NEW RELEASES (19.10.26)
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
The Rouse by China Miéville $45
Maur's life has been shaped by an unbearable loss. But in the aftermath of what is an apparently ordinary tragedy, deeper, stranger questions arise. Their answers may lie within the dark heart and darker history of an old soldier who shares Maur's obsessions — and is violently pursued by the same unknown, unquiet forces. So begins a book unlike any other: at once a sprawling saga of a bloody century, and the intimate story of two lives, their loves, regrets and secrets - and a terrifying journey into infinite mystery. [Paperback]
“The Rouse is a monumental work that combines a sprawling history of Britain’s postcolonial entanglements in the latter half of the twentieth century with speculation about what lies ‘beyond the veil’ of death. China Miéville sets himself the daunting task of describing phenomena that are indescribable, stretching language to its limits and pushing formal and genre boundaries. In a time when much fiction is careful to colour inside the lines, this enormous, exuberant, overflowing book is a reminder that the novel is capable of containing multitudes.” —Hari Kunzru, 2026 Goldsmiths Prize judge’s citation
”Mieville's command of his prose is phenomenal. There is a real sense of life throughout as he seamlessly slips between styles. This is a world that you can truly swim in, and few authors can achieve that” —The Times
”What Mieville has crafted in The Rouse is an intimate epic, a controlled sprawl of history and emotional resonance. I felt it in my bones, the undeniable power of a jagged masterpiece.” —The New York Times
”The Rouse is affecting, intelligent and, in more than one place, very, very frightening. ‘Life,’ as Mieville writes, ‘is just a prologue to a ghost story.’ This is a novel destined for a rich afterlife.” —The Guardian
”The Rouse is a book of the dead and the superpositioned living. A lament configuration that grieves and is aghast. It is monumental and exhaustive yet concise. You never want it to end: you want it never to end.” —Boston Review
”I cannot say how much I love this book both for its humanity and its originality. The Rouse is a classic of modern weird literature, and goes beyond genre to put Mieville in the forefront of modern British novelists.” —Michael Moorcock
”At once the most poetic horror and the most fearsome historical novel in contemporary letters. There is simply no equivalent to Mieville's achievement.” —Jordy Rosenberg
>>”Completely defining.”
>>Gains and losses.
>>Other books short-listed for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize.
Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $28
An adolescent girl narrates her day in an existential masterpiece that plumbs the depths of what it means to be a forming person in a fomenting society. A woman writes a farewell note to her husband, an artist who has driven her away with his counterfeit profundity and naked ambition. A plain young woman steals a bathing suit for a handsome friend, only to find herself ostracised by her neighbours for her boy-crazed behaviour — and her refusal to be shamed. These six stories by Osamu Dazai are among his finest. Written during the Second World War, into a period of intense nationalism, they unpick the concept of the patriotic, productive or moral self. Including the novella 'Schoolgirl', which rocketed Dazai to fame on initial publication in 1939, this collection, newly translated by Polly Barton, is a perfect introduction to Dazai's work. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Leaning into self-loathing.
Tongue by Kathryn Crowcroft $38
’The more I learnt about the tongue the less certain I became about what the organ was for, which made me doubtful about what it really was.’ A young researcher works in a university archive, intent on unveiling the history of the human tongue, its strange metaphors and hidden uses. The archival materials conjure memories of her own past, transporting her home, half a world away, into the silence lodged between herself and her mother. Alongside the academic work, she begins a second manuscript through which a personal reckoning takes place. Between library stacks and text messages, she confronts her own struggle to articulate the unspoken legacy that has shaped her past. Framed through her research into the tongue and its untold cultural significance, Kathryn Crowcroft's debut explores how the organ has been cast as both sacred and sinful across centuries. Tongue takes the shape of a nodal essay, composed of discrete cells that mirror the form of the organ itself: porous, muscular, bifurcated. Written in the shadow of gendered violence, and attuned to the ways in which we speak and avoid speaking, the book offers a fierce, sensitive and unique articulation of the truths we learn to lie for. Tongue creates a radical space for silence to resonate and an exploration of how a voice might piece together what has been severed. [Paperback]
'Muscular, reverent and beautifully researched, Tongue is a delicate archive of our past and present mysteries.' —Jessica Au
>>How the book came about.
