NEW RELEASES
Things keep slipping up for Shy. All he wants is sex, spliffs and his own turntables, and for all the red noise in his mind to disappear. But again and again he spirals past his senses and ends up with his head in his hands and carnage around him. You mustn't do that to yourself Shy. You mustn't hurt yourself like that. He's been kicked out of two schools, been cautioned, arrested, stabbed his stepdad in the finger and bottled a former Tumble Tots playmate, but it's the taunts and teasing of his new schoolmates that haunt Shy. Shy's got no armpit hair / Shy needs fake ID to buy fags / Got your special meds, nutcase? At Last Chance — a home for 'very disturbed young men' — he is surrounded by people who want to help him, but his night terrors aren't getting any better. The night is huge and it hurts. So tonight he's stepping into it, with the haunted beginnings of a plan. Again, Porter shows an incredible ability to get completely inside the head of his narrator, his spare and unconventionally effective prose delivering us an experience that enlarges our empathy and understanding. A beautiful hardback.
"An act of humanity and grace, heightened by its distinctive form and artistry." —Telegraph
"Shy is the strangest, most beguiling and affecting of all his books." —Ian Rankin
>>Absolute horror at the political present. >>Men and masculinity.
>>Entering the hinterland.
>>Read our reviews of Lanny.
>>Read Thomas's review of The Death of Francis Bacon.
>>Grief Is the Thing With Feathers.
Pirate Enlightenment; or, The Real Libertalia by David Graeber $40
The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends - but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land. For Graeber, Madagascar's lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to 'decolonise the Enlightenment', demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe. Its actors were Malagasy women, merchants and traders, philosopher kings and escaped slaves, exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice in by Western revolutionary regimes a century later.
>>How enlightened were the pirates?
>>Other books by David Graeber.
Fate of the Land | Ko ngā Ākinga a ngā Rangatira: Māori Political Struggle in the Liberal Era, 1891-1912 by Danny Keenan $65
In the second half of the nineteenth century, settlers poured into Aotearoa demanding land. Millions of acres were acquired by the government or directly by settlers; or confiscated after the Land Wars. By 1891, when the Liberal government came to power, Maori retained only a fraction of their lands. And still the losses continued. For rangatira such as James Carroll, Wiremu Pere, Paora Tuhaere, Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui, and many others, the challenges were innumerable. To stop further land loss, some rangatira saw parliamentary process as the mechanism; others pursued political independence. For over two decades, Maori men and women of outstanding ability fought hard to protect their people and their land. How those rangatira fared, and how they should be remembered, is the story of Maori political struggle during the Liberal era.
>>Ten questions.
OK as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for "all correct" when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age. Nearly ubiquitous and often overlooked, OK illustrates the never-ending dance between language, technology, and culture, and offers lessons for our own techno-historical moment.
.In her latest collection, Michele Leggott speaks to the art and writings of nineteenth-century New Zealand painter Emily Cumming Harris. Face to the Sky tells stories of love and loss from two woman in the shadow the same mountain, more than a century apart.
"Voices sing from the archive: a choir of breakers on a North Taranaki beach. Two women born more than a hundred years apart tell stories of love and loss in the shadow of the mountain that is always there. One of them becomes a painter of botanically accurate native flora, and writes all her life. The other, now without sight, lives in a world of sounds caught into expanding webs of memory. She listens for the other, tracing the delicate shapes of what she cannot see, taking her cue from the words of others. She listens and travels, picking up connections over time and place. Mothers and fathers come and go, adding their voices to the tumult on the beach, the shadow of the mountain, the hills above Nelson where the first woman comes to rest. The second, living between two small volcanos in a northern city, waits for a miracle that might cure the lymphoma that has been tracking her days. Through it all, the familiar phrases of the weather forecast sound their ever-hopeful, ever-changing predictions." —Michele Leggott
"Impeccably edited by Patrick McGuinness. The first volume stretches from the 16th century to the early 20th century and features classics by Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. But we also have Charles Perrault's folktale 'Bluebeard', a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire, and a darkly satirical tale by Emile Zola about a man driven insane by advertising. Volume two takes us from there to the early 21st century, featuring more women and non-white authors than the first volume. Treat yourself: buy both." —Tomiwa Owolade, Sunday Times
A beautiful hardback.
>>Volume 2 due soon!
>>Volume 2 due soon!
Wala Kitu is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill's desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, 'Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it's time we gave nothing back.' Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of America's most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn't to say that it's not about anything. In fact, it's about villains. Bond villains. And that's not nothing.
"Everett continues to be an endlessly inventive, genre-devouring creator of thoughtful, tender, provocative, and absolutely unpredictable literary wonders." —Booklist
When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I's first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified 'Great Britain' under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. The book explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, revealing Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history and offering a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.
"A triumph of writing and scholarship. For Das the Roe mission is the lens through which to give sharp focus to a remarkably wide-ranging study that does much to illuminate the bigger story of the unpromising origins of British power — and initial powerlessness — in India. Her style, while nuanced and erudite, is also jaunty and often witty. The book is as full of lovely passages of prose and finely shaded pen portraits as it is of new archival research, of which there is a great deal. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story." —William Dalrymple
A System so Magnificent it is Blinding by Amanda Svensson (translated from Swedish by Nicola Smalley) $35
In October 1989, triplet babies are born into chaos in a Swedish hospital. Over two decades later, the siblings are scattered around the world, barely speaking. Sebastian is in London working for a mysterious scientific organisation and falling in love. Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult. And the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, practising being a stepmother. Then something happens that forces them to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives.
"Amanda Svensson’s raucous, sprawling novel takes on the enigmas of our origins, riddles of human consciousness and animal cognition, doomsday cults, and the most bedevilling of mysteries – the minds and choices of our closest intimates." —judges' citation on listing the book for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Read an extract.
