, funny novel about social media and modern romance from the author of Animals mixes humour with grief and betrayal. Unsworth’s prose is jaunty, witty, sexy and funny. I will remember, for a long time, this novel’s lacerating wit and its melancholy sorrow." —Guardian
"Emma Jane Unsworth’s virtuoso new novel is far too canny to convey anything so gauche as a message, but if it did, it would be this: step away from your screen. Adults is a tale rich in keenly observed relationships – between mothers and daughters, best friends and boyfriends, idols and rivals – yet its central, inseparable pairing is that of thirty-something heroine Jenny and her phone. Theirs is a supremely dysfunctional affair. The fakery of online life, its codes, its rules, its soul-destroying self-promotion have been plenty anatomised but, as Unsworth shows, online anxiety also takes a very physical toll, too." —Observer
A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson $30
This wide-ranging collection of poetry, honed by anger at racism and injustice, won the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize
"A Portable Paradise finds in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of ‘sweet, sweet life’.” —Judges' citation
"A scathing polemic, and a meditation on love. It attacks the economies that saw Grenfell Tower clad in substandard materials. It stares unflinchingly at the legacies of slavery and yet, at its heart, it believes in kindness and community. While A Portable Paradise is a portrait of the worst of us, Robinson never loses sight of our better selves. The collection is challenging but is also rewarding and, ultimately, uplifting." —John Field
"One of the most important poetic voices in the UK right now." —Raymond Antrobus
>>Robinson reads.
Hattie by Frida Nilsson $20
Hattie is a street-smart country girl in her first year of school. She lives just outside of nowhere, right next to no one at all. Luckily she's starting school and that brings new adventures. Hattie gets her first swimming badge, falls madly in love with a hermit crab and meets a best friend. Sometimes things go wrong, like when the hairdresser cuts her hair into stumps just in time for school photos. Or when she happens to accidentally say in class that her new neighbour has three white horses she can ride on.
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley $26
"There are some writers who never let you down. They’re not big stars and their books are not preceded by a tsunami of hype. They simply do what writers do best, producing novels that are so apparently effortless that a wise reader recognises just how difficult they must be to construct. Tessa Hadley is one such writer. Throughout her career, Hadley has explored the middle-class existence, its ennui and its deceptions, with great skill. She has a keen psychological insight that allows her to create multifaceted characters that remain with the reader long after the story has come to an end. It’s no surprise, then, that Late in the Day is a powerful addition to her already distinguished body of work. Really, a rather brilliant novel." - John Boyne, Irish Times
Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a literary revolution by Pascale Casanova $25
Casanova argues that Beckett's reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Once his subversion has been reinstated, she suggests, the enigmas thought to lie at the heart of his work are revealed.
Kraftwerk: Future music from Germany by Uwe Schütte $28
"If you pay attention to the noises made by your car, Hütter explained, you'll realise that it is a musical instrument." So many of Kraftwerk's innovations have become absorbed into the mainstream that it is sometimes hard to remember just how innovative, strange and avant-garde they were. Ignoring almost all rock traditions, working in near total secrecy in their Dusseldorf studio, releasing new material sometimes at very long intervals, Kraftwerk also revolutionized stage presentation and, through their obsession with design and presentation, linked their work to the traditions of Bauhaus and 1920s German aesthetics.
>>Live (1970)
>>'Autobahn' (1974)
>>"Live" (1978)
The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha $37
"You’ve grown roots, you’re gathering moss. You’re desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go. You’re forever wandering, everywhere and nowhere, but where is your home? And where will you choose to go? To New York, to follow your dreams? To Berlin or Amsterdam? Lima or Tijuana? Or onto a train that will never stop? The choices you make about which pages to turn to may mean you’ll become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet many travellers with their own stories to tell. As your paths cross and intertwine, you’ll soon realise that no story is ever new."
“Intan Paramaditha is a wicked feminist writer in the very best sense possible. The novel is simultaneously unnerving and yet oddly familiar from the outset. Paramaditha establishes a rapport with the reader through a second person narrative that invites us to wander through worlds of myth, horror, and fantasy that progressively dismantle our perception of geographic and cultural boundaries. Epstein’s translation vividly captures the divergent voices and narrative styles that make up this wonderfully inventive novel.” —Pen America
Seagull, Seagull by James K Baxter $30
Poems for young children written by Baxter in the 1950s and illustrated by Kieran Rynhart.
Celebrations by Alan Burns $23
First published in 1967, Burns applies his cut-up and collage style to denounce power hierarchies and inherent violence in a family-owned factory and arcane legal structures.
