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A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car also borrowed onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request. Banville's eagerly anticipated new novel toys with ways in which 'reality' is constructed, especially in fiction, and forms a kind of echo to any and all of his previous books.
"Gorgeously written and superbly choreographed, The Singularities in its unapologetic complexity and brilliance seems similarly unlikely to please the crowd. On the other hand, isn’t two a crowd, under certain circumstances? Writer, reader: who else do you need to play the supreme game?" —Irish Independent
Declaration: A Pacific Feminist Agenda gathers together some of the Pacific’s leading activists, scholars and critical thinkers in a dynamic discussion about Pacific feminisms in the visual arts, shared histories, literature, cosmologies and everyday experiences. The publication is the first of its kind and its contributors include: Caroline Vercoe, Melenaite Taumoefolau, Emalani Case, Coco Solid, Teresia Teaiwa, Manuha‘apai Vaeatangitau, Phylesha Brown-Acton, Luisa Tora, Selina Tusitala Marsh, J C Sturm, Matariki Williams and Lisa Taouma. Melding critical analysis with poetry and personal narrative, Declaration! provides a challenge and suggests possible directions for future developments in feminist thinking in and about the Pacific, while discussing some of the most pressing issues of our time: the climate crisis, gender equality, Indigenous sovereignty and collective leadership.
In March 2020 Lucy's ex-husband William pleads with her to leave New York and escape to a coastal house he has rented in Maine. Lucy reluctantly agrees, leaving the washing-up in the sink, expecting to be back in a week or two. Weeks turn into months, and it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the sea. Strout's new 'Lucy Barton' novel uses her typically small palette and clean prose to explore the subtleties and depths of ordinary lives.
"Strout's novels, intricately and painstakingly crafted, overlap and intertwine to create an instantly recognisable fictional landscape, You don't so much read a Strout novel as inhabit it." —Guardian
Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offences at age 20, and sent to high-security prison for eight years. While there, he was a student in an education programme that included a fiction writing course taught by Preti Taneja. In 2019, Khan was permitted to travel to London to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of the education programme, He sat with others and then killed two people, including the programme supervisor. In this searching lament, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe, and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, she draws on history, memory, and poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is an attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.
Winner of the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize.
"Aftermath is a major landmark in British narrative non-fiction. It's a beautiful and profoundly important account of creative writing teaching as a radical act of trust and interrogation of power; its anti-racist and abolitionist stance makes it a vitally important as well as deeply moving book to read now in these dismal days for the British political project. It is fearless in the way it shows its agonised workings as it unfolds into a complex map of grief." —Max Porter
"Aftermath is a major landmark in British narrative non-fiction. It's a beautiful and profoundly important account of creative writing teaching as a radical act of trust and interrogation of power; its anti-racist and abolitionist stance makes it a vitally important as well as deeply moving book to read now in these dismal days for the British political project. It is fearless in the way it shows its agonised workings as it unfolds into a complex map of grief." —Max Porter
"It takes a rare talent to respond to a shattering act of violence by reassembling the pieces in a way that refuses easy explanations or platitudes, but is illuminating, daring, world-expanding. Essential, in the truest sense of the word." —Daniel Trilling
Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, is looking after his sister Una, now seventy and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate. From Dan's anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. How Dots, the mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho. How a young and overweight Una finds herself living in a hippie squat in Kilburn in the early 1970s. How the squat appears to be haunted by vindictive ghosts who eat away at the sanity of all who live there. And, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una's unspooling memories as she sits outside in the Margate sunshine, and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister.
"If you're looking for this century's Ulysses, look no further." —Alex Preston, Observer
"Pitched—deliriously—between high modernism and folk magic, between gorgeous free-verse and hilarious Irish vernacular, Poguemahone is a stunning achievement." —David Keenan
"In A Shock, a clutch of more or less loosely connected characters appear, disappear and reappear. They are all of them on the fringes of London life, often clinging on – to sanity or solvency or a story – by their fingertips. Keith Ridgway, author of the acclaimed Hawthorn & Child, writes about people whose understanding of their own situation is only ever partial and fuzzy, who are consumed by emotions and anxieties and narratives, or the lack thereof, that they cannot master. He focuses on peripheral figures who mean well and to whom things happen, and happen confusingly, and his fictional strategies reflect this focus. In a deftly conjured high-wire act, Ridgway achieves the fine balance between the imperatives of drama and fidelity to his characters. The result is pin-sharp and often breathtaking. A Shock is a perfect, living circle of beauty and mystery, clearsighted and compassionate, and, at times, wonderfully funny." —David Hayden
"A Shock inhabits the secret life of a city, its hidden energies. It dramatizes how patterns form and then disperse, how stories are made and relationships created." —Colm Tóibín
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Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era's own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer — an insightful chronicler of the human heart — so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love? Pym lived through extraordinary times. She attended Oxford in the thirties when women were the minority. She spent time in Nazi Germany, falling, to her later regret, for a man who was close to Hitler. She made a career on the Home Front as a single working girl in London's bedsit land. Through all of this, she wrote. Diaries, notes, letters, stories and more than a dozen novels — which as Byrne shows more often than not reflected the themes of Pym's own experience: worlds of spinster sisters and academics in unrequited love, of powerful intimacies that pulled together seemingly humble lives.