>>Six years of fun.
>>A funny book taken seriously.
>>Other books listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Where to begin?
"Amanda Svensson’s raucous, sprawling novel takes on the enigmas of our origins, riddles of human consciousness and animal cognition, doomsday cults, and the most bedevilling of mysteries – the minds and choices of our closest intimates." —judges' citation on listing the book for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Read an extract.
>>Six years of fun.
>>A funny book taken seriously.
>>Other books listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Where to begin?
Higgie explores the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women, from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint, who painted with the help of her spirit guides and whose recent exhibition at New York's Guggenheim broke all attendance records; the 'Desert Transcendentalist', Agnes Pelton, who painted her visions beneath the vast skies of California; the Swiss healer, Emma Kunz, who used geometric drawings to treat her patients; and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun, whose estate of more than 5,000 works recently entered the Tate gallery collection. While the individual work of these artists is unique, the women loosely shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of these myriad lives, sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art.
"In effervescent and atmospheric prose, Jennifer Higgie explores some of history's most innovative artists and their spiritual investigations into this realm and the next. I was entranced from start to finish, as she takes us on both a personal and artistic journey across time and across the globe. The Other Side is an exhilarating read." —Katy Hessel
In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire — this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. In Beyond the Wall, historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.
A 'clinic for the past' offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. An unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents, and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape the horrors of modern life — a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.
"A wide-ranging, thought-provoking, macabre and humorous novel about nationality, identity and ageing, and about the healing and destructive power of memory." —judges' citation, International Booker Prize 2023
:The most exquisite kind of literature. I've put it on a special shelf in my library that I reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then." —Olga Tokarczuk
Panda and Squirrel can't live without each other and do everything together: lie on the rocks to look at the moon, take walks, play games. One of their journeys lasts for only two steps, another day they discover a newly hatched duckling. Sometimes they argue but they always make up again. This a friendship for any day: roaring, quiet, grumbling, snoring . . . always.
A memoir about belonging and motherhood, told through the author's lifelong passion for wild food. When Helen Lehndorf moves to the city after a childhood living off the land in rural Taranaki, she can't help but feel different from her peers and professors - peculiar, poor. She finds solace in long walks foraging weeds and plants along the river, but something inside her still longs for home. Chasing a feeling of ancestral belonging, she travels to England with her new husband. There they learn about nature as the commons, something shared between all who encounter it - a source of delight, food, medicine, and connection with something greater than the forest in which it's found. An unexpected pregnancy in Aotearoa changes everything. Times are tight and motherhood takes over Helen's identity. When her son is diagnosed with autism, foraging becomes a space for selfhood and calm in a chaotic world.
Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery $33
The Art and Life of Hilma af Klint by Ylva Hillström and Karin Eklund $35
The first children's picture book on Hilma af Klint. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) began painting her abstract and highly symbolic images as early as 1906, long before Kandinsky and Malevich arrived at what is generally regarded as the birth of modern abstract art. She was heavily influenced by spiritual ideologies and claimed that she painted on instruction from the spirit world, for the future. Includes reproductions of several of her works.
>>Look inside!
>>Other books on Hilma af Klint.
It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders $40
Philosophy and Life: Exploring the great questions of how to live by A.C. Grayling $40
Alarm ('Object Lessons') by Alice Bennett $23
In the late 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol set out to make an unconventional novel by following a cast of his most famous characters around New York, recording their conversations with his tape recorder. The twenty-four one-hour tapes were transcribed by four women — The Velvet Underground's drummer Maureen Tucker, a Barnard student Susan Pile, and two young women. Flattery imagines the lives of those two high school students — precocious and wise beyond their years but still only teenagers, living with their mothers but working all day in the surreal and increasingly dangerous world of Andy Warhol's Factory, and learning to shape and reshape their identities as they navigate between their low-paid, grueling jobs and their lives at home, in a time of social change for girls and women in America. This blistering, mordantly funny debut interrogates the nature of fantasy and reality, voyeurism and language, and celebrity and the construction of identity. Within the framework of Andy Warhol's surreal world, Flattery asks us to consider at what point does the creation, and consumption, of our public selves turn us into something we don't recognise?
The first children's picture book on Hilma af Klint. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) began painting her abstract and highly symbolic images as early as 1906, long before Kandinsky and Malevich arrived at what is generally regarded as the birth of modern abstract art. She was heavily influenced by spiritual ideologies and claimed that she painted on instruction from the spirit world, for the future. Includes reproductions of several of her works.
>>Look inside!
>>Other books on Hilma af Klint.
"How can we accept an economic order that allows three billionaires to control more wealth than the bottom half of our society? How can we accept a political system that allows the super-rich to buy elections and politicians? How can we accept an energy system that rewards the fossil fuel corporations causing the climate crisis? How can we let it happen any longer? We must demand fundamental economic and political change. This is where the path forward begins."
How should I live my life? What values shall I live by? What sort of person should I be? What shall I aim for? Grayling enlists the help of philosophers, writers and other thinkers ancient and modern (and everything in between) to explore what gives life meaning.
Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention and force us to attend to things we've preferred to ignore. But alarms also allow us to feel secure, to sleep and to retreat from alertness. They take over vigilance on our behalf. From the alarm clock and the air-raid siren to the doorbell and the phone alert, the history of alarms is also the history of work, security, technology and emotion. Alarm responds to culture's most urgent calls to attention by examining all kinds of alarms, from the restless presence of the alarm clock in modernist art to the siren — the sound of the police — in classic hip hop. More than just bells and whistles, alarms are objects that have defined sleeping and waking, safety and danger, and they have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the mind and its capacity for attention.