NEW RELEASES
The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself.
>>Eight ways of looking at Haruki Murakami.
>>Eight ways of looking at Haruki Murakami.
A novrl in three parts, The Things We've Seen is a dazzling and anarchic exploration of social relations which offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of humanity, history, violence, art and science. The first part follows a writer who travels to the small, uninhabited island of San Simon, where he witnesses events which impel him on a journey across several continents, chasing the phantoms of nameless people devastated by violence. The second book is narrated by Kurt, the fourth astronaut who secretly accompanied Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on their mythical first voyage to the moon. Now living in Miami, an ageing Kurt revisits the important chapters of his life: from serving in the Vietnam War to his memory of seeing earth from space. In the third part, a woman embarks on a walking tour of the Normandy coast with the goal of re-enacting, step by step, the memory of another trip taken years before. On her journey along the rugged coastline, she comes across a number of locals, but also thousands of refugees newly arrived on Europe's shores, whose stories she follows on the TV in her lodgings.
"There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too. This novel, which ranges across the world and beyond it, is hugely ambitious in scope. It’s a weird, recursive, paranoiac, funny, menacing and thrilling book." —Chris Power
>>A trick mirror held up to history.
>>A trick mirror held up to history.
>>The B-side of war.
>>Read an extract.
More Favourable Waters: Aotearoa poets respond to Dante's Purgatory edited by Marco Sonzogni and Timothy Smith $25
>>Read an extract.
Each of the 33 poets has written a poem of 33 lines inspired by and including a short passage from one of the 33 cantos of Dante's Purgatory, for the 700th anniversary of his death. Airini Beautrais, Marisa Cappetta, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Mary Cresswell, Majella Cullinane, Sam Duckor-Jones, Nicola Easthope, David Eggleton, Michael Fitzsimons, Janis Freegard, Anahera Gildea, Michael Harlow, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Anna Jackson, Andrew Johnston, Tim Jones, Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod, Hugh Lauder, Vana Manasiadis, Mary McCallum, Elizabeth Morton, Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, Vincent O’Sullivan, Robin Peace, Helen Rickerby, Reihana Robinson, Robert Sullivan, Steven Toussaint, Jamie Trower, Tim Upperton, Sophie van Waardenberg, Bryan Walpert, Sue Wootton.
Consent by Vanessa Springora $35
City Monster by Reza Farazmand $40
Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of France's most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of an influential man. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Springora, now in her forties and the director of one of France's leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story. Devastating in its honesty, Springora's memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a thirteen-year-old girl to become involved with a fifty-year-old man. Drawing parallels between children's fairy tales, French history and the author's personal life, Consent offers insights into the meaning of love and consent, the toll of trauma and the power of healing in women's lives.
>>On the limits of sexual freedom.
>>Breaking news: France changes its laws.
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler $33
Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn $37
Burst Kisses on the Actual Wind by Courtney Sina Meredith $30
Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý $35
Quantum of Dante edited by Marco Sonzogni $40
Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley $35
Breaking Things at Work: Why the Luddites were right about why you hate your job by Gavin Mueller $33
The Who's Who of Grown-Ups by Owen Davey $50
Wild Seas to Greenland by Rebecca Hayter $40
The Pattern Seekers: A new theory of human invention by Simon Baron-Cohen $48
>>On the limits of sexual freedom.
>>Breaking news: France changes its laws.
A woman in a post-election tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this provocative and subversive novel that examines social media, sex, feminism, and fiction, the connection they've all promised, and the lies they help us tell.
"Fake Accounts is a novel about the enigmatical spectacle of our extremely online world that is itself both enigmatic and spectacular – a dark comedy about a dark time, and a prismatically intelligent work of art. Brilliant." —Guardian
An unsparing yet curiously sympathetic novel of ideas, brain science, love, capital and rewilding from the author of the remarkable 'Patrick Melrose' novels.
"More humorous but just as intellectually inclined as Richard Powers and David Mitchell, among other contemporaries, St. Aubyn explores human foibles even as he brilliantly takes up headier issues of the human brain in sickness and in health. A thought-provoking, smartly told story that brings philosophy, medicine, and neuroscience into boardroom and bedroom." —Kirkus
A beautifully presented collection of surprising and shifting poems, focused on connection and displacement, the blurring between internal landscapes and longed-for realities.
"Courtney Sina Meredith is one of New Zealand's most talented and influential authors. Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind will find an eager audience." —Paula Morris.
"Courtney Sina Meredith has grown a distinctive voice. Her arrangements are formally inventive. She surprises in ways that writers ought to." —Lloyd Jones
Malmö, Sweden. A cellist meets a spun-out junkie. That could have been me. His mind starts to glitch between his memories and the avant-garde music he loves, and he descends into his past, hearing all over again the chaotic song of his youth. He emerges to a different sound, heading for a crash. From sprawling housing projects to underground clubs and squat parties, Wretchedness is a blistering trip through the underbelly of Europe's cities.
Limited, numbered edition.
"In order to transform a work into a cult object, you must be able to take it to pieces, disassemble it, and unhinge it in such a way that only parts of it are remembered, regardless of their original relationship with the whole." — Umberto Eco
A typographical intervention in Dante's text, with illustration by Art Sang and book design by Sally Greer, reveals an entomological dimension to the work while leaving the text both entirely unchanged and strangely transformed.
Pungent, steamy, insatiable Soho; the only part of London that truly never sleeps. Tourists dawdling, chancers skulking, addicts shuffling, sex workers strutting, punters prowling, businessmen striding, the homeless and the lost. Down Wardour Street, ducking onto Dean Street, sweeping into L'Escargot, darting down quiet back alleyways, skirting dumpsters and drunks, emerging on to raucous main roads, fizzing with energy and riotous with life. On a corner, sits a large townhouse, the same as all its neighbours. But this building hosts a teeming throng of rich and poor, full from the basement right up to the roof terrace. Precious and Tabitha call the top floors their home but it's under threat; its billionaire-owner Agatha wants to kick the women out to build expensive restaurants and luxury flats. Men like Robert, who visit the brothel, will have to go elsewhere. Those like Cheryl, who sleep in the basement, will have to find somewhere else to hide after dark. But the women won't go quietly. Soho is their turf and they are ready for a fight.
"Hot Stew is expansive and ribald where Elmet, set in rural Yorkshire, was claustrophobic and restrained. It’s ambitious, clever, brilliant and very funny. It shows what happens when an author, rather than letting expectations weigh upon her, uses them to catapult her writing to a whole new plane." —Guardian
How to Be Animal: A new history of what it means to be human by Melanie Challenger $33
Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive and baffling animals on the planet. But how well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal writes a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this psychology evolved, the book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the ways we distance ourselves from other species.
“Melanie Challenger’s wonderful book teaches me this: our blazing continuity with the depth of time and the whole of life. It is a huge, complex and triumphant thing: challenging, but also celebratory, courageous, mournful and apprehensive. Her language is lovely: exact and lyrical and sparklingly full of suggestion and implication. It is a hymn to generosity. I know it will be something I will return to again and again.” —Adam Nicholson
>>How to be a trailer.
>>How to be a trailer.
In the nineteenth century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. Breaking Things at Work is a rethinking of labour and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. 
In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard $48
Essays ranging from intensely personal readings of literature, philosophy and art, to the limits on privacy, how we view ourselves and the world, and how our daily and creative lives intertwine.
The Trouble with Being Born by E.M. Cioran $24
"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach." Cioran is the philosopher of personal and collective frailty and failure, of emptiness, of hopelessness, of the eschewing of all answers (“Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind.”). He rails against society, against both choice and necessity, against all values. Cioran is an important, interesting (and frequently amusing) thinker, an heir to Nietzsche, and there is much to admire (and be amused by) in his books. His words dissolve civilisation as acetone dissolves paint (that’s got to be a good thing).
Chris Potter was born in Hong Kong just prior to the 1941 Japanese invasion and spent most of his first four years in Stanley Internment Camp before being repatriated to England and then emigrating to New Zealand in 1948. This illustrated book springs from his mother's journals and letters, and outlines also her ongoing activity opposing nationalism and racism and promoting women's rights and international co-operation.
What does a soccer player or surfer actually need? What is the robe of the samurai called and what is the archaeologist packing next to her for her next expedition? What occupations and hobbies do adults have and what do they need? With this large-format picture book, small readers get to know different professions and leisure activities and the necessary objects. From clothing to accessories to work tools, Owen Davey uses graphic illustrations to present a wide range of leisure activities and professions. This large-format book simplifies and explains what you need for it.
Hayter's gripping account of four months spent voyaging into the Arctic Circle with 1994 Whitbread Round the World Race winner Ross Field.
>>"Just tell me I'm not going to die!"
>>"Just tell me I'm not going to die!"
Why can humans alone invent? In this book, psychologist and renowned autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen puts forward a bold new theory: because we can identify patterns, specifically if-and-then patterns. And he argues that the genes for this unique ability overlap with the genes for autism. From the first musical instrument to the agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions, Baron-Cohen shows how this unique ability has driven human progress for 70,000 years. By linking one of our greatest human strengths with a condition that is so often misunderstood, The Pattern Seekers challenges us to think differently about those who think differently.
A graphic novel set in a world of rather ordinary supernatural creatures, following a young monster who moves to the city. As he struggles to figure out his future, his new life is interrupted by questions about his mysterious roommate—a ghost who can't remember the past. Joined by their neighbor, a centuries-old vampire named Kim, they explore the city, meeting a series of strange and spooky characters and looking for answers about life, memories, and where to get a good beer.
>>Poorly Drawn Lines.
>>Poorly Drawn Lines.