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Tama is just a helpless magpie chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. ‘If it keeps me awake,’ says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.’ But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds – and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them – bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival. Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious with it), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sense. From the author of The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy.
"Catherine Chidgey fuses the sensibility of our cinema of unease – of life on a struggling back-blocks farm with a dour farmer – with the liberating and alienating madness of fame, all of it seen by the novel’s hero, the magpie Tama. Tama does all the voices – orchardists, tourists, fairground commentators, daffy activists, and the unappeasable axeman – and he does them justice. The Axeman’s Carnival is a compulsive read and flat-out brilliant.’ —Elizabeth Knox
>>Magpies.
The darkly funny new novel from the completely sui generis author of The Wallcreeper, Mislaid and Nicotine. Bran's Southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. After her mother abandons her and joins a Buddhist colony, Bran is raised by her 'common-law stepfather' on Bourdon Farms — a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang. She spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school and imagining what life could be if she had been born to a different family. And then she meets Peter — a charming, troubled college student from the East Coast — who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of art. The two begin a seemingly doomed long-distance relationship as Bran searches for meaning in her own surroundings. She knows how to survive, but now she must learn how to live.
These poems are about the endless work of fitting in when the goalposts are constantly changing. They ask: how can we nail the perfect routine? How can we be a people person in the world? What parts of ourselves must we leave behind? Moving between South Korea and New Zealand, Joanna Cho’s poems range excitingly in form, drawing upon and cleverly subverting the folktale, the phone conversation and the basketball game. At the heart of this book is a mother – a generous, artistic woman who has limited choices in life, in comparison with our narrator, who is almost paralysed by choice – and the deep, almost haunting comfort she brings.
"This book is taut and strong, rigorous and funny. With skill and care Joanna Cho has produced a work which envelopes and accommodates but never gives. And somehow, also, all this power makes room for hope and tears and a renewed sense of the world. In these ways, it is very much like the magic sock which opens this magnificent collection which shows the essayistic potential of the poem and the poetic potential of the essay. People Person is an amazing reading experience which will make itself felt in your non-reading world." —Pip Adam
San Andrés rises gently from the Caribbean, part of Colombia but closer to Nicaragua, the largest island in an archipelago claimed by the Spanish, colonized by the Puritans, worked by slaves, and home to Arab traders, migrants from the mainland, and the descendants of everyone who came before. For Victoria — whose origins on the island go back generations, but whose identity is contested by her accent, her skin color, her years far away — the sun-burned tourists and sewage blooms, sudden storms, and 'thinking rundowns' where liberation is plotted and dinner served from a giant communal pot, bring her into vivid, intimate contact with the island she thought she knew, her own history, and the possibility for a real future for herself and San Andrés.
QUAKE as the bedside stack of unread books grows taller! TREMBLE at the writer's ever-moving but perpetually unmet deadline! QUAIL before the critic's cruelly incisive dissection of the manuscript! And most importantly, SEETHE with envy at the paragon of creative productivity!
"Tom Gauld is always funny, but he's funny in a way that makes you feel smarter." —Neil Gaiman
>>A few strips.
Filmmaker Werner Herzog's first novel tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II. In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly — Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. At the end of 1944, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the island until the Imperial army's return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs. There is only one rule. You are forbidden to die by your own hand. In the event of your capture by the enemy, you are to give them all the misleading information you can. So began Onoda's long campaign, during which he became fluent in the hidden language of the jungle. Soon weeks turned into months, months into years, and years into decades-until eventually time itself seemed to melt away.
"Herzog's writing bristles with the same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films. His jungle pulses with hallucinatory life." —Sam Byers, Guardian
"Herzog's writing bristles with the same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films. His jungle pulses with hallucinatory life." —Sam Byers, Guardian
Cain's wandering sensibility, her attention to the small and the surprising, finds a new expression in her first nonfiction book, a sustained meditation on writers and their work. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors — including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf — and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess.
