NEW RELEASES (16.4.25)
These books are all keen to sit on the top of your reading pile. Which will you choose? We can dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door.
Phantom Limb by Chris Koehler $45
One evening, Gillis — a young Scottish minister who technically doesn't believe in god — falls into a hole left by a recently dug up elm tree and discovers an ancient disembodied hand in the soil. He's about to rebury it when the hand beckons to him. He spirits it back to his manse and gives it pen and paper, whereupon it begins to doodle scratchy and anarchic visions. Somewhere, in the hand's deep history, there lies a story of the Scottish reformation, of art and violence, and of its owner long since dead. But for Gillis, there lies only opportunity: to reinvent himself as a prophet, proclaim the hand a miracle and use it for reasons both sacred and profane: to impress his ex-girlfriend, and to lead himself and his country out of inertia and into a dynamic, glorious future. [Hardback]
”Thrillingly unfettered. Phantom Limb is its own kind of miraculous relic: disturbing and mesmerising, the work of a writer possessed of a rare power and vision.” —Daily Telegraph
”At once playful and deeply moving, ancient and shockingly new, Phantom Limb is a tremendous read: full of wisdom, madness, kindness and action. You won't read anything quite like it.” —Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
The Ways of Paradise: Notes from a lost manuscript by Peter Cornell (translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $28
A book at the intersection of fiction and essay, on the connections between art, literature, spirituality and the occult through history. In his foreword, Peter Cornell presents this so-called found manuscript as the work of a now-deceased, obscure researcher who spent three decades in the National Library of Sweden working on his magnum opus. Upon his death, no trace of this work remains aside from this set of footnotes notes and fragments which form an enigmatic set of texts. Ranging from the Crusades to Ruskin, Freud to surrealism, cubism, automatic writing, Duchamp, the Manhattan Project, Pollock and Smithson, this cult book, first published in Sweden in 1987, is now translated into English for the first time. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Like a collision between the fantastical libraries of Borges, David Markson’s art obsessed micronarratives and Iain Sinclair’s occult strain of psychogeography. The Ways of Paradise is a labyrinth I never wanted to escape.” —Chris Power
”Who could have imagined that a set of imaginary orphaned footnotes could yield so much pleasure and fascination? More than a study of the labyrinth motif, The Ways of Paradise is itself a labyrinth, an apparently slim volume pulsing with infinite, overlapping worlds, an intricate meditation on the abysses of reality and illusion.” —Joshua Cohen
”The Ways of Paradise is the story of a lost manuscript and the labyrinth of enigmas through which its obscure author wandered, a book that pleasurably situates the reader at the centre of the idea of fiction, a place of everything and nothing from which ever-widening circles of mystery and meaning spread out.” —David Hayden
”Just as any person tracking a spiral or walking a labyrinth will find their sense of space and time collapsed, viewing moments in the past and future of their journey from vividly altered perspectives as they make their way, so the reader of this remarkable ‘manuscript’ will be similarly enlightened. Open, allusive, constantly expanding its appreciation of the covert relations between culture and history, place and belief, The Ways of Paradise embodies its own utopian premise. Assembled with a lightness of touch and a precision in detail, profound in its accumulative insights, it understands that any book aspiring to the fullest incarnation of its potential remains in process more than it offers an arrival. No longer are fragments deployed only formally; rather they serve as waymarkers on a quest passage to the interior, the final labyrinth of human imagination, and the mind’s own mysterious corridors. The spaces between entries are where the doors to this charged site lie. Each traveller will find their own entrance, and each will surely be entranced.’ —Gareth Evans
Mark Adams: A survey — He kohinga whakaahu by Sarah Farrar $80
Photographer Mark Adams is known for his focus on Samoan tatau, Māori–Pākehā interactions in Rotorua, carved meeting houses, locations of significance for Ngāi Tahu in Te Waipounamu, and Captain James Cook’s landing sites reflect his deep engagement with our postcolonial and Pacific histories. This first-ever comprehensive survey of his work honours one of our most distinguished — and continually compelling — photographers. It includes photographs taken across the Pacific, the United Kingdom and Europe that explore the migration of artistic and cultural practices across the globe, and examine the role of museums, and photography itself, in this dynamic and ongoing cross-cultural exchange. [Hardback]
Being, Seeing, Making, Thinking: 50 Years of the Chartwell Project edited by Sue Gardiner and Megan Shaw $50
