NEW RELEASES (1.10.26)

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.

Bedford Street by Ross Murray $35
The much-anticipated new graphic novel from the author of Rufus Marigold, Bedford Street is a darkly comic exploration of social decay, hardship, recklessness and the ways in which we care for one another. Eight loosely interwoven stories create a mosaic of lives lived in the growing maelstrom of 21st century Aotearoa, where some submit to their worst impulses and others try their best despite it all. Beautifully done. Subtle. Devastating. [Paperback]
'This is one of the most deeply truthful depictions of humanity I've ever read. Beautifully bleak and chocka with delicious moments of dark humour, Murray has created a truly captivating cast of (highly) flawed yet loveable characters.' —Tom Sainsbury
”Bedford Street is not just a moving and beautifully presented graphic novel but, as with Rufus Marigold, it invites us to think about relationships, how we conduct ourselves, caring and being responsible.” —Graham Reid, Elsewhere
>>Look inside!
>>Read an extract.
>>What has happened in our society?
>>Deeply flawed.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Rufus Marigold.
>>Other superb Aotearoa graphic novels from Earth’s End.

Whose Knowledge Counts? From warp drive to waka huia by Pounamu Jade William Emery Aikman $20
‘The miracle of knowledge is that it speaks across time and space, from tūpuna to descendant.’ Knowledge takes many forms, but not all are valued equally. Pounamu Jade Aikman shows how particular ways of knowing underpin life in Aotearoa, to the exclusion of others. Ranging from Foucault to Spock to school lunches, Aikman traces the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge systems. He looks at the impact of this on our economy, prisons, politics and constitutional relationships, asking is knowledge, like space, our final frontier? Challenging, optimistic and ever curious, this Text explores how we value knowledge, and what that means for us all. [Paperback]

A Guide to Making Fragments from Diaries by Joshua Beckman $45
Joshua Beckman's new book, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries, gathers poems found or made in various forms — chapter summaries of non-existent books, body poems, an assemblage of his mother's remarks while painting his portrait, lists of thoughts and things (one of all the uninvited animals and insects who entered his house over the course of a year!). The book culminates with the guide, including light instructions toward finding fragments within a notebook or diary. [Paperback]
”If you take a broad squint at our nation's new poets you can find two general strategies: poets who are carrying the torch, and poets who are using it to start fires. And then we have Joshua Beckman. He seems to be doing everything.” —Daniel Handler, The Believer
>>Early 1984.
>>A sequence of prompts.

Brother BrontBrontë by Fernando A. Flores $37
The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech-industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of its mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick's pockets. Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Proserpina and Neftalí. One of Three Rivers' last literate citizens, Neftalí hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalí's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick's forces, Neftalí and Proserpina, with the help of a wounded Bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel aunties, rise up to reclaim their city — and in the process, unlock Rivas's connection to Three Rivers itself. A mordant, gonzo romp through a ruined world that, in its dysfunction, tyranny, and disparity, feels uncannily like our own. [Paperback]
"Flores's style has an exhilarating punk, D.I.Y. aplomb; it's as if he feels he's inventing literature for the first time." —Mark Leyner, The New York Times Book Review
"This crazy, cakey world-making of Fernando A. Flores is all of literature: wide, plaintive, melancholy, and full of feminist fellow joyousness and ways." —Eileen Myles
>>Read an extract.

Land, Race, and the Settler Imgination by Liana MacDonald $20
Liana MacDonald exposes how settler colonialism is sustained by the places we move through, the institutions we work in and the stories we tell. Deconstructing the ‘settler fantasy’, she reveals how a settler understanding of race, land and power is made to seem natural, even inevitable. Well-meaning efforts to challenge it can reinforce the very thing they oppose. Once we recognise our part in these stories, MacDonald argues, we might begin to remake our relationships with one another, in our everyday lives and workplaces. [Paperback]

Noriko Smiling by Adam Mars-Jones $30
'Late Spring, directed and co-written by Yasujiro Ozu, was released in 1949, which makes it an old film, or a film that has been new for a long time...' So begins this remarkable essay in narrative reconstruction, which elicits a world of meanings from the reticences of one classic Japanese movie, and reserves to the very end a resolution of its mystery. Adam Mars-Jones gives a virtuoso performance as that lost figure from the earl days of cinema: the film explainer. There has never been a film book like this one. [Hardback (clothbound)]
>>The light is sixty years old.
>>Demystifying the master.
>>Watch Late Spring.

