NEW RELEASES
It’s 1978: the Auckland abortion clinic has been forced to close and sixteen-year-old Charlie has to fly to Sydney, but the plane is delayed on the tarmac. It’s 2019: Charlie’s tightly contained Wellington life with her grandson Tommy is interrupted by the unexpected intrusions of Tommy’s first girlfriend, Jenna, and the father he has never known, Jim. The year turns, and everything changes again. Loop Tracks is written in real time against the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic and the New Zealand General Election and euthanasia referendum.
"Loop Tracks is an urgent and unexpected novel about freedom and responsibility – about a woman forced to wear her solitary and unsupported choice as a puzzling mistake, and about the very present past that she must face to help her family and herself." —Elizabeth Knox
"This fictional inter-generational story will speak to a wide readership about the choices that are important for our future." —Margaret Sparrow
"To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all." Three stories in which kernels of trauma, loss, loneliness and obsession are glimpsed through the gauze of fiction. 'The Fool' may have stepped out of a tarot pack – to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer’s mind. 'The Narrator' proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. The power of narrative to trump a stark reality is perhaps at its strongest in the last story: in 'The Wishing Table' the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual, and surreal stories.
"I love the way Anne Serre’s mind works, and her slyly seductive approach to narrative." — Adam Mars-Jones
"Anne Serre is a remarkable and unusual writer; her pen a scalpel dissecting the human condition with painful precision. The Fool & Other Moral Tales – three novellas – are lyrical and disturbing, wonderful and terrible, arousing and devastating. Their hallucinatory, and at times nightmarish quality, is beautifully rendered by translator Mark Hutchinson." — Georgia de Chamberet, BookBlast
"If the first two stories are moral firecrackers, ‘The Wishing Table ’, the third and final piece in the collection, is a hand grenade." — Tristan Foster, Music & Literature
A semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue. Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the shishōsetsu, or 'I-novel', a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalisation.
>>Autofiction's first boom.
>>Autofiction's first boom.
I hear everything. I hear for miles and miles. I can hear everything that ever happened. Some nights, the fog bell. That’s all right if the ships are safe. It’s the drummer I can’t abide. I say it in my prayers, Please not the drummer, but that makes no difference. He’s far off when I first hear him, over the stile at the sea bank, and slowly he comes closer, closer and louder, down the grass track between the cornfields, beating a drum as he comes along. One morning in 1969 Roy Watkins woke up to find words on the sheet of paper he had left in his typewriter before going to sleep: "an incoherent jumble of apparently unconnected phrases about fire, explosions, soldiers, and railway lines". The words recorded an actual event in Watkins’s life that took place just before his third birthday. Simple Annals is informed by these and other images and memories that surfaced over the following years: the sounds and songs, scrapes and surprises of childhood in an ordinary but loving family in Lancashire in the 1940s and early 50s, brought to the page with an almost pre-verbal immediacy.
"This short memoir is an absorbing masterpiece which sustains over its 127 pages the lyric intensity of the great practitioners of the short story. —Bernard O’Donoghue
"There isn’t an iota of sentiment or nostalgia in his recollection partly because the past isn’t embalmed but seen as an ecstatic and traumatic living root and presence in the writer’s being. Watkins is entirely original and this book is a masterpiece." —Nuzhat Bukhari
As climate change imposes significant challenges on the natural world we are being encouraged to plant trees. At the same time, urban intensification and expansion threatens our existing arboreal resources and leads to disputes among communities, councils and developers over the fate of mature trees. To find our way through this confusion, we need to build our respect for trees and to recognise their essential role in our environment, our heritage, our well-being and our future. We need to build a 'tree sense'. This collection of essays, art and poetry by artists, activists, ecologists and advocates discusses the many ways in which humans need trees, and how our future is laced into their roots and their branches. Includes contributions from Huhana Smith, Mels Barton, Elizabeth Smither, Philip Simpson, Anne Noble, Kennedy Warne, Meredith Robertshawe, Glyn Church, Jacky Bowring, and Colin Meurk.
>>Have a look inside the book.
>>Have a look inside the book.
A 'plumber's Mrs. Dalloway.' Back on the job after a long leave, Joseph is not at all sure he'll be able to fix his wife's best friend's water heater. Or that he'll even make it through the day. Bad thoughts keep creeping in. His son, suffering from a condition in which he believes someone close to him has been replaced by an imposter, has tried to kill Joseph's wife. He's worried that he'll try again. And that his wife is planning to leave him. A portrait of the uncertainty and awkwardness of one vulnerable man and his relationship with the world.
Tibble's eagerly awaited second collection, following 2018's Poūkahangatus.
Tiny Moons: A year of eating in Shanghai by Nina Mingya Powles $30
Civilisations by Laurent Binet $37
Selected Poems by Harry Ricketts $40
In Great Numbers: How number shape the world we live in by Beth Walrond, Daniela Olejníková and Isabel Thomas $45
"The intricate politics woven into Tibble’s poetry give her writing strength and purpose." —Winnie Siulolovao Dunn, Cordite Poetry Review
"Tibble speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality." —Hinemoana Baker
>>Two poems from the book.
>>Two poems from the book.
A collection of essays about food and belonging. Nina Mingya Powles journeys between Wellington, Kota Kinabalu and Shanghai, tracing the constants in her life: eating and cooking, and the dishes that have come to define her. Through childhood snacks, family feasts, Shanghai street food and student dinners, she attempts to find a way back towards her Chinese-Malaysian heritage.