Since its establishment in 1974, Chartwell has championed the importance of creative visual thinking, shaping an expansive collection of contemporary art and an enduring programme of philanthropic and educational support. Illustrating over 150 images from the Chartwell Collection, the book features new writing on 50 selected artworks from New Zealand, Australia and further afield as well as rarely seen archival images of artists and exhibitions. The book offers unprecedented insight into the art, artists and remarkable story and philosophy of The Chartwell Project. Featuring a preface by Chartwell’s founder, Rob Gardiner, an essay by Chartwell’s chair, Sue Gardiner, a Timeline by co-editor Megan Shaw and 50 accompanying texts on artworks, this landmark book offers unprecedented insight into the art, artists and remarkable story and philosophy of the Chartwell Project. [Flexibound]
Groundwork: The art and writing of Emily Cumming Harris by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson $60
Part inspired creative endeavour and part determined detective work, this long overdue book brings to light one of New Zealand's most significant botanical artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just as Emily Harris's beautiful paintings occupy a liminal space between scientific botanical illustration and art, so this book occupies a shifting ground between biography and imagineered monograph. The result is often moving and always intriguing. Importantly, it restores to Aotearoa art history a figure who had almost disappeared. Emily Harris has been examined alongside her artist peers Sarah Featon and Georgina Hetley, but until this book neither her distinctive voice nor her almost 200 surviving images have been heard or seen in any quantity outside of archival or online spaces. Her life story is remarkable and her diaries, letters, poems and paintings constitute a fascinating legacy. Harris was born in England in 1837 and dies in Nelson in 1925. [Hardback]
Shade and Breeze by Quynh Tran (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $45
Má dreams of wealth and grandeur, Hieu dreams of Finnish girls. The younger brother, always on the periphery, always an observer, gradually disappears into his schoolwork, mesmerised by his own intellect. The three of them form a solitary world in a small Ostrobothnian town on the west coast of Finland. Má and Hieu, constantly on a collision course with each other and the community’s suffocating social codes. They live among people who want to talk openly about everything, who don’t understand the necessity of sometimes remaining in the shade. In sensitive and transfixing prose that has the effect of a series of tableaux, and with chapter headings reminiscent of the intertitles in a silent film, Tran’s multi-award-winning debut is a moving story about love, the compulsion to create, and the meaning of family. [Paperback]
”A magic voice. Working with the coming-of-age in a smalltown narrative, Quynh Tran creates a world completely of its own kind, a story of belonging and estrangement, and of the refugee experience. In a sensual, dreamy prose, still so very real, with an authority reminiscent of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Tran has written a first novel that shines like a precious gem.” —Monika Fagerholm
”A perceptive debut, where the significant events are intentionally placed in the background, in line with the family’s wishes. Not everything should be discussed, claims the mother whose anger instead turns into a physical condition — a slap here and there. Nobody is capable of seeing how their actions cause a ripple effect, how human darkness is passed down through generations. In different ways, the family members try to find a mutual place where they can love one another. This makes Shade and Breeze a complex, delicate, and wistful debut. It deserves to be pulled into the light.” —Sydsvenskan
The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet $33
Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertiliser, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues will plot a bloody revenge. Jade Cabinet is both a riveting novel and a reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language and power. [Paperback]
The History of Medicine in Twelve Objects by Carol Cooper $45
THE TREPHINE, THE BONE SAW, THE MASK. THE MICROSCOPE. THE STETHOSCOPE. THE ETHER INHALER, THE HYPODERMIC SYRINGE, THE OBSTETRIC FORCEPS, THE X -RAY MACHINE, THE E.C.T. MACHINE, THE HIP PROSTHESIS, THE HEART-LUNG MACHINE. Over the course of centuries, the ways in which doctors have engaged with sickness has changed drastically, and so too have the tools at their disposal. The history of these medical tools is truly astounding, revealing the true extent of human ingenuity, curiosity, and compassion. [Hardback]
The Companion to Volcanology by Brent Kininmont $25
The Companion to Volcanology is not a field guide to volcanoes. But tectonic shifts are present in Brent Kininmont's second book of poetry, and so are companions. The child, for instance, carried up a mountain in the titular opening poem, and companions alive to the brevity of their time together. Kininmont, who grew up in Aotearoa, has lived in Japan for many years, and so these poems are of a life between two places and of the body in anxious or joyful motion. [Paperback]
