NEW RELEASES (1.9.23)

New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.

Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai by Michaela Keeble with Kerehi Grace, illustrated by Tokerau Brown $30
”My name is Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai. You can call me Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai.” In this completely outstanding and hugely enjoyable picture book, Paku Manu Ariki talks directly to the reader, drawing on the stories that spin around him—his father’s mātauranga, his mother’s politics, his many pet birds, and his best friend who is taller, even though he’s younger. The book is born from the experience of growing up in a strong Māori whānau in a country and wider world that offers a conflicting version of what is right and of value. Paku Manu Ariki is trying to understand his role in his family, community and the larger world. His preoccupation is who is the boss—his nanna at the marae, his older siblings, or any number of atua? His steadfast dad, his Pākehā mum, the ‘leader of the free world’, or Paku Manu Ariki himself? Paku Manu bumps up against authority, trying to reconcile the kind and just rules of nanna and the unjust power of leaders he sees every day on the TV. Thoughtful, funny and confronting, Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai is about the hustle for belonging, and our place in the epic spiral of space, time and culture.
>>The author introduces the book.
>>Look inside!
>>Other curiously god books from Gecko Press.

Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li $35
A new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, aging and the strangeness of contemporary life. A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li's stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces — death, violence, estrangement — come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen. Li is an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know.
”Li is extraordinary — a storyteller of the first order. She inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one cannot help but marvel.” —Junot Diaz
>>Read the title story.

Melancholy I—II by Jon Fosse (translated from Norwegian by Damion Searles and Grethe Kvernes) $40
Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this feverish narrative, Jon Fosse delves into Hertervig’s mind as the events of one day precipitate his mental breakdown. A student of Hans Gude at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Hertervig is paralyzed by anxieties about his talent and is overcome with love for Helene Winckelmann, his landlady’s daughter. Marked by inspiring lyrical flights of passion and enraged sexual delusions, Hertervig’s fixation on Helene persuades her family that he must leave. Oppressed by hallucinations and with nowhere to go, Hertervig shuttles between a cafe, where he endures the mockery of his more sophisticated classmates, and the Winckelmann’s apartment, which he desperately tries to re-enter – a limbo state which leads him inexorably into a state of madness.
”Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.” —New York Times
>>As if punished.
>>Introduce yourself to Lars Hertervig.
>>It writes itself.

The Forgotten Prophet: Tāmati Te Ito and his Kaingārara Movement by Jefffrey Sissons $50
Tāmati Te Ito Ngāmoke led the prophetic Kaingārara movement in Taranaki from 1856. Te Ito was revered by tribal leaders as a prophetic tohunga matakite; but others, including many settlers and officials, viewed him as an ‘imposter’, a ‘fanatic’. Despite his influence and leadership, Te Ito’s historical importance remains largely unrecognised today. By the time war broke out in 1860, Te Ito and his followers had established a school and a court system in Taranaki. Striving for the ‘fulfilment of the divine order’, the Kaingārara movement initiated the ‘Taranaki iconoclasm’, discarding tapu objects associated with atua (ancestral spirits, which often took the form of reptiles) into massive bonfires. Te Ito was a visionary adviser to Te Ātiawa chief Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke, and played a crucial role in the conflicted region, both before and after the wars of the 1860s. Initially perceived as a rival to the Parihaka leaders, Tohu Kākahi and Te Whiti o Rongomai, he eventually joined the Parihaka community.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life by Anna Funder $40
Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own. When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical nous saved his life. But why — and how — was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell's private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer — and what it is to be a wife.
"Simply, a masterpiece. Here, Anna Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full. And this in a narrative that grips the reader and unfolds through some of the most consequential moments — historical and cultural — of the twentieth century.” —Geraldine Brooks

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman $30
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.
”Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is not a sorrowful kill-your-heroes recanting. It’s much more interesting than that – a freewheeling, hopscotching study of the Fassbinder allure and an investigation of Penman’s younger self…It’s a book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time.” —Anthony Quinn, Observer
>>I don’t just want you to love me.
>>It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.