"Byrne's book is outstanding. Just like a Pym novel, this biography is warm, funny, unexpected and deeply moving." —Financial Times
Andrea, a young Indigenous Colombian woman, has returned to the land she calls home. Only nineteen years old, she comes to mourn her lost child, carrying a box in her arms. And she comes with another mission. Andrea has hidden a camera upon herself. If she can capture evidence of the illegal mining that displaced her family, it will mark the first step toward reclaiming their land. This graphic novel examines the injustices of Canizales's home country in a stark, distinctive style.
"Simply powerful, Colombian artist Canizales's illuminating, expressively rendered graphic novel contains moments of great beauty (particularly Andrea's memories of her husband and father) among numerous scenes of deep anguish." —Kirkus
The Book About Everything: Eighteen artists, writers and thinkers on James Joyce's Ulysses edited by Declan Kiberd, Enrico Terrinoni and Catherine Wilsdon $33
Each essayist is an expert in one of the subjects treated in the novel, but what brings them together is a common love of Ulysses. Joseph O'Connor considers the music-saturated Sirens episode and David McWilliams writes about the bigotry and violence of nationalism on display in Cyclops. Irish obstetrician Rhona Mahony responds to Oxen and the Sun, set in a maternity hospital, journalist Lara Marlowe examines the Aeolus episode, which takes place in a newspaper office, and Irish philosopher Richard Kearney reflects on the erudite musings of Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount strand. The Book About Everything counters the perception of Ulysses as the sole preserve of academics and instead showcases readers' responses to the book.
Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. His thinking and rethinking of the problems of modern life is inexhaustibly relevant to contemporary situations. New edition.
"A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature." —Susan Sontag
Victoria Blaisdell longs for independence, adventure, and to accompany her father as he sails west in search of real gold. But it is 1848, and Tory isn’t even allowed to go to school, much less travel all the way from Rhode Island to California. Determined to take control of her own destiny, Tory stows away. San Francisco is frenzied and full of wild and dangerous men, but Tory finds freedom and friendship there. Then her younger brother, Jacob, is kidnapped, sending Tory on a treacherous search for him in Rotten Row, a part of San Francisco Bay crowded with hundreds of abandoned ships.
"Containing strong feminist themes, this fast-paced tale vividly contrasts the wildness of 19th-century San Francisco with stuffier New England. Tory is a brave yet naive protagonist, who makes a number of mistakes before proving herself a hero, and her dangerous encounters with unscrupulous villains provide nonstop excitement and suspense." —Publishers Weekly
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old. Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is drawn into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.
"Ng effortlessly combines a character-led family story with a detective tale, a tribute to books and storytelling and a confrontation with history. A story that is exceptionally powerful and scaldingly relevant." —Observer 
This urgent book chronicles the lives of the diverse young people on the frontlines of the environmental crisis around the world, amplifying the stories of those living at the heart of the crisis. Advocating for the protection of both people and the planet, Bella restores the heart to global environmental issues, from air pollution, to deforestation and overconsumption by telling the stories of those most directly affected. Transporting us from the humming bounty of Ecuador's Choco Rainforest and the graceful arcs of the Himalayan Mountains, to the windswept plains and vibrant vistas of life in Altiplano, Bella speaks to young activists from around the world including Dara McAnulty, Afroz Shah and Artemisa Xakriaba and vividly brings the crisis to life.
ROAR SQUEAK PURR: A New Zealand treasury of animal poems selected by Paula Green, illustrated by Jenny Cooper $45
Between the covers of this book you will meet creatures large and small. They might pad, or skitter, swoosh or soar. They could be fuzzy, feathery, suckery, scaly or spiky. These animals might ROAR or squeak or Purrrrrrrrrr. Just like the animals they are about, these poems come in all shapes and sizes!
Fresh from his triumphs in the Trojan War, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wants nothing more than to return home to his family. Instead, he offends the sea god Poseidon, who dooms him to long years of shipwreck and wandering. In his efforts to get home, Odysseus must battle man-eating monsters, violent storms, and the supernatural seductions of sirens and sorceresses. He will need all his strength and cunning — and a little help, divine and otherwise — to make his way home once more.
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The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The untold story of the international spy network by Richard Kerbaj $40
Aa to Zz: A pop-up alphabet by David Hawcock $35
An ingeniously constructed pop-up book, throwing the alphabet into three dimensions.
Drawn from five countries — Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — the Five Eyes has been steeped in secrecy since its formation in 1956, its existence only publicly acknowledged as recently as 2010. On the one hand, it is an alliance held together by a common language and cause, whose successes range from the takedown of atomic spies in the 1940s to the exposure of Russian collusion in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. On the other hand, however, the Five Eyes' very existence is not legally binding - it functions as a marriage of convenience riddled with distrust, competing intelligence agendas and a massive imbalance of power that favours the United States.
An ingeniously constructed pop-up book, throwing the alphabet into three dimensions.