NEW RELEASES (17.11.23)
A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers $37
“Part poetry, part electricity, this story carries relics between the ephemeral and the eternal with all the disarming vitality of a truly illuminated text.” —Goldsmiths Prize judges' citation
Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras — from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages. And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage their dreams, desires, connections and communities. Winner of the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize.
”A sensational piece of storytelling. The symbiosis of poetry and story, of knowledge and deep love, marks out Cuddy as a singular and significant achievement.” —Guardian
”A polyphonic hymn to a very specific landscape and its people. At the same time, it deepens his standing as an arresting chronicler of a broader, more mysterious seam of ancient folklore that unites the history of the British Isles as it's rarely taught.” —Observer
Flora: Celebrating our botanical world edited by Carlos Lehnebach, Claire Regnault, Rebecca Rice, Isaac Te Awa, and Rachel Yates $80
This splendid large-format book mines Te Papa's collections to explore and expand upon the way we think about our botanical world and its cultural imprint. It features over 400 selections by a cross-disciplinary curatorial team that range from botanical specimens and art to photography, furniture, jewellery, tivaevae, applied art, textiles, stamps and more. Flora's twelve essays provide a deeper contextual understanding of different topics, including the unique characteristics of New Zealand flora as well as how artists and cultures have used flora as a motif and a subject over time. Very desirable, very browsable, very givable.
I Have the Right: An affirmation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child illustrated by Reza Dalvand $30
Beautifully illustrated and unfortunately urgently relevant at the moment, this book introduces children and reminds adults of the basic rights of children that no adult or government should violate for any reason. I have the right to have a name and a nationality. I have the right to the best healthcare. I have the right to an education. I have the right to a home where I can thrive. Adopted in 1989 and ratified by these 190 countries, the UNCRoC promises to defend the rights of children and to keep them safe, respected, and valued. Dalvand's stunning illustrations speak to children all around the world, some of whose rights are often challenged and must be protected every day. Among its other articles guaranteeing children’s access to food, water, safety and wellbeing, the UNCRoC specifically “condemns the targeting of children in situations of armed conflict and direct attacks on objects protected under international law, including places that generally have a significant presence of children, such as schools and hospitals.”
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo $35
Short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, Western Lane is a beautiful and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, and a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself. Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in an intense training regime, and the game becomes her world. Her life is reduced to the sport’s rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot, and its echo.
What the Booker judges say: "Skilfully deploying the sport of squash as both context and metaphor, Western Lane is a deeply evocative debut about a family grappling with grief, conveyed through crystalline language which reverberates like the sound ‘of a ball hit clean and hard…with a close echo’.” Now available in paperback.
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner $37
This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer on the cusp of a windfall, courtesy of the Social Evils prize committee, for whom the actual gong — and with it the prize money - remains tantalizingly out of reach. Neon beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with partner Drew and surprise eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular detour through their childhood in the Forest 3 via an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, through wormholes and time loops, Corey learns — the hard way — the difference between a prize and a gift. Both radiant and revolutionary, Isabel Waidner's fiction gleefully takes a hammer to false binaries, boundaries and borders, turning walls into bridges and words into wings. Fierce, fluid and funny, they free us to imagine another way of being. This is a novel about coming into one's own, the labour of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself and the pitfalls of social mobility. It's about watching TV with your lover. Waidner, whose Sterling Karat Gold was awarded he 2022 Goldsmiths Prize, has a unique, disorienting, and very enjoyable voice.
”A piece of winged originality.” —Ali Smith
”A provocative act of resistance to our morally slippery times. Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas.” —Guardian
”The writer everyone is talking about — and deservedly so. Their explosive sensibility and style are as far removed from mediocre prose and middle-class manners as you can imagine.” —Bernardine Evaristo
”Buckle up! Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is a head-spinning, mind-bending roller coaster of fun, horror, and subversion. I love it.” —Kamila Shamsie
At the Bach by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Hilary Jean Tapper $30
Cowley’s simple rhythmic text is perfectly matched with Tapper’s warm and gentle illustrations to capture the common childhood experience of staying in a bach by the sea in summer. An instant favourite.
The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell $37
It's the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her — about her affairs, her sexuality, her orgies and addictions. All these stories are lies, but the public loves them — spreading them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in society. This is a world of decadence and saturation, of lavish parties and private salons, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. It's also one ruled by men — high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, crimes against women and, above all, language. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth and beauty. A wild story of female friendship, language and power, from France to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment — a historical novel like no other.
”Adam Thirlwell considers the celestial and the political on the same plane, creating wondrous new ways of seeing history, nature, friendship and time. He weaves together so many wisps of reality, and the result is a radically beautiful new novel that is funny, touching, memorable and bright.” —Sheila Heti
”Thirlwell's prose is hypnotic and coolly beautiful. The writing is full of dreamlike leaps, not just at the level of plot, but in its sentences, too. The Future Future has a beauty and a mysterious power that reflect its enigmatic protagonist.” —Guardian
”A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight.” —Colm Toibin
Take What You Need by Idra Novey $25
Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who's sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah's urban life with her young family, she's revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother's hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition. But with Jean's death, Leah must return to sort through what's been left be-hind. What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she's welded from scraps of the area's industrial history. Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most, zeroing in on the joys and difficulties of family with great verve and humour.
”Novey fully renders the inarticulable parts of artmaking - the antagonism of an artist's material, the pleasure in that difficulty, the way it troubles tidy ideasof legacy.” —Raven Leilani
Determined: Life without free will by Robert Sapolsky $40
Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Determined offers a synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works — the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault". Yet, as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognising that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.
Eve: How the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution by Cat Bohannon $42
Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon's findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women's pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.
”Utterly fascinating. This book should revolutionise our understanding of human life. It is set to become a classic.” —George Monbiot
”Eve was immeasurably useful to me in my life-long quest to understand my own body. I highly recommend it to anyone who is on the same journey.” —Hope Jahren
Artists in Antarctica edited by Patrick Shepherd $80
What transformation happens when writers, musicians and artists stand in the vast, cold spaces of Antarctica? This book brings together paintings, photographs, texts and musical scores by Aotearoa New Zealand artists who have been to the ice. It explores the impact of this experience on their art and art process, as well as the physical challenges of working in a harsh and unfamiliar environment. Antarctic science, nature and human history are explored through the creative lens of some of New Zealand's most acclaimed artists, composers and writers, including Lloyd Jones, Laurence Aberhart, Nigel Brown, Gareth Farr, Dick Frizzell, Anne Noble, Virginia King, Owen Marshall, Grahame Sydney, Ronnie van Hout, Phil Dadson, and Sean Garwood.
A Passion for Whisky: How the tiny island of Islay creates malts that captivate the world by Ian Wisniewski $60
”Ian Wisniewski is one of our foremost drinks writers. At once affectionate, knowledgeable and entertaining, this engaging book is essential reading for any fans of Islay whisky.” —Charles MacLean
Individual profiles of Islay's 13 distilleries include tasting notes for selected malts that illustrate the incredible range of peated styles produced, together with a section on tasting techniques, making this an indispensable guide for Scotch whisky lovers.