"I adore her work, and sensibility." —Claire-Louise Bennett
"Cain writes beautiful precise sentences about what it means to wander through this luminous world." —Jenny Offill
"A Horse at Night is like light from a candle in the evening: intimate, pleasurable, full of wonder. It asks us to consider fiction as life and life as fiction. Amina Cain is our generous, gentle guide through an exquisite library. A truly beautiful book." —Ayşegül Savaş
Excellent new translations of six stories, ranging from impossible fantasy to scorching satire. A civil servant finds a new passion for his work when he's swallowed alive by a crocodile. A struggling writer stumbles on a cemetery where the dead still talk to each other. An arrogant but well-intentioned gentleman provokes an uproar at an aide's wedding, and in the marital bed. And a young boy finds unexpected salvation on a cold and desolate Christmas Eve. Contains: 'A Bad Business', 'Conversations in a Graveyard' ('Bobok'), 'A Meek Creature', 'The Crocodile', 'The Heavenly Christmas Tree', and 'The Peasant Marey'.
In the late nineteenth century when non-European societies were seen merely as 'living fossils' offering an insight into how civilisation had evolved, anthropology was a thriving area of study. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, it was difficult to think about ideas of 'savages' and otherness when 'civilised' man had wreaked such devastation across two world wars, and field work was to be displaced by sociology and the study of all human society.
By focusing on thirteen key European and American figures in this field, from Franz Boas on Baffin Island to Zora Neale Hurston in New Orleans and Claude Levi-Strauss in Brazil, Lucy Moore tells the story of the brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific area of study, and about the men and women whose observations of the 'other' were unwittingly to come to bear on attitudes about race, gender equality, sexual liberation, parenting and tolerance in ways they had never anticipated.
The twentieth century was the century of modernity: in a world undergoing rapid transformation, musicians drew upon new technologies, social revolution and seismic geopolitical changes to bring forth a truly paradigm-shifting aural catalogue of human existence. Classical music flourished, and yet when we reflect on the genre's history its central figures seem to share three characteristics: they were white, male, and western. Through charting the stories of ten forgotten sonic pioneers, Kate Molleson opens up the world of classical music far beyond its established centres, challenging stereotypical portrayals of the genre and shattering its traditional canon. Traversing the globe from Ethiopia and the Philippines to Mexico, Russia, and beyond, she sheds light on the unheralded figures that altered the course of musical history, only to be sidelined and denied recognition during an era that systemically favoured certain sounds - and people - over others. A survey of radical creativity rooted in ideas of protest, gender, race, ecology and resistance.
Recipe reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process. These include lessons in hospitality, friendship, community, family and ethnic heritage, tradition, nutrition, precision and order, invention and improvisation, feasting and famine, survival and seduction and love. A recipe is a signature, as individual as the cook's fingerprint; a passport to travel the world without leaving the kitchen; a lifeline for people in hunger and in want; and always a means to expand one's worldview, if not waistline.
España: A brief history of Spain by Giles Tremlett $53
Spain's position on Europe's south-western corner has exposed it to cultural, political and actual winds blowing from all quadrants. Africa lies a mere nine miles to the south. The Mediterranean connects it to the civilisational currents of Phoenicians, Romans, Carthaginians, and Byzantines as well as the Arabic lands of the near east. Bronze Age migrants from the Russian steppe were amongst the first to arrive. They would be followed by Visigoths, Arabs, Napoleonic armies and many more invaders and immigrants. Circular winds and currents linked it to the American continent, allowing Spain to conquer and colonise much of it. As a result, Spain has developed a sort of hybrid vigour. Tremlett argues that lack of a homogenous identity is Spain's defining trait. Nicely presented and illustrated.
In 1953, at the end of the Korean War, twenty-two British and American prisoners of war were released - and chose to stay in China. The decision sparked panic in the West: Why didn't they want to come home? What was going on? Soon, people were saying that the POWs had been 'brainwashed', a new word for an old idea: that it is possible to control or change someone's mind from the outside without their permission. In an era of Cold War paranoia, the idea of brainwashing flourished - appearing in everything from Bond films and CIA experiments to the assassination of JFK.Today we still talk of being 'brainwashed' by advertising and television. But what is the truth behind brainwashing?
