NEW RELEASES
A hugely empathic AI, Klara is bought as an Artificial Friend for a girl suffering from an undefined illness. As the full extent of the girl's predicament becomes apparent, Klara, with her wonderful mixture of naivety and capacity, does all she can for the girl, and makes us question what it is to be human. Ishiguro's first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.
"People will absolutely love this book, in part because it enacts the way we learn how to love." —Anne Enright
This exquisite little hardback of 21 poems and 26 watercolour paintings is the result of a long-time poet-and-artist collaboration and grew out of their thinking about the natural world, childhood memories and thoughts about the climate change crisis. It’s part of a growing literary genre based on emerging forms of ecological thinking that cross genres and scientific disciplines. An adult picture book to be read aloud to all ages, and a gesture of playful joy, this small treasure can be enjoyed in one sitting and returned to on a regular basis.
>>Look inside.
>>Meet the poet and the illustrator. 
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, In which four Russians give a masterclass in writing, reading, and life by George Saunders $48
From AK79 to The Class of 81: Photos from 1978 to 1982 (and a few more) by Anthony Phelps $79
For the last twenty years, George Saunders (whose Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize) has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
>>Read our reviews of Lincoln in the Bardo.
>>Read our reviews of Lincoln in the Bardo.
In 1978 a young man began to take photographs of the bands that visited his school, playing lunchtime concerts. From there, Anthony Phelps followed the bands to the other venues they were playing and over the next five years, he visually documented one of the most exciting eras in New Zealand rock and roll history: the punk and post-punk years. The 40 bands featured include Toy Love, Androidss, The Scavengers, Pop Mechanix, The Terrorways, The Spelling Mistakes and The Screaming Meemees, as well as touring acts The Clash, Madness and The Ramones.
>>More about the book (and a few of the photographs).
>>More about the book (and a few of the photographs).
>>The Class of 81 concert and record took the racing pulse of a changing cultural scene.
>>The Enemy live at the Beneficiaries' Club.
>>The Enemy live at the Beneficiaries' Club.
"I’d wanted to remember why it was we swam in the first place – to remember the pleasure of immersing in an element other than air." Ingrid Horrocks had few aspirations to swimming mastery, but she had always loved being in the water. She set out on a solo swimming journey, then abandoned it for a different kind of swimming altogether – one which led her to more deeply examine relationships, our ecological crisis, and responsibilities to collective care. Why do people swim, and where, how, with whom? Where We Swim ranges from solitary swims in polluted lakes and rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, to swims in pools in Medellín, Phoenix and the Peruvian Amazon. Near Brighton, Horrocks is joined by an imagined community of early women swimmers; back home she takes her first tentative swim after lockdown. Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, this book is about being a daughter, sister, partner, mother, and above all a human animal living among other animals. 
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford $33
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen $38
1944. It's a Saturday lunchtime on Bexford High Street. The Woolworths has a new delivery of aluminum saucepans, and a crowd has gathered to see the first new metal in a long time. Everything else has been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone. Incinerated. Atomised. Among that crowd were five little children. What future did they lose? The only way to know is 'to let run some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be'.
"A brilliant, capacious experiment with fiction. An audacious meditation on life and death." —Guardian
In this sequel to The Sympathiser, Nguyen takes up the story as the Sympathizer arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. No longer in physical danger, but still inwardly tortured by his re-education at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into a dominant culture, the Sympathizer is both charmed and disturbed by Paris. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals and politicians who frequent dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he finds not just stimulation for his mind but also customers for his merchandise—but the new life he is making has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.
This issue encapsulates the state of nature and our different cultural relationships with it worldwide. It features interviews with Amazonian shaman Manari Ushigua, Inuit activist Siila Watt-Cloutier and Indigenous elder Rod Mason; fiction by Caoilinn Hughes and Amy Leach; poetry by John Kinsella and Daisy Lafarge; and photography by Xavi Bou and Merlin Sheldrake. Plus, reportage and memoir by: Rebecca Priestley, Patrick Barkham, Robert Becker, Ellen Coon, Tim Flannery, Cal Flyn, Derek Gow, Trevor Goward, Barry Lopez, Dino Martens, Charles Massy, Callum Roberts, Judith D. Schwartz, Sue Stuart-Smith, Samanth Subramanian, Ken Thompson, and Adam Weymouth.
