NEW RELEASES (27.2.25)
Your new books — just out of the carton! We can have your order dispatched by overnight courier or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang (translated from Korean by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) $40
One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalised in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird — or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting. [Hardback]
”Unforgettable. A disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history. Hang Kang's prose, as delicate as footprints in the snow or a palimpsest of shadows, conjures up the specters haunting a nation, a family, a friendship.” —Hernan Diaz
”A visionary novel about history, trauma, art and its tremendous costs. Han Kang is one of the most powerfully gifted writers in the world. With each work, she transforms her readers, and rewrites the possibilities of the novel as a form.” —Katie Kitamura
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse (translated from German by Katy Derbyshire) $36
A narrator and her dog are criss-crossing the Swiss Alps. She travels with friends who share her interest in food, languages and their topographical contexts. They collect colours, even look for colourlessness, and develop the idea of a walk-in diary, a vain attempt to archive their observations. Gradually, other mountains appear in their observations and memories, as do the mountains of literature and art. Mountains may be sites of fear and awe, of narrow-mindedness, racism and ever-looming collapse; Alpine lodges may be places of hospitality, retreat and unexpected encounters; of nature under threat. In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish. [Paperback]
Gloss by Kyra Wilder $38
Transposing the Greek myth of the Hesperides nymphs (guarding the Golden Apples in the legend of Hercules) to Marin County at the turn of the millennium, Gloss is an unconventional psychological thriller with feminist bite. Apple farmer Lee Lotan is a passionate cook who runs an alternative therapy programme for young women suffering from an unnamed eating disorder. Ari, Eleni and Hesper meet at his farm, Golden Apples, one summer. His seemingly benevolent methods have a long-term impact on his young charges. A year later, a trial is underway and the girls reunite to testify. From the chorus of their voices emerges a surreal, kaleidoscopic picture of trauma and its aftermath: ambivalence, guilt, denial, lingering fascination, and the gaps left by things too difficult to speak aloud. As the story reaches its surreal climax, the girls discover the incompetence of the criminal justice system and the cathartic delights of personal revenge. Wilder paints desire and disgust alike in sensuous, delicate prose. [Wrappered paperback][
”Taut and vivid. It is like stepping into a delicately described hallucinatory nightmare and I was completely mesmerised all the way through. The themes of coercive control and psychological disintegration are so chilling and important.” —Suzanne Joinson