”Kininmont’s terrific second book has that sense of lived experience finding forms which release thought and feeling. I read it in one go as a kind of interrupted story.” —Damien Wilkins
”Luminous, surprising, inventive, original.” —Paula Green
Umai: Recipes from a Japanese Home Kitchen by Millie Tsukagoshi Lagares $65
In this beautiful book, you have precision alongside the simple and relaxed. Discover unfussy lunch dishes and favorite family meals. Find recipes that are a joy to make together and to share. Millie Tsukagoshi Lagares guides you through her home kitchen and out onto the streets to experience food is both serene and exhilarating. From dumplings to fungi to matcha cookies, you will find accessible recipes that will delight and sooth in the making and the eating. [Hardback]
”A vibrant exploration of Japanese cuisine with beautiful writing and exciting recipes to nourish the soul.” —Ixta Belfrage
Caret by Adam Mars-Jones $30
”We make lazy assumptions about the centre of things and its location. Who's to say that the centre of things isn't in a corner, way over there?”; “People in authority are always saying you should know your rights, though I've noticed they don't much enjoy it when you do.”; “Nobody can be a person twenty-fours hours a day - it just can't be done. At night the sets dissolve and the performance falls away... We're off the books.” That's John Cromer talking, in this fresh instalment of his lifelong saga. For John, embarking on a new stage of life in 1970s Cambridge, charm and wit aren't just assets, they are survival skills. It may be a case of John against the world. If so, don't be in too much of a hurry to bet on the world. Conjuring a remarkable voice and mind, Caret is a feast of a novel, served on a succession of small plates, each portion providing an adult's daily intake of literary nourishment. Reading it is guaranteed to help you work, rest and play. [Paperback]
”Thank god for John Cromer and his creator Adam Mars-Jones, one of the funniest, most self-aware characters in English fiction, whose minute observations on everything from constipation to lust are a source of unexpected delight.” —Linda Grant
”Mars-Jones is building a facsimile of existence; a map with a scale that seems, when you’re reading it, to be closing on 1:1. It’s an inordinately bold technique, but in the end it succeeds: it feels, as we follow the seemingly endless meander of Cromer’s thoughts, that we’re not so much reading a story, as living in one.” —The Guardian
God and the Devil: The life and work of Ingmar Bergman by Peter Cowie $40
A chronicle of the life and career of one of film's defining figures, God and the Devil draws on exclusive extracts from Bergman's diaries, letters and production workbooks. Peter Cowie brings us close to the man and the artist, as he wrestled with themes of love, sex and betrayal — with the figure of Death always hovering overhead. [Now in paperback]
"A commanding portrait: one that consistently ties events in his life to specific scenes, themes and locations in his movies. Having met Bergman in 1969 and corresponded with him until 1995, veteran film author Peter Cowie is able to channel first-hand knowledge of Bergman into a book that's respectful without being overly reverential." —Matt Looker, Total Film
"Indispensable, rich, engaging, thorough." —Sight & Sound
Munichs by David Peace $40
February 6, 1958, British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on take-off at Munich Airport. On board were the young Manchester United team, 'the Busby Babes', and the journalists who followed them. Twenty-one of the passengers died instantly, four were left fighting for their lives while six more were critically injured. Twenty-four hours later, Jimmy Murphy, the assistant manager of Manchester United, faced the press at the Rechts der Isar Hospital: 'What of the future, you ask? It will be a long, hard struggle. It took Matt Busby, Bert Whalley and myself twelve years to produce the 1958 Red Devils. It was long, hard, tiring work, but we succeeded. At the moment, I am so confused, so tired and so sad, I cannot think clearly, but what I do know is that the Red Devils will rise again.' Munichs is the story of how Manchester United rose again, of the crash and its aftermath, of those who survived and those who did not, of how Britain and football changed, and how it did not; a novel of tragedy, but also of hope. [Paperback]
”Peace writes the boldest and most original British fiction of his generation.” —Richard Lloyd Parry, The New York Times
Pearl: A graphic novel by Sherrie Smith and Christine Norrie $21