In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak $38
During a time of great turmoil, Gustave Flaubert created literature's most scandalous heroine: Madame Bovary. He then poisoned her with arsenic. But what if, 175 years later, Emma — and the women that history overlooked — could seize the quill from his hands and tell a different story? In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a reinvention of an iconic male writer, told through the eyes of the women — real and fictional — who shaped him: a devoted nursemaid, an Egyptian dancer, and a passionate, jealous lover who refuses to be forgotten. Through their voices, Shafak creates both an intimate portrait of a great artist and an epic meditation on storytelling itself: who gets remembered, who gets erased, and how can literature endure through political upheaval, war and injustice? When the world feels broken, how do we find the hope to carry on? Shafak takes readers on a journey through time and space, from Flaubert's unusual childhood in a house that was part home, part hospital, part morgue, to nineteenth-century Paris during the Revolution, and onwards to Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine and Beirut. [Paperback]
Unquiet Landscape: Places and ideas in twentieth-century British painting by Chrisopher Neve $28
How is it that artists, by thinking in paint, have come to regard the landscape as representing states of mind? 'Painting', says Neve, 'is a process of finding out, and landscape can be its thesis.' What he is writing is not precisely art history: it is about pictures, about landscape and about thought. Over the years, he was able to have discussions with many of the thirty or so artists he focuses on, the inspiration for the book having come from his talks with Ben Nicholson; and he has immersed himself in their work, their countryside, their ideas. Because he is a painter himself, and an expert on 20th-century art, Neve is well equipped for such a journey. Few writers have conveyed more vividly the mixture of motives, emotions, unconscious forces and contradictions which culminate in the creative act of painting. Each of the thirteen chapters has a theme and explores its significance for one or more of the artists. The problem of time, for instance, is considered in relation to Paul Nash, God in relation to David Jones, music to Ivon Hitchens, hysteria to Edward Burra, abstraction to Ben Nicholson, 'the spirit in the mass' to David Bomberg. There are also chapters about painters' ideas on specific types of country: about Eric Ravilious and the chalk landscape, Joan Eardley and the sea, and Cedric Morris and the garden. [Paperback]
'Fierce, witty, wise, elegiac, supremely indifferent to fashion and confident in the long view, this is among the best books written about landscape.' —Financial Times
'A minor modern classic, to my mind, uniting art history and landscape thought by means of dazzling, dancing, unsettling sentences. I'm delighted it's back in print in a new edition.' —Robert Macfarlane
>>Also highly recommended: Immortal Thoughts.
We Were Forbidden by Jacqueline Harpman (translated from French by Ros Schwartz) $24
Three novellas from the author of I Who Have Never Known Men, translated into English foe the first time.
In the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman wanders the forest. She and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their eternal march through its strange depths.
Attending a rigid French school in 1940s Casablanca, a teenage girl is barred from ever questioning the dogma she is taught to believe — her punishment for doing so will be as swift as it is shocking.
Locked in a loveless marriage in the Belgian bourgeoisie, a young woman satisfies her husband's desires, twice weekly, as required. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.
