NEW RELEASES
At last: a science fiction novel written in Orkney dialect verse! (there are translations at the foot of the pages but you soon won't need them).
Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind. The first full-length book published in the Orkney language for half a century.
There was once a tiny man. One day, at the first sign of spring, he decided to pin a note to a tree that said FRIEND WANTED. Then he sat down on the step to wait. After ten days, he woke to find a cold nose in his hand. Beside him was a big dog with a beautiful curve in its tail. The tiny man had made a friend at last. They play and walk and laugh every day. But then the girl in the polka dot dress comes to the step. The little man watches as the dog put his soft muzzle into the girl's hand and worries that he has lost his only friend. The Tale of the Tiny Man is a touching picture book about loneliness that has a very happy ending. It is possible after all to have more than one friend!
A novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. Smallwood's novel inhabits the abyss between what we think about and what we actually do.
The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser $25
Burntcoat by Sarah Hall $33
Things I Didn't Throw Out by Marcin Wicca $25
Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the course of human history by Kyle Harper $58
Slime: A natural history by Susanne Wedlich $45
The Dead Girls' Class Trip by Anna Seghers $35
God: An anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou $40
Aesop's Animals: The science behind the fables by Jo Wimpenny $37
The Black Locomotive by Rian Hughes $38
Chewing the Fat: Tasting notes from a greedy life by Jay Raynor $17
Burning Boy: The life and work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster $45
"Christine Smallwood’s novel inhabits the abyss between what we think about and what we actually do. Smallwood’s casually agonized and abundantly satisfying novel, provides the exact sort of thrill that can be found only through obsessive overthinking. Why live in the moment when you can dissect it like this?" —The New Yorker
"Smallwood’s novel reminds us is that the body is the only thing tethering us to the world," —Bookforum
Almontaser's asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser sneaks artefacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. Speakers move with the force of what cannot be contained by the limits of the Western imagination; instead, they invest in troublemaking and trickery, navigate imperial violence across multiple accents and anthems, and apply gang signs in henna, utilising any means necessary to form a semblance of home.
In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. The symptoms are well known: her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.
"Finely wrought, intellecutally brave and emotionally honest." —The Scotsman
"Sarah Hall makes language shimmer and burn. One of the finest writers at work today." —Damon Galgut
"I can think of no other British writer whose talent so consistently thrills, surprises and staggers. With Burntcoat she has solidified her status as the literary shining light we lesser souls aspire to." —Benjamin Myers
Lamps, penknives, paperbacks, mechanical pencils, inflatable headrests. Marcin Wicha's mother Joanna was a collector of everyday objects. She found intrinsic — and often idiosyncratic — value in each item. When she dies and leaves her apartment intact, Wicha is left to sort through her things. The objects are the seemingly ordinary possessions of an ordinary life. But through them, Wicha begins to construct an image of Joanna as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a citizen. As Poland emerged from the Second World War into the material meanness of the Communist regime, shortages of every kind shaped its people in deep and profound ways. What they chose to buy, keep — and, arguably, hoard — tells the story of contemporary Poland.
Harper explains why humanity's uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality. He also tells the story of humanity's escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible, yet destabilises the environment and fosters new diseases.
Slime is an ambiguous thing. It exists somewhere between a solid and liquid. It inspires revulsion even while it compels our fascination. It is a both a vehicle for pathogens and the strongest weapon in our immune system. Most of us know little about it and yet it is the substance on which our world turns. Slime exists at the interfaces of all things: between the different organs and layers in our bodies, and between the earth, water, and air in the environment. It is often produced in the fatal encounter between predator and prey, and it is a vital presence in the reproductive embrace between female and male. Wedlich leads us on a scientific journey through the 3 billion year history of slime, from the part it played in the evolution of life on this planet to the way it might feature in the post-human future. She also explores the cultural and emotional significance of slime, from its starring role in the horror genre to its subtle influence on Art Nouveau. Slime is what connects Patricia Highsmith's fondness for snails, John Steinbeck's aversion to hagfish, and Emperor Hirohito's passion for jellyfish, as well as the curious mating practices of underwater gastropods and the miraculous functioning of the human gut.
Best known for her anti-fascist novels such as The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers also wrote short stoies throughout her life, portraying her social and mythic vision, and these constitute an important and fascinating element of her work. This selection of Seghers's stories, written between 1925 and 1965, reflects the range of her creativity.
What does political agency mean for those who don't know what to do or can't be bothered to do it? This book develops a novel account of collective emancipation in which freedom is achieved not through knowledge and action but via doubt and inertia. In essays that range from ancient Greece to the end of the Anthropocene, Bull addresses questions central to contemporary political theory in novel readings of texts by Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, and Arendt, and shows how classic philosophical problems have a bearing on issues like political protest and climate change. The result is an original account of political agency for the twenty-first century in which uncertainty and idleness are limned with utopian promise.
Three thousand years ago, in the Southwest Asian lands we now call Israel and Palestine, a group of people worshipped a complex pantheon of deities, led by a father god called El. El had seventy children, who were gods in their own right. One of them was a minor storm deity, known as Yahweh. Yahweh had a body, a wife, offspring and colleagues. He fought monsters and mortals. He gorged on food and wine, wrote books, and took walks and naps. But he would become something far larger and far more abstract: the God of the great monotheistic religions. But as Stavrakopoulou reveals, God’s cultural DNA stretches back centuries before the Bible was written, and persists in the tics and twitches of our own society, whether we are believers or not. The Bible has shaped our ideas about God and religion, but also our cultural preferences about human existence and experience; our concept of life and death; our attitude to sex and gender; our habits of eating and drinking; our understanding of history. Examining God’s body, from his head to his hands, feet and genitals, she shows how the Western idea of God developed. She explores the places and artefacts that shaped our view of this singular God and the ancient religions and societies of the biblical world. And in doing so she analyses not only the origins of our oldest monotheistic religions, but also the origins of Western culture.
Despite originating over than two-and-a-half thousand years ago, Aesop's Fables are still passed on from parent to child, and are embedded in our collective consciousness. The morals we have learned from these tales continue to inform our judgements, but have the stories also informed how we regard their animal protagonists? If so, is there any truth behind the stereotypes? Are wolves deceptive villains? Are crows insightful geniuses? And could a tortoise really beat a hare in a race?In Aesop's Animals, zoologist Jo Wimpenny turns a critical eye to the fables to discover whether there is any scientific truth to Aesop's portrayal of animals.
Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek (translated by Leri Price) $33
Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. Rima finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur'an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she's crazy, but she is no fool—the madness is in the battered city around her. One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta—where, between bombings, she writes her story.
"A brilliantly original novel of literary SF from the acclaimed author of XX, The Black Locomotive weaves steam trains, the history and architecture of London, and a mysterious alien artefact below the city into a work of stunning inventiveness and originality." —Telegraph
Why are gravy stains on your shirt at the dinner table to be admired? Does bacon improve everything? Is gin really the devil's work?
This lively reassessment of the American writer, whom Auster posits as the first of the Moderns, is also a vivid picture of fin-de-siecle cultural life in the United States.
The glare of the city lights can be blinding, as the Paris celebrated in books and films clashes with reality. And all the time the shadows are growing: the Bataclan terror attack, the violent protests of the gilet jaunes, rioting in the banlieues, Notre Dame in flames, record heatwaves, and the pandemic. Not just a series of unfortunate events, they are phenomena which all of the world's metropolis will have to face. But in Paris today there is also an air of renewal: from planning and environmental revolution to a generation of chefs rebelling against the classist traditions of haute cuisine; from second generation immigrants reclaiming their rights to women's rejection of the stereotypes high fashion created for them.
"Half-magazine, half-book, 'The Passenger' series began last year: think of it as an erudite and literary travel equivalent to National Geographic, with stunning photography and illustration and fascinating writing about place." —Independent
>>Other books in the series.
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Lauren van der Berg $40
Eight Improbable Possibilities: The mystery of the Moon, and other implausible scientific truths by John Gribbin $25
Wolf Girl by Jo Loring-Fisher $17
>>Other books in the series.
A collection of short stories of of women on the verge, trying to grasp what's left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too closely.
Echoing Sherlock Holmes' famous dictum, John Gribbin tells us: 'Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is certainly possible, in the light of present scientific knowledge.' With that in mind, in his sequel to the hugely popular Six Impossible Things and Seven Pillars of Science, Gribbin turns his attention to some of the mind-bendingly improbable truths of science. For example: We know that the Universe had a beginning, and when it was — and also that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up. We can detect ripples in space that are one ten-thousandth the width of a proton, made by colliding black holes billions of light years from Earth. And, most importantly from our perspective, all complex life on Earth today is descended from a single cell - but without the stabilising influence of the Moon, life forms like us could never have evolved.
Sophy doesn't know how to fit in. She tries to talk at school but the words get stuck in her throat and everyone laughs and whispers behind her back. Upset and alone, Sophy hides away in her room. But then an extraordinary thing happens... Sophy is whisked away to a magical snowy land where she meets a wolf and her cub. The unlikely trio roll, run and howl together, playing happily in the snow. Sophy has found friends and nothing can ruin her day... until a big, angry bear appears. But Sophy finally finds her voice and finds the courage she's been looking for all along.