”We are in Japan in the 1940s with Amy, a 13-year-old Japanese American girl born in Hawaii, sent to visit her ailing great-grandmother. After Pearl Harbour is bombed Amy is stuck in Japan, where she is conscripted by the military to be a Monitor Girl listening in and translating U.S. radio messages. The other story thread is the one her great-grandmother tells her: the Japanese annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom in Okinawa in 1879. Both are stories of survival and hope, and for Amy, identity, the conflict of being both Japanese and American. Christine Norrie’s illustrations capture the confusion and emotion of the situation, and the sharp singular colour palette has great impact.” —Stella
Crack-Up Capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy by Quinn Slobodian $30
An important book right now, showing how capitalist extremists profit from the collapse of the democratic nation. Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalisation has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities — tax havens, free ports, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation — and with them, ultracapitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government altogether. Slobodian follows the most notorious radical libertarians — from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel — around the globe as they search for the perfect home for their free market fantasy. The hunt leads from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the medieval City of London, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled. [Paperback]
Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams $35
Eley Williams returns with a thrilling collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient — from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. A courtroom sketch artist delights in committing portraits of their lover to paper but their need to capture likenesses forever is revealed to have darker, more complex intentions. A child's schoolyard crush on a saint marks a confrontation with the reality of a teenage body in flux. Elsewhere, an editor of canned laughter loses their confidence and seeks divine intervention, and an essayist annotates their thoughts on Keats by way of internet-gleaned sex tips. Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good hums with fossicking language and ingenious experiments in form and considers notions of playfulness, authenticity and care as it holds relationships to account: their sweet misunderstandings, soured reflections, queer wish fulfilments and shared, held breaths. [Paperback]
”Stories that work from the inside out: glancing, intriguing.” —Guardian
”Erudite and audacious.” —Kieran Goddard
”Frequently brilliant and deeply pleasurable.” —Caoilinn Hughes
Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands by Annie Worsley $29
Annie Worsley traded a busy life in academia to take on a small-holding or croft on the west coast of Scotland. It is a land ruled by great elemental forces — light, wind and water — that hold sway over how land forms, where the sea sits and what grows. Windswept explores what it means to live in this rugged, awe-inspiring place of unquenchable spirit and wild weather. Walk with Worsley as she lays quartz stones in the river to reflect the moonlight and attract salmon, as she watches otters play tag across the beach, as she is awoken by the feral bellowing of stags. Travel back in time to the epic story of how Scotland’s valleys were carved by glaciers, rivers scythed paths through mountains, how the earliest people found a way of life in the Highlands — and how she then found a home there millennia later. [Paperback]
”Windswept is a wonderful work, prose-painted in bold, bright strokes like a Scottish Colourist's canvas. It is a story of learning to keep time differently, in one of the most spectacular landscapes in Britain. Annie Worsley has written a gorgeous almanac or year-book in which the minutes, hours and months are marked not by the tick of clock-hands but weather-fronts, bird migrations and plant-patterns of growth and decay.” —Robert Macfarlane
”A shaft of golden stormlight, a blast of pure Highland air, Windswept is an exhilarating account of life lived closer to the elements than most of us will ever have the chance to experience.” —Melissa Harrison
”I have read pages and pages of this wonderful book, swept away by its beauty and understanding, its chromatic brilliance, flickering and surging into colour at every turn, moulded to its mountains and all the subtleties of its winds and skies. Honestly it is a great, great book.” —Adam Nicolson
Fog Island by Tomi Ungerer $35
Two young siblings find themselves cast away on mysterious Fog Island. No one has ever returned from the island's murky shores, but when the children begin to explore, they discover things are not quite as they expected. Ungerer's captivating drawings evoke the eerie beauty and magic surrounding this timeless adventure. [Hardback]
Pop-Up Surrealism by Gérard Lo Monaco $454
In this magical book, pop-up engineer Gérard Lo Monaco brings to life eight works of art by leading surrealists: Salvador Dalí, Victor Brauner, Jean Arp, Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Dora Maar, René Magritte and André Breton. Short texts introduce each work and its historical context, while hand-painted illustrations bring a new dimension to this revolutionary period in modern art. [Hardback]