NEW RELEASES (1.7.26)
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Kieron Smith, boy by James Kelman $48
Rejected by his brother and largely ignored by his parents, Kieron Smith finds comfort – and endless stories – in the home of his much-loved grandparents. But when his family move to a new housing scheme on the outskirts of Glasgow, a world away from the close community of the tenements, Kieron struggles to find a way to adapt to his new life. Kieron Smith, boy is a brilliant evocation of an urban working-class childhood, capturing the joys, frustrations, injustices, excitements, revels, battles, games, uncertainties, questions, lies, discoveries and sheer of wonder. Kelman is an outstanding writer, uncompromising and with deep sympathy for the downtrodden, and it is good to see his works coming back into print. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Kieron Smith, boy is one more in a line of uncompromising, honest, passionate, radical and perfectly crafted books from a writer who has not given up on the questions of freedom and justice.' —Sean O'Reilly, Stinging Fly
'Kieron Smith, boy gives voice to an honourable decency which guides the human spirit even in the midst of its own brutality. This is an outstanding novel of immense power, and is Kelman's best yet.' —Simon Koevesi, The Independent
'By forcing us to rethink childhood, (and therefore adulthood), Kieron Smith, boy is a magnificent and important novel, and might just be Kelman's greatest achievement to date.' —Irvine Welsh, Financial Times
'An outstanding, living, breathing novel that powerfully documents the life of a Glaswegian boy in his own voice. This book is almost impossible to review, because it is simply too good. Kelman is not beating up the contemporary novel — he is simply showing how it's done and shoving the bar that bit farther up and out of reach for most British writers.' —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
'James Kelman's best novel so far, Kieron Smith, boy is Kelman's tender evocation of his own childhood.' —James Wood, New Yorker
'The boy's voice, to my ear, is flawless and brilliantly sustained. The diction, the syntax, the sudden cliff-edges Kelman brings us to, where language fails — these are the product of years of careful listening to people who're never listened to.' —Kathleen Jamie, Granta
>>Read an excerpt.
>>The war against silence.
Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette (translated ffrom Fench by Kate Briggs) $42
In an opulent villa near the English channel lives a well-to-do family. A man--a husband, father, and employer--has been shot dead. The bullet is from his own gun, which he got from the Germans during the war. In this family, the father has a safe, a monkey wrench, a wife, and a maid named Rose. The son has a swing, a croquet set, a rain coat, and a car. They all read detective novels to fall asleep (the father), to stay awake (the son), to distract herself from an empty marriage (the mother). Packed with brutal revelations, the novel centers on the twenty minutes of silence it takes for the family to alert the doctor (who lives next door) of the father's death. Everything in this high-octane drama is subject to change, including the setting and the characters, who are truer to life than might at first appear. But who if anyone is the true criminal and who is the victim? In this marvelous and sui generis novel, written in Bessette's signature taut and stripped-back prose, the detective novel is turned inside out and wholly on its head. Introduction by Kathryn Scanlan. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Twenty Minutes of Silence is a sublimely rare thing: a feat of experimentation that defies comparison. Helene Bessette's phrasings (translated by the brilliant Kate Briggs) pulse with a bass drum and freewheeling speed, as she upends the sentence so that we can reconsider our relationship to language and the stories we tell with it. Thrilling.' —Makenna Goodman
'Discovering Helene Bessette through Kate Briggs's incredible translations has felt like having a light switched on. I can feel so many of us excitedly learning and re-exploring the potential of the novel, which as a form, multiplies in Twenty Minutes of Silence. The brilliant modernist and anti-commercial styles that run through it feel perfect for us now and I am grateful we get to write and think in the extraordinary milieu of Bessette and Briggs.' —Holly Pester
>>With the revolver in the library.
Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno $42
Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child's life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more. [Paperback]
”Kate Zambreno's oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an interrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence.” —Paris Review
>>Worthwhile ghost.
>>Writing postpartum.
The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Alison L. Strayer) $25
One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women's conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie's memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. The Other Girl explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ernaux repeatedly stuns by the depth and honesty of her psychological observations, as she does by her frugal and unsentimental language. This book, beautiful and profound, attests to what we already knew from her other works — that Ernaux is one of the great writers of our time, and a truly worthy Nobel.” —Magdalena Miecznicka, Financial Times
”Across over twenty books and for the better part of the last five decades, Ernaux has gathered, broken and reassembled the infinite, singular matter of her history. Perhaps no other literary figures, save Proust or Knausgaard, have come as near to achieving so Promethean a project.” —Jamie Hood, The Baffler
>>Other books by Annie Ernaux.
Maybe Baby by Emma Neale $39
Nate, a grieving widower, is determined to honour his late wife and find a way to have the child they were desperate to raise together. After various attempts to identify a suitable surrogate come to nothing, Nate is compelled to try something radical. He travels to London to take part in a groundbreaking medical trial. As things progress, he becomes caught in the complex hinge of three powerful desires: his loyalty to his late wife, a primal urge to be a father, and his knee-weakening attraction to Sadie, who has her own reasons to resist starting a family. [Paperback]
”An irresistible story of grief, hope and the miracles we dare to chase.” —Catherine Chidgey
>>By page 25 she is dead.
>>Grief and desire.
Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora (translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery) $40
An archaeological novel that digs into the strata of the European soil, and uncovers a long history of oppression, expropriation and erasure. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European feudalism is starting to crumble. Newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small Prussian town to claim a plot of arable land and the simple life of a freehold farmer. Digging a grave for his wife’s body, Redo finds the body of a soldier. The next day, Redo uncovers two soldiers from an earlier time, perfectly preserved. This novel contains the story of Redo's mysterious life, and the great love at the heart of it, revealed in chapters of increasing length: as the bodies proliferate, the story gets more complicated. What will be excavated from the earth, and what will remain buried? Astounding, bursting with ideas and novel thoughts. [Paperback]
‘Mora embarks on a radical adventure in a Europe ravaged by wars and revolutions that has no reference in our current literature.’ —La Vanguardia
>>Hidden and revealed delights.
>>Freedom through structure.
>>Melville in miniature.
Repetition, A novel by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $25
As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange. It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Hjorth writes with the feminist bluntness of Annie Ernaux, the psychic precision of Javier Marias and the lyrical repetitions of Jon Fosse.” —S.C. Cornell, The New York Times
”For Freud the 'compulsion to repeat,' as he called it, was an unconscious expression of what had been repressed by memory. Here, Hjorth brings that compulsion to life in prose, making the reader feel, at once, the desire to remember and the desire to forget, which battle it out on the field of memory. The novel's explosive power comes from the tension between those competing desires, and its suspense comes from the presence of the unnamed trauma, which sits outside the family's house like a hungry beast in the darkness. If Will and Testament shows us the process by which a repressed truth rises to the surface, Repetition shows us how it gets repressed.” —Madeline Gressel, Parapraxis
>>Never let it go.
>>Finding words.
>>Familiar and strange.
>>Unfolding the past.
>>Other books by Vigdis Hjorth.
>>Other Repetiton.
When the World Sleeps: Stories, words and wounds of Palestine by Francesca Albanese (translated from Italian by Gregory Conti) $38
The spirit of a place lies in the people who inhabit it, in the stories that intertwine through its streets. And this is especially true of a land like Palestine, the witness to defining historic transitions to one of the most painful chapters in contemporary history. With a voice both authoritative and deeply human, Francesca Albanese (who lived in Palestine for many years while following the legal battles of numerous Palestinian families and is currently a United Nations Special Rapporteur) takes on the role of narrator of the ongoing conflict, starting with the stories of the people she met. Anyone following the harrowing events that have unfolded in the Middle East who wants to understand Palestine will discover in When the World Sleeps a gallery of stories, characters, and places that allow us to understand what Palestine was like until recently, and what it has become today. [Paperback]
Motherland: A feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy by Julia Ioffe $40
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home mothers. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women. [Paperback]
'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia. Julia Ioffe tracks the transformation of Russia from dictatorship to democracy and back again in sharp, engaging prose, filling in the blanks, telling the stories left out by so many others.' —Anne Applebaum
Search and Find: Alphabet of Alphabets [and] Number of Numbers by Allan Sanders $30
There are hours of fun in this epic search-and-find activity book! Children can practise their letters and numbers in this interactive activity book designed to engage and entertain. There are over fifty fully illustrated 'search-and-find' activities, each themed on a number or letter of the alphabet. In Alphabet of Alphabets, you'll take a ride through twenty-six fully-illustrated alphabets, from an A to Z of Birds to an A to Z of Zoo. Then, flip the book over for Number of Numbers, where you can count the animals going into Noah's Ark two-by-two, spot thirteen scary skeletons at the haunted house on Halloween, visit Farm Fifteen and more. Dip in and out of the pages or do each one in order for a unique reading experience. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Being: Why its harder to be a human than a hamster or a herring by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies $40
From early childhood, we start to become aware of the difficulties we must all inevitably face. We will battle an inner critic across the entirety of our life. We will never truly know those around us and time will destroy all we create. Death becomes a reality, and we cannot escape the knowledge that it is coming for us all. These are the problems of being; the existential truths that make it harder to be human than a hamster or a herring. Many other problems emerge from the knowledge of our own mortality. How do we find meaning, choose a life path, form an identity, face uncertainty, cope with hardship and, ultimately, bear the loss of all we love? How do we make peace with the inner voice that won't stop attacking the choices we've made and the opportunities we've missed? How do we deal with the uncertain and unpredictable nature of the world and our future? [Paperback]
'Few books capture so powerfully the paradox of being human: that self-awareness both elevates us and unsettles us. Being is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand anxiety, identity, and the shadow of mortality.' —Professor Thomas Heidenreich, Esslingen University