These novellas — the first works by Jacqueline Harpman to arrive in English in decades — reveal her stylistic range and demonstrate once more her penetrating psychological insight. Here we find the origins of a singular, relentless voice. [Paperback]
”Renewed interest in Harpman's oeuvre isn't just warranted: In works like this, she reveals herself to be one of the major writers of the 20th century, comparable to Gogol and Kafka but with a style and outlook entirely her own.” —Kirkus Reviews
”In Harpman's desperate, ornery, and alien universes, her avatars write their memoirs for no one at all. It is a desolate prospect, but also a triumph.” —Jessi Jezewska Stevens
White Rabbits / Down Below by Leonora Carrington $28
In 1940, Leonora Carrington — a twenty-two-year-old British-born Surrealist artist — was persuaded to flee France and the advancing German army for Spain. Already suffering from a psychotic break occasioned by the arrest of her lover by the Nazi authorities, she was soon confined to a mental institution, where she was subjected to sadistic treatment under the guise of medical care. In her memoir, Down Below, she describes her experiences with an anthropologist's precision and an artist's sense of the fantastic. This volume also includes a selection of Carrington's best stories from across her lifetime, functioning as companion pieces to her surrealist-inflected non-fiction. They include 'The Debutante', in which a young woman, wishing to avoid a ball in her honour, swaps places with a hyena; 'White Rabbits', which sees a friendly neighbour come by to ask for spare decomposing meat; and 'My Flannel Knickers', in which a woman has sainthood forced upon her. [Paperback]
”Carrington's stories are optimistic and nihilistic, beautiful and grotesque, tender and cruel. Her stories make brambles out of my brain.” —Sheila Heti
”I remember reading Down Below on a park bench in summer of 2020 and thinking: this is what is happening to me. Also, it contains the closest approximation you can get to a diagram of God's perineum.” —Patricia Lockwood
The Wolf Suit by Sid Sharp $40
Bellwether Riggwelter is, once again, out of blackberries. This time, rather than tiptoe through a forest full of predators, he comes up with a new plan. He will keep himself safe by blending in — he will sew a Wolf Suit! The disguise works perfectly . . . sort of. Bellwether realises he can't enjoy the forest in a bulky suit, and he may not be the only creature in the forest who feels that way. Perhaps not everyone is as wolfish as they appear. With humour, darkness, and insight, Sid Sharp turns the idiom ‘wolf in sheep's clothing’ on its head. This award-winning hilarious and touching graphic novel debut about the pressures of conformity and conquering fear by finding community is the perfect contemporary folktale to press into the hands of anyone who has felt they need to pretend to be someone else. completely delightful. [Hardback]
"The gorgeous black and dark blue backgrounds, thick with night, make the opening of the curtain, and the sunlight that spills onto the last page, feel like another undressed window through which we can better see the self." —The New York Times
>>Look inside!
Women Textile Designers edited by by Victoria Bradley and Elizabeth Currie $90
This beautiful and informative book features printed, woven and embroidered fabrics created for public spaces, furnishings, fashion and theater by some of the world's most accomplished designers. Illustrated with a wealth of weaves, prints, textures and patterns, it includes works by Arts and Crafts pioneer May Morris, Bauhaus designers Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers, mid-century designers Lucienne Day and Althea McNish, contemporary pioneers, such as Birgitta Hahn and Reiko Sudo, and many more. Chapters charting the transformation of the textile industry over the twentieth century — including women's increased access to design education and their roles as entrepreneurs and leaders — are accompanied by in-depth illustrated profiles of key designers. The book examines the creation of new products and technologies, alongside changing consumer patterns and the shifting functions of modern textiles in domestic interiors, public spaces and transportation. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
Simple Pleasures by Julia Busuttil Nishimura $49
Eating well at home is one of life's true pleasures, and it's easier than you think. With Julia's guidance, a well-stocked pantry and some good seasonal produce are all you need to create simple and flavourful dishes you'll want to cook on repeat. With an emphasis on ease and enjoyment, Julia shows you how to turn household staples into something truly special. Weeknight dinner favourites include a punchy ginger and coriander one-pan chicken, lemony tomato and bean broth, and pasta with caramelised fennel and sausage, while side dishes like fennel gratin and a delightful nectarine, cucumber and feta salad are stars in their own right. With sweet and savoury bakes such as potato, onion and gruyère tart and coconut and lemon cake with passionfruit icing, plus a whole chapter of desserts including Julia's classic chocolate mousse, Simple Pleasures is the perfect book for the modern home cook. [Large-format paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>All her books are excellent!
Abandoning a Cat: A personal story by Haruki Murakami (translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel), designed by Suzanne Dean $38
'Even now, I can relive the shared puzzlement of that summer day when we rode together on his bike to the beach at Koroen to abandon a striped cat, a cat that totally got the better of us.' A moving reflection on the author's father — plus a cat! Originally published in the New Yorker in 2019, and now presented in a full, unabridged form, Abandoning a Cat is a poignant, self-reflective work by Haruki Murakami. Here he writes about his father, the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him into the second world war. Murakami's father wrote accomplished haiku and eventually became a teacher. As Haruki grew older and became an adult and then a writer, he and his father found they had little in common. They were later estranged for twenty years, only reconciling on his father's deathbed. This haunting personal essay is a reflection on what it means to be a father and what it means to be a son — on what it means to be loved and to be abandoned — and also on a particular moment of Japanese history, through the aftermath of the second world war on into the present. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!