>>Magnolia 木蘭 was short-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards this year. 
Party Legend by Sam Duckor-Jones $25
Endpapers: Uncovering a family story of books, war, escape, and home by Alexander Wolff $40
"Blending outrageous tales and borrowed moments with surprising results, Party Legend is the work of a poet unafraid to get a little weird to show us a good time. I am utterly bewitched by this sexy, playful and curious book." —Chris Tse
"Gorgeous and contrary." —Jenny Bornholdt
"Sex and longing, tenderness and pain, quest and invention, togetherness and solitude: if that’s not the queer experience, I don’t know what is." —Kerry Donovan Brown
"Bloody fantastic." —John Campbell
In 2017, Alexander Wolff moved to Berlin to take up a long-deferred task: learning his family's history. His grandfather Kurt Wolff set up his own publishing firm in 1910 at the age of twenty-three, publishing Franz Kafka, Emile Zola, Anton Chekhov and others whose books would be burned by the Nazis. In 1933, Kurt and his wife Helen fled to France and Italy, and later to New York, where they would bring books including Doctor Zhivago, The Leopard and The Tin Drum to English-speaking readers. Meanwhile, Kurt's son Niko, born from an earlier marriage, was left behind in Germany. Despite his Jewish heritage, he served in the German army and ended up in an prisoner of war camp before emigrating to the US in 1948. As Alexander gains a better understanding of his taciturn father's life, he finds secrets that never made it to America and is forced to confront his family's complex relationship with the Nazis.
>>Book trailer.
An entertainingly sui generis counterfactual historical novel, in which Freydis, the Viking daughter of Erik the Red reaches Panama and disappears from history. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even when captured by Incas, his faith in his superiority and his mission is unshaken. Thirty years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe. What does he find? The Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, capitalism, the miracle of the printing press, endless warmongering between the ruling monarchies, and constant threat from the Turks. But most of all, downtrodden populations ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent guidebook to acquiring power—Machiavelli's The Prince. It turns out he is very good at it. So, the stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and, when the Aztecs arrive on the scene, for a great war that will change history forever. 
Reawakened: Traditional navigators of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa by Jeff Evans $40
In this important book, ten navigators — the late Hec Busby, Piripi Evans and Jacko Thatcher from Aotearoa New Zealand; Peia Patai and Tua Pittman from the Cook Islands; and Kālepa Baybayan, Shorty Bertelmann, Nainoa Thompson, `Onohi Paishon and Bruce Blankenfeld from Hawai`i — share the challenges and triumphs of traditional wayfinding based on the deep knowledge of legendary navigator Mau Piailug. Their stories are intertwined with the renaissance of knowledge and traditions around open-ocean voyaging that are inspiring communities across the Pacific.
From his 1989 collection Coming Here – in which he wrote the first of his ‘Secret Life’ poems – to his 2018 collection Winter Eyes, which reviewer Tim Upperton called "unsettling, moving, both estranging and empathetic", Ricketts has written of friendship, youth, romance, loss, and the small moments that carry a lifelong weight, or light, within us.
Imagine a world without numbers. How would we ask for three scoops of ice cream? Or know whether we've got 60 minutes left to play with our friends rather than 60 seconds? Why does a -minute have 60 seconds anyway and not 100? Where does zero come from and what language do computers understand? Nicely presented for children.
Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials by Alice Roberts $50
Using the latest science and genetic research as well as new burial discoveries, Roberts paints an entirely new picture of pre-Roman Britain, of the people who lived there, and of the strong migratory and trade links connecting prehistoric Britain to Europe and beyond.
A collection of vital New Zealand short stories for young adults exploring ideas about identity, activism awareness, coming-of-age, society, and family. Stories by Gina Cole, Lani Wendt Young, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Witi Ihimaera, Anahera Gildea, Elsie Locke, Owen Marshall, David Hill, Katherine Mansfield, Patricia Grace, Frank Sargeson, J.P. Pomare, Tracey Slaughter, Russell Boey, Nithya Narayanan, and Ting J. Yiu.
Well-observed and precisely delineated, McCracken's short stories provide insight into the (mis)functioning of families and are frequently very funny.
William's beloved sister was his muse, champion, and most valued reader. She is mythologised as a self-effacing spinster and saintly amanuensis, yet Thomas De Quincey described her as 'all fire and ardour'. Dorothy sacrificed a conventional life to share in her brother's world of words. In her Grasmere Journals, she vividly recorded their intimate life together in the Lake District, marked by a startling freedom from social convention. The tale that unfolds in her brief, electric entries reveals an intense bond between siblings, culminating in Dorothy's collapse on William's wedding day — after which the woman who once strode the hills in all weathers retreated inside the house for the last three decades of her life.
Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni $19
Pablo by Rascal $25
Little Blue and Little Yellow are best friends, but one day they can’t find each other. When they finally do, they give each other such a big hug that they turn green! With very few words and the power of a few scraps of coloured paper, this is a story of acceptance and friendship - and an introduction to colour-blending abstract art.
Pablo is asleep. This is his last night inside the shell. Tomorrow he'll come out. But he's a little shy so will start with just very small hole. Tap tap tap... With the little chick Pablo, we discover up and down, forward and back, shapes, the noises and smells of the outside, and take a first flight. It's not scary at all (especially not if you keep a little piece of home with you, in case you need it later).