>>Other books by Alan Burns.
Amnesty by Aravind Adiga $35
Denied refugee status in Australia after fleeing Sri Lanka, Dhananjaya works illegally as a cleaner in Sydney, trying to construct a new life for himself. One morning he he learns that a client of his has been murdered. When Danny recognises a jacket left at the murder scene, he believes it belongs to another of his clients, a doctor with whom he knows the woman was having an affair. Should he come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported, or say nothing, and let justice go undone? From the author of White Tiger.
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli $25
A family from New York take a road trip into the parts of the US that used to be Mexico as a convoy of children approach the dangerous US border from the Mexican side, and an inhumane reception. New paperback edition.
Short-listed this week for the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize.
"Beautiful, pleasurable, engrossing, beguiling, brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising." - James Wood, New Yorker
"A mould-breaking new classic. The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli's hands - electric, elastic, alluring, new." - New York Times
"Valeria Luiselli offers a searing indictment of America's border policy in this roving and rather beautiful form-busting novel. Among the tale's many ruminative ideas about absences, vanished histories and bearing witness, it offers a powerful meditation on how best to tell a story when the subject of it is missing." - Daily Mail
"A novelist of a rare vitality." - Ali Smith
>> Writing as a vehicle for political rage.
Until the End of Time: Mind, matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe by Brian Greene $55
Greene takes us on a journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the universe's beginning, to the closest science can take us to the very end. He explores how life and mind emerged from the initial chaos, and how our minds, in coming to understand their own impermanence, seek in different ways to give meaning to experience: in story, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and our longing for the timeless.
Nightingale by Marina Kemp $33
A 24-year-old Parisian escaping her past takes a job as a nurse to a dying patriarch in a remote village in Languedoc. The book is remarkably evocative both of the Mediterranean countryside and of caring for a cantankerous invalid.
"Deft, gritty, unsentimental but deeply moving, aglow with compassion." —Guardian
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor $25
"The shape-shifting protagonist of this magic-realist novel, twenty-two-year-old Paul Polydoris, belongs to 'all the genders', able to change his body at will. Exploring the malleability of gender and desire, and paying homage to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the book follows Paul—sometimes Polly—as s/he searches for love and the 'uncontaminated truest' self. The quest leads through New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis, Iowa City’s queer punk scene, off-season Provincetown, a womyn’s festival in Michigan, and, finally, San Francisco. Lawlor successfully mixes pop culture, gender theory, and smut, but the great achievement here is that Paul is no mere symbol but a vibrantly yearning being, 'like everybody else, only more so'." —The New Yorker
"Quite simply one of the most exciting - and one of the most fun - novels of the decade." —Garth Greenwell
Females by Andrea Long Chu $23
Drawing inspiration from Valerie Solanas (author of The SCUM Manifesto and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol), Long Chu claims that femaleness is less a biological state of women and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race.
Chinese Thought, From Confucius to Cook Ding by Roel Sterckx $28
With examples from philosophy and literature and everyday life, Sterckx intimates some key approaches to self, community and environment that underlie the variety of Chinese thought through the centuries.
Strange Antics: A history of seduction by Clement Knox $40
If sex has generally been agreed a private matter, seduction has always been of intense public interest. Strange Antics analyses seduction in art, history, legality, politics and literature.
Possible Minds: 25 ways of looking at AI edited by John Brockman $35
Understanding our future in relation to artificial intelligence is only possible if the right questions are asked in the right contexts.
The Lost Properties of Love by Sophie Ratcliffe $25
An insightful memoir of how the death of Ratcliffe's father when she was 13 affected her life for the next thirty years, and how she sought to come to terms with his absence through classic literature.
A Superior Spectre by Angela Meyer $25
When the neural technology used by a dying man in the near future to reduce his pain has the side-effect of time travel, he finds himself inhabiting the mind of a young woman in the Scottish Highlands in the 1860s.
For Your Convenience by Paul Fry $23
A reprint of a classic 1930s guide to the gentlemen's toilets of London, hailed as the city's first gay guidebook.
Suncatcher by Romesh Gunesekera $33
A semi-autobiographical novel about a boy growing up amidst the turmoil of Sri Lanka in the 1960s, and his friendship with a boy from a privileged family.
Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky $28
Best known as the novel that inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, Roadside Picnic tells of the experiences of a 'stalker' who ventures illegally into the 'Zone' where the laws of nature are suspended in search of alien artefacts with unusual powers. Classic Russian science fiction.