This new edition of Bryson's very popular journey around the quirks, capacities and history of the human body is a beautifully presented hardback, as packed with fascinating illustrations as it is with facts.
In 2018 poet and author Michael Pedersen lost a cherished friend, Scott Hutchison, soon after their journey into the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Just weeks later, Michael began to write to him. As he confronts the bewildering process of grief, what starts as a love letter to one magical, coruscating human soon becomes a paean to all the male friendships that have transformed his life.
"As perfect a portrait of friendship as I've ever read." —Stephen Fry
"Lucid, lyrical, loaded. A love letter to friendship." —Jackie Kay
"A lovely book: bright and heartfelt, funny and refreshing." —Andrew O'Hagan
"A beautiful, moving, life-affirming book." —Ian Rankin
Humans and animals: are we similar? Different? Do we all have blood? Do we all smell and taste and think? How is it that birds can fly, fish can breathe underwater, but humans can't do either? Explore the amazing diversity of the animal kingdom and compare the body systems of over fifty animal species with those inside of you! Fourteen tall, page-length foldouts open to reveal animal inner workings and provide extra details about these fascinating curiosities of the animal kingdom.
The new novel from the author of the much-acclaimed The Old Drift confronts the grief that send fractures between and within members of the family of a young boy who goes missing.
"Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence. There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable — no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved — only the inescapable rhythms of loss." —Guardian
The Raven's Nest by Sarah Thomas $45
In 2008, on a week-long trip to a film festival in Iceland, Sarah Thomas was spellbound by the strange landscape she found herself in, a place whose midwinter full moon is brighter than daylight, where fierce storms shake iron-clad houses and northern lights pattern the night sky, where the meaning of the word for yes - ja - is imbued with ambiguity when spoken on an inbreath. A place in which, and with which, it is possible to think differently. An immediate love for this country and a man she meets there, Bjarni, turns what was intended to be a short stay into a profoundly transformative half decade, one which radically alters Sarah's understanding of herself and the natural world. A moving meditation on place, identity, and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption.
"A deeply thoughtful, vivid, enquiring, genre-traversing book, closely attentive to the people and the landscapes with which it dwells. It asks hard questions — and offers no easy answers — about what it means to belong to a place, and to live well upon a part of the earth. Sarah's writing — crisp in its details, patient in its rhythms — draws its readers northwards and inwards upon a fascinating journey." —Robert Macfarlane
The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximisation, through a years-long process of privatisation that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatisation that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward — deprivatise the internet. Deprivatisation aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organised.
As the fracture lines between nations grow wider, how do we relate to each other, and to the land? Are we united enough to see protection of the environment as a priority? These are the questions Raynor asks herself as she embarks on her most ambitious walk to date with her husband Moth, from the dramatic beauty of north-west Scotland to the familiar territory of the South-west Coast Path. Chronicling her journey across Great Britain with trademark luminous prose, Raynor maps not only the physical terrain, but captures the collective consciousness of a country facing an uncertain path ahead. From the author of The Salt Path and The Wild Silence.
Broom examines Scotch whisky from the point of view of its terroir — the land, weather, history, craft and culture that feed and enhance the whisky itself. Travelling around his native Scotland and visiting distilleries from Islay and Harris to Orkney and Speyside, he explores the whiskies made there and the elements in their distilling and locality which make them what they are. Along the way he tells the story of whisky's history and considers what whisky is now, and where it is going.
Papercuts: A party game for the rude and well-read $45
"Papercuts is what Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, and Virginia Woolf would play if they were alive, locked in a room together, and forced to play a card game. This party game for bibliophiles and pop culture fanatics follows an intuitive and popular game format, similar to Apples to Apples — the dealer lays down a Question card and each player must fill in the blank with one of the five Answer cards in their hand. What ensues is an endless loop of hilarious literary jokes and gut-busting gameplay."
>>Find out more.
>>Find out more.