Kupe me te Wheke nui a Muturangi nā Mat Tait $30
Te haerenga a Kupe ki Aotearoa! I ako a Kupe mō te wheke nui, mō te wheke wehi nāna tonu ngā ika o te moana i kai, arā, kua kore ngā kaimoana hei kai mā ngā tāngata o Hawaiki. Nā, ka whāia taua wheke rā e Kupe, ka whiti atu i Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Nāwai rā, ka kite a Hine-te-Aparangi i tētahi whenua me tētahi ao tea roa: Aotearoa! Ākona ngā kōrero mō te pakanga nui i waenga i a Kupe me te wheke nui. [Uhi mārō]
>>Tirohia ki roto!
>>Kupe and the Giant Octopus of Muturangi.

Hinterlands: journeys through Europe’s unfinished frontiers by Hannah Lucinda Smith $55
Long before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, conflict was simmering on Europe's borders. In overlooked territories in eastern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus — from the Balkans and Cyprus to Abkhazia on the fringes of Georgia — local disputes spiral into regional crises, global alliances are forged and broken, and power is brokered while the West looks elsewhere. In Hinterlands, correspondent Hannah Lucinda Smith draws on vivid first-hand encounters with politicians, spies and ordinary people caught in the crosshairs to paint a gripping portrait of Europe at its edges — and the struggles that will define its future. [Hardback]
”Brilliantly reported and sharply analysed, Hinterlands shines a light on the disputed on the disputed regions that are on the frontline of great power conflict.' —Gideon Rachman
'A gripping and elegantly written exploration of Europe's little-understood frontiers. Hannah Lucinda Smith reveals why the continent's borderlands matter — and how they are quietly reshaping the future of the continent.' —Peter Frankopan
’An important book which provides a compelling reminder of Europe's half-forgotten border conflicts, each of them capable of erupting once again into war’ —Sam Miller

The Hidden Globe: How wealth hacks the world by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian $28
Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist's riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens' rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had — bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centres where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by foreign governments and multinational corporations — and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids. [Paperback]
”This book did nothing less than make me re-see the world. Original, and very clever.” —Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
”In describing insidiously interconnected global regimes of inequality and injustice, Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.” —Pankaj Mishra

Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks $38
Philip Deval, a soldier recently returned from the beaches of Normandy, arrives in Palestine on a ‘peace-keeping mission’ in the final days of the British Mandate. The Sea of Galilee glitters in the distance as war-weary troops marvel at the novelty of oranges and sun — a paradise that belies a fierce new conflict about to erupt. Some years later, Philip begins work teaching at a school in the English countryside and meets the enigmatic music mistress, Frances Darwood. Over long evenings spent listening to records in her music room, they grow close. But Philip is a changed man, and must confront the secrets and scars of all he has lived through — which threaten, even now, to upend his future. Farewell to Eden is a portrait of an embattled post-war Britain. It asks the question: how, after great suffering, do we retain our humanity, learn to love again, and believe in the promise of a better life? [Paperback]
”A fascinating, timely and densely pleasurable novel, written with measured and impressive intelligence and tremendous narrative aplomb.” —William Boyd
”A beautifully written and deceptively deep novel of moral choice set in the aftermath of the Second World War. The characters are as utterly convincing as the story.” —Antony Beevor
”Faulks is one of the titans of historical fiction and has this gift for really bringing to life the minutiae of the suffering of war and violence. It's a really arresting book and important work of storytelling.” —Afua Hirsch

The Jewish Bakery: Over 100 family recipes from East London’s oldest Jewish bakery by Jennifer Rinkoff $65
From Rinkoffs, a family-run Jewish bakery in London's East End, comes The Jewish Bakery, an exciting selection of their tried-and-tested recipes, all of which bring the joy of the bakery into your kitchen. Ranging from simple treats to more involved recipes, you'll find traditional and celebratory Jewish items, with something for everyone. Try your hand at much-loved specialties, including challah and beigels, as well as more modern creations, like matcha babka and vegan chocolate banana bread. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!