A relationship triangle between a young show magician, his assistant, and their compère threatens not only their show (in Brighton, in 1959), but also those things they hold most dear. Both intimate and coolly observed, Swift's writing retains its economical power.
"The variety of voices and its historical and emotional reach are so finely entwined, it is as perfect and smooth as an egg. Passages leap out all the time, demanding to be reread, or committed to memory. It is perhaps too simple to say that Swift creates a form of fictional magic, but what he can do with a page is out of the ordinary, far beyond most mortals’ ken. —The Herald
The much-anticipated new book from the author of the incisive and influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which was made into a film), exposing the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. With this in mind, he outlines a pathway to a fairer economic system.
A striking lino-cut graphic story, telling the prehistory, history and fate of an island and the ravages wrought upon it by 'civilisation'. An angry and memorable work from this cult graphic designer and Radiohead collaborator.
>>Stanley Donwood's website.
>>Nothing will ever get better.
"This smart, funny novel about social media and modern romance from the author of Animals mixes humour with grief and betrayal. Unsworth’s prose is jaunty, witty, sexy and funny. I will remember, for a long time, this novel’s lacerating wit and its melancholy sorrow." —Guardian
"Emma Jane Unsworth’s virtuoso new novel is far too canny to convey anything so gauche as a message, but if it did, it would be this: step away from your screen. Adults is a tale rich in keenly observed relationships – between mothers and daughters, best friends and boyfriends, idols and rivals – yet its central, inseparable pairing is that of thirty-something heroine Jenny and her phone. Theirs is a supremely dysfunctional affair. The fakery of online life, its codes, its rules, its soul-destroying self-promotion have been plenty anatomised but, as Unsworth shows, online anxiety also takes a very physical toll, too." —Observer
This wide-ranging collection of poetry, honed by anger at racism and injustice, won the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize
"A Portable Paradise finds in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of ‘sweet, sweet life’.” —Judges' citation
"A scathing polemic, and a meditation on love. It attacks the economies that saw Grenfell Tower clad in substandard materials. It stares unflinchingly at the legacies of slavery and yet, at its heart, it believes in kindness and community. While A Portable Paradise is a portrait of the worst of us, Robinson never loses sight of our better selves. The collection is challenging but is also rewarding and, ultimately, uplifting." —John Field
"One of the most important poetic voices in the UK right now." —Raymond Antrobus
>>Robinson reads.
Hattie is a street-smart country girl in her first year of school. She lives just outside of nowhere, right next to no one at all. Luckily she's starting school and that brings new adventures. Hattie gets her first swimming badge, falls madly in love with a hermit crab and meets a best friend. Sometimes things go wrong, like when the hairdresser cuts her hair into stumps just in time for school photos. Or when she happens to accidentally say in class that her new neighbour has three white horses she can ride on.
"There are some writers who never let you down. They’re not big stars and their books are not preceded by a tsunami of hype. They simply do what writers do best, producing novels that are so apparently effortless that a wise reader recognises just how difficult they must be to construct. Tessa Hadley is one such writer. Throughout her career, Hadley has explored the middle-class existence, its ennui and its deceptions, with great skill. She has a keen psychological insight that allows her to create multifaceted characters that remain with the reader long after the story has come to an end. It’s no surprise, then, that Late in the Day is a powerful addition to her already distinguished body of work. Really, a rather brilliant novel." - John Boyne, Irish Times
Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a literary revolution by Pascale Casanova $25
Casanova argues that Beckett's reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Once his subversion has been reinstated, she suggests, the enigmas thought to lie at the heart of his work are revealed.
"If you pay attention to the noises made by your car, Hütter explained, you'll realise that it is a musical instrument." So many of Kraftwerk's innovations have become absorbed into the mainstream that it is sometimes hard to remember just how innovative, strange and avant-garde they were. Ignoring almost all rock traditions, working in near total secrecy in their Dusseldorf studio, releasing new material sometimes at very long intervals, Kraftwerk also revolutionized stage presentation and, through their obsession with design and presentation, linked their work to the traditions of Bauhaus and 1920s German aesthetics.
>>Live (1970)
>>'Autobahn' (1974)
>>"Live" (1978)
"You’ve grown roots, you’re gathering moss. You’re desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go. You’re forever wandering, everywhere and nowhere, but where is your home? And where will you choose to go? To New York, to follow your dreams? To Berlin or Amsterdam? Lima or Tijuana? Or onto a train that will never stop? The choices you make about which pages to turn to may mean you’ll become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet many travellers with their own stories to tell. As your paths cross and intertwine, you’ll soon realise that no story is ever new."