Over eighty recipes, both traditional and contemporary, both from Atassi's family and from various parts of a country bursting with rich culinary traditions.
There is a growing belief that the capitalist system no longer works. Inequality is rampant. The environment is being destroyed for profits. In some Western nations, life expectancy is even falling. Political power is wielded by wealthy elites and big business, not the people. But for proponents of capitalism, it is the engine of progress, not just making all of us materially better off, but helping to address everything from women's rights to political freedoms. We seem to stand at a crossroads: do we need to fix the system as a matter of urgency, or would it be better to hold our nerve, or completely rethink our approaches? Four thinkers debate the issues.
Who better than Patrick Evans to produce a savage and hilarious satirical on literary academia and the bullshit, envy and plagiarism that underlies its operations?
This foremost poet's first collection since 2016.
This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of Heaney as translator. The authors have approached their contribution from different perspectives but are united by their fascination or preoccupation with the works of one of the greatest poets and poet-translators in the English language. This interdisciplinary combination of individual expertise and shared interest was essential to offer a holistic appreciation of Heaney's translations from fifteen languages, literatures and cultures.
When interior designer Frida Ramstedt moved from a characterful old apartment to a functional new build, she started to think about design in a new way. Rather than relying on high ceilings and architectural features, she had to make full use of essential principles to transform a blank canvas into a cosy, attractive and harmonious home. In doing so, she distilled the secrets of successful interior design and styling. This is a book about what looks good and why, filled with practical tips and illustrations to help you work out what's best for your space and lifestyle—and to discover what your individual tastes really are.
Catherine lives with her gentle father, Georges Certitude, who runs a shipping business in Paris with a failed poet named Casterade. Father and daughter share the simple pleasures of daily life: sitting in the church square, walking to school, going to her ballet class every Thursday afternoon. But just why did Georges change his name to Certitude? What kind of trouble with the law did Casterade rescue him from? And why did Catherine's ballerina mother leave to return to New York?
Employing lyrical prose meditations, lists, and inventories, Perec conjures up the sixteen million people who, between 1890 and 1954, arrived in America as foreigners and stayed on to become Americans. Perec (who by the age of nine was an orphan: his father was killed by a German bullet, and his mother perished in Auschwitz) is awake to the elements of chance in immigration and survival: "To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile. That is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere. Ellis Island belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty have driven and still drive from the land where they grew up." A new edition to re-emphasise the importance of migrants and refugees to a host culture.
A collection of essays, poems, photographs and other texts challenging us to consider better ways of listening to and responding to the needs of our land, environment and waterways, and to find these solutions in Māori perspectives in a changing world.
A mother is a nest, a mirror, a moon. The baby sees their mother in every aspect of their day. As the pages go by, the child grows. The mother who was a refuge becomes a road, a story, and a show. On the final page, the child is ready to take their first steps. This beautifully illustrated story looks through the baby's eyes for an unexpected and affecting picture of parents and home.
A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits- it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly, how did she find herself in this situation in the first place? As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...
Mathilda has long been enamored with the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions? From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda’s journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.
Arising from a public arts project which recorded submissions of poems associated with specific locations in Britain, the book presents the best poems of the 7500 submitted. Includes new work by Kayo Chingonyi, Gillian Clarke, Zaffar Kunial, Jo Bell and Jen Hadfield.
182 poems by 129 poets, including Elizabeth Morton, Michele Leggott, essa may ranapiri, Bob Orr, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Jordan Hamel, David Eggleton and Mere Taito, the winning entries in the Poetry New Zealand Prize, essays, and reviews of 25 new poetry books. Featured poet: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor.
The king can't sleep until the dragon is found. Luckily, three knights know everything about dragons and are armed to the teeth! Now they just have to find him. They set out into the night with a candle in hand. Soon they find something that looks very much like a dragon…