Ngā Kupu Wero edited by Witi Ihimaera $37
From over 60 Maori writers, Nga Kupu Wero brings together essays, articles, commentary and creative nonfiction on the political, cultural and social issues that challenge us today. From colonisation to identity, from creativity to matauranga Maori, this anthology explores the power of the word.

A New Way to Bake: Re-imagined recipes for plant-based cakes, bakes and desserts by Philip Khoury $60
In A New Way to Bake, Philip transforms the traditional building blocks of baking by using only natural, plant-based ingredients. A New Way to Bake uncovers a brief history of baking before setting out the Plantry, where the main ingredients and their functions are explained. Full of delicious bakes, from Apple Pie to Banana Bread, to Lamingtons and Tiramisù, there are sweet treats for any occasion. Recipes are broken down into digestible steps, with explanations as to why steps are important, and tips along the way too. Plus, there are even QR codes to videos and other resources help navigate through the recipes. Baking has hitherto often been a challenge for those who don’t want to use eggs and butter — no longer!
>>Look inside.
>>Vrioche!

Time Song: Searching for Doggerland by Julia Blackburn $45
How can we think ourselves back in time? Julia Blackburn has always collected things that hold stories about the past, especially the very distant past — mammoth bones, little shells that happen to be two million years old, a flint shaped as a weapon long ago. Time Song brings many such stories together as it tells of the creation, the existence and the loss of a country now called Doggerland, a huge and fertile area that once connected the entire east coast of England with mainland Europe, until it was finally submerged by rising sea levels around 5000 BC. Blackburn mixes fragments from her own life with a series of eighteen 'songs' and all sorts of stories about the places and the people she meets in her quest to get closer to an understanding of Doggerland. She sees the footprints of early humans fossilised in the soft mud of an estuary alongside the scattered pockmarks made by rain falling eight thousand years ago. She visits a cave where the remnants of a Neanderthal meal have turned to stone. In Denmark she sits beside Tollund Man who seems to be about to wake from a dream, even though he has lain in a peat bog since the start of the Iron Age. Now in paperback.
>>The old time, the deep time.
>>Look inside.

The Visitors by Jane Harrison $37
On a steamy, hot day in January 1788, seven Aboriginal men, Elders representing the nearby clans, gather at Warrane. Several newly arrived ships are in the harbour. The men meet to discuss their response to these Visitors. All day, they talk, argue, debate. Where are the Visitors from? What do they want? Might they just warra warra wai back to where they came from? Should they be welcomed? Or should they be made to leave? The decision of the men must be unanimous — and will have far-reaching implications for all. Throughout the day the weather is strange, with mammatus clouds, unbearable heat, and a pending thunderstorm. Somewhere, trouble is brewing.
”A remarkable achievement of First Nations storytelling. We live in a time when truths need to be told and heard — this is a generous offering, a story that challenges and ultimately rewards us.” —Tony Birch
”A work of soaring imagination and breathtaking ambition. Jane Harrison upends all our black-and-white assumptions about what happened on that fateful January day in 1788 when eleven tall ships sailed into a safe blue harbour that people already called home. Surprisingly funny, cheeky and tragic by turns, this remarkable novel is bold, brave and unforgettable.” —Clare Wright
>>Harrison has written a play of the same idea.

Preventable: How a pandemic changed the world, and how to stop the next one by Devi Sridhar $37
Combining science, politics, ethics and economics, this definitive book dissects the global structures that determine our fate, and reveals the deep-seated economic and social inequalities at their heart. Will we never learn?
“The sensational story of how a disaster was turned into a catastrophe, with the clarity, precision and humanity that you would expect from one of the most important voices of reason of the COVID era. A brutally compelling reminder that if voices like Devi's had been listened to, so many more could have lived.” —Owen Jones