“Intan Paramaditha is a wicked feminist writer in the very best sense possible. The novel is simultaneously unnerving and yet oddly familiar from the outset. Paramaditha establishes a rapport with the reader through a second person narrative that invites us to wander through worlds of myth, horror, and fantasy that progressively dismantle our perception of geographic and cultural boundaries. Epstein’s translation vividly captures the divergent voices and narrative styles that make up this wonderfully inventive novel.” —Pen America
Poems for young children written by Baxter in the 1950s and illustrated by Kieran Rynhart.
First published in 1967, Burns applies his cut-up and collage style to denounce power hierarchies and inherent violence in a family-owned factory and arcane legal structures.
>>Other books by Alan Burns.
Denied refugee status in Australia after fleeing Sri Lanka, Dhananjaya works illegally as a cleaner in Sydney, trying to construct a new life for himself. One morning he he learns that a client of his has been murdered. When Danny recognises a jacket left at the murder scene, he believes it belongs to another of his clients, a doctor with whom he knows the woman was having an affair. Should he come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported, or say nothing, and let justice go undone? From the author of White Tiger.
A family from New York take a road trip into the parts of the US that used to be Mexico as a convoy of children approach the dangerous US border from the Mexican side, and an inhumane reception. New paperback edition.
Short-listed this week for the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize.
"Beautiful, pleasurable, engrossing, beguiling, brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising." - James Wood, New Yorker
"A mould-breaking new classic. The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli's hands - electric, elastic, alluring, new." - New York Times
"Valeria Luiselli offers a searing indictment of America's border policy in this roving and rather beautiful form-busting novel. Among the tale's many ruminative ideas about absences, vanished histories and bearing witness, it offers a powerful meditation on how best to tell a story when the subject of it is missing." - Daily Mail
"A novelist of a rare vitality." - Ali Smith
>> Writing as a vehicle for political rage.
Greene takes us on a journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the universe's beginning, to the closest science can take us to the very end. He explores how life and mind emerged from the initial chaos, and how our minds, in coming to understand their own impermanence, seek in different ways to give meaning to experience: in story, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and our longing for the timeless.
A 24-year-old Parisian escaping her past takes a job as a nurse to a dying patriarch in a remote village in Languedoc. The book is remarkably evocative both of the Mediterranean countryside and of caring for a cantankerous invalid.
"Deft, gritty, unsentimental but deeply moving, aglow with compassion." —Guardian
"The shape-shifting protagonist of this magic-realist novel, twenty-two-year-old Paul Polydoris, belongs to 'all the genders', able to change his body at will. Exploring the malleability of gender and desire, and paying homage to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the book follows Paul—sometimes Polly—as s/he searches for love and the 'uncontaminated truest' self. The quest leads through New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis, Iowa City’s queer punk scene, off-season Provincetown, a womyn’s festival in Michigan, and, finally, San Francisco. Lawlor successfully mixes pop culture, gender theory, and smut, but the great achievement here is that Paul is no mere symbol but a vibrantly yearning being, 'like everybody else, only more so'." —The New Yorker
"Quite simply one of the most exciting - and one of the most fun - novels of the decade." —Garth Greenwell
Drawing inspiration from Valerie Solanas (author of The SCUM Manifesto and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol), Long Chu claims that femaleness is less a biological state of women and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race.
With examples from philosophy and literature and everyday life, Sterckx intimates some key approaches to self, community and environment that underlie the variety of Chinese thought through the centuries.
If sex has generally been agreed a private matter, seduction has always been of intense public interest. Strange Antics analyses seduction in art, history, legality, politics and literature.
Understanding our future in relation to artificial intelligence is only possible if the right questions are asked in the right contexts.
An insightful memoir of how the death of Ratcliffe's father when she was 13 affected her life for the next thirty years, and how she sought to come to terms with his absence through classic literature.
When the neural technology used by a dying man in the near future to reduce his pain has the side-effect of time travel, he finds himself inhabiting the mind of a young woman in the Scottish Highlands in the 1860s.
A reprint of a classic 1930s guide to the gentlemen's toilets of London, hailed as the city's first gay guidebook.
A semi-autobiographical novel about a boy growing up amidst the turmoil of Sri Lanka in the 1960s, and his friendship with a boy from a privileged family.
Best known as the novel that inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, Roadside Picnic tells of the experiences of a 'stalker' who ventures illegally into the 'Zone' where the laws of nature are suspended in search of alien artefacts with unusual powers. Classic Russian science fiction.