NEW RELEASES (18.8.23)
New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.
After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley $40
A collection of twelves stories plumbing the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognise each other. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age — everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes. These stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams.
>>A master of non-elaboration.
>>On building a story from details.
>>Read the title story.
Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe $37
”It was hard to be in the present, she said, but if her body were heavier and more in control, then her thoughts would clear and her mind would recover its power.”
An enigmatic young woman drastically transforms her body, working to become bigger, stronger, and stiller in the wake of a trauma. We see her through the eyes of three people, each uniquely mesmerized by her, as they reckon with the consequences of her bizarre metamorphosis. Each of them leaves us with a puzzle piece of who she was before she became someone else. Elliot, a recluse who notices her at the gym, witnesses her physical evolution and becomes her first acolyte. Bella, her mother, worries about the intense effect her daughter's new way of life is beginning to have on others, and she reflects on their relationship, a close cocoon from which her daughter has broken free. Susie, her ex-colleague and best friend, offers her sanctuary and support as she makes the transition to self-created online phenomenon, posting viral meditation videos that encourage her followers to join her in achieving self-sufficiency by isolating themselves from everyone else in their lives. Chrysalis raises questions about selfhood and solitude. It asks if it is possible for a woman to have agency over her body while remaining part of society, and then offers its own explosive answer. (A lovely hardback.)
”Unputdownable, ice-cool and wittily contemporary, Chrysalis announces Anna Metcalfe as a distinctive and daring fresh literary voice. Utterly original and with shades of Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, Yoko Ogawa and Alexandra Kleeman, this brilliant portrayal of desire and transcendence had me totally entranced.” —Sharlene Teo
>>Loneliness and online selfhood.
>>Transformation.
>>Read an extract.
Wish I Was Here: An anti-memoir by M. John Harrison $40
”Late style is when the people who have all your life jumped in front of you waving their arms — No! Careful! — jump out one more time to encourage you to run them down, and this time you do.”
M. John Harrison has written space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. Every book is subversive of genre and united by restless intelligence, experimentation and rebelliousness of spirit. This is his first memoir, an 'anti-memoir', written in his mid-seventies with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style, fresh after winning the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020.
”One of the best writers currently at work in English.” —Robert Macfarlane
”Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece. Formally inventive, constantly surprising, M John Harrison has written an archaeology of fragments that shivers with wholeness. It's exquisite.” —Helen Macdonald
”As always with M John Harrison, you're never quite sure what you're reading or where it will take you next. There are only a few certainties: that it will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed.” —Jonathan Coe
”'Harrison is the shape-shifting master of absent and elusive things, many of them absent and eluding in Barnes and the Peak District. In this mesmerising book, the author — or rather his style — goes in search of what may have been his memories of different versions of his life. The result is an enchantment of instability, usually ungraspable, always intense.'' —Neil MacGregor
“So wholly original that a label doesn’t do it justice” —New Statesman
>>The consequences are real.
Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, vaccine, and the health of nations by Simon Schama $70
Covid 19 was not the first instance of a mass infection being met and tempered with a vaccine, as Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox struck London; cholera hit Paris; plague came to India. Threading through Schama’s stories of terror, suffering and hope — in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums — are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai. At the heart of it all, an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice. Just as with the current pandemic, it is politics and self-interest that prevent humanity from receiving the full benefits of science.
>>An indictment of modern leaders’ response to Covid.
>>Science has to run ahead.
>>What history teaches us about pandemics.
Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi (translated by Jeremy Tiang) $33
A fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi's experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside. Zou poetically captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is less talkedabout — the sheer tedium and waste of young life, as well as the gallows humour thataccompanies such desperate situations.
>>”I wrote this book to let go of my childhood.”
>>”When I looked at myself, I saw a stranger.”
>>Read an extract.
>>”Everyone should translate.”
>>Also available in this edition.
The Food Almanac 2 by Miranda York $40
A collection of recipes and stories celebrating the joy of food , as a beautifully produced and illustrated hardback. Miranda York has curated a dynamic, diverse mix of history, memoir, stories and poems, alongside recipes, cooking tips and techniques, menus and reading lists — from Caroline Eden describing the dining car on the Siberian Express to Diana Henry honouring the softness of autumn, from Simon Hopkinson discussing the glory of puddings to Russell Norman celebrating bitterness in the beautiful form of chicory and its many Italian varieties. Each month includes a seasonal three-course menu from food writers such as Jeremy Lee, Tommi Miers, Emily Scott and Calum Franklin, plus additional recipes from the likes of Mary Berry, Asma Khan, Darina Allen and Gill Meller — there is an abundance of thought-provoking, hunger-making food writing for you to tuck into, whatever the season.
>>Have a look inside!
The Amazing and True Story of Tooth Mouse Pérez by Ana Cristina Herreros, illustrated by Violeta Lopiz $35
Long ago, throughout the Spanish-speaking world, the Tooth Mouse brought children their permanent teeth, strong and straight as a mouse's. Tracing the Tooth Mouse's beginnings through to his descendants, this book artfully weaves the Tooth Mouse's changing habits as the world industrializes, with the growing independence of the child, as teeth fall out and the child learns to care for themselves. It's also a playful, thought-provoking history of our changing world — as even Tooth Mice and children must adapt their customs when faced with the culture-shifting forces of urbanization, migration, and capitalism… Just remember, magic can always be recovered, and the real gift in losing baby teeth is growing up!
>>Look inside!
The Men with the Pink Triangle: The true life-and-death story of homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps by Heinz Heger $35
For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed ‘undesirable’, suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. This heart-wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality, now with a new foreword by Sarah Schulman, remains an essential contribution to gay history and our understanding of historical fascism, as well as a remarkable testament to the resilience of those who experienced the unimaginable cruelty of the concentration camps.
>>About the author and the book.
No Love Lost by Rachel Ingalls $25
After a one-night-stand with the Angel Gabriel, a monk is transformed into a pregnant woman. Lost in the fog, two visitors are lured into a ruined candlelit mansion. A wife confiscates her husband's homemade sex doll, only to demand her own. Great-aunts warn of the deadly skin of the pearlkillers. Rachel Ingalls's incomparable novellas are surrealist, subversive, tragicomic. Prepare to meet what lurks beneath. From the author of Mrs Caliban.
”Wonderful.” —Margaret Atwood
”Genius.” —Patricia Lockwood
”Remarkable.” —Joseph Heller
”Perfect.” —Max Porter
>>Hallucinatory realism.
Penance by Eliza Clark $37
It's been years since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time. That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec. Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder — and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil. The only question is: how much of it is true? From the author of Boy Parts.
"Eliza Clark is a genius with voice and a master of flipped expectations. Penance astonished me with its breadth, wit and confidence. A wickedly clever deep dive into the nastier corners of the national psyche--you've never read anything like this." —Julia Armfield
"A work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence." —The Guardian
>>A slippery take.
>>A bravura deconstruction of our voyeuristic love for true crime.
The Waters by Carl Nixon $37
One family. Forty years. The Waters kids ― practical, athletic Mark; the physically beautiful dreamer Davey; and the baby of the family, Samantha ― have had to face more than their fair share of challenges. 1979 was the year their father sold up the farm and invested all the family’s money in a doomed property development next to the ocean in Christchurch. Is that when 'everything started going wrong', as Mark believes? Will their bond survive the passage of time or will the three siblings succumb to their parents’ legacy of failure? Can the past be overcome . . . and forgiven?
The Wolf’s Secret by Nicolas Digard and Myriam Dahman, illustrated by Júlia Sardà $23
Wolf is a hunter, feared by every creature. But he has a secret: in the middle of the forest lives a girl whose beautiful voice has entranced him . The Wolf longs for friendship. But is he prepared to sacrifice his own true nature in order for his wish to come true? A beautifully illustrated contemporary fairytale about difference, trust, and the power of friendship.
>>Look inside!
>>Storytime!
>>Júlia Sardà’s website.
War and Punishment by Mikhail Zygar $40
Zygar explores how more than 300 years of propaganda, bad historical scholarship, folk tales and fantasy, from the legendary deeds of the Cossacks to 1970s spy novels, led Russia to commit an act of violence on the Ukraine. By unpicking the historical confusions and telling the strange but true stories of Russo-Ukrainian relations over the past centuries, Zygar reveals the origins of Russia's actionas and points the way out of its self-destructive imperial delusions.
The Archaeology of Loss: Life, love, and the art of dying by Sarah Tarlow $40
As an archaeologist, much of Tarlow’s work is concerned with the ritual and belief behind the practices of grief. In 2012, she was awarded the Chair in Archaeology at the University of Leicester. But in the years that followed this appointment, her husband, Mark, would begin to suffer from a progressive but undiagnosed illness, finally resulting in his inability to drive, to walk, to taste or to care for himself. Though Sarah had devoted her professional life to the study of emotion, of how we anticipate and experience grief, nothing could have prepared her for the realities of care-giving, of losing someone you love and the helplessness attached to both.
>>Wholly Mark and wholly dead.
In Limbo: A graphic memoir by Deb JJ Lee $35
Deborah (Jung-Jin) Lee knows she's different. Ever since her family emigrated from South Korea to the United States, she's felt her Otherness. And as the pressures of high school ramp up, friendships change or end and everything gets harder. Even home isn't a safe place, as fights with her mother escalate. Deb is caught in a limbo, with nowhere to go. But Deb is resilient. And during a trip to South Korea, she realises something that changes her perspective on her family, her heritage, and herself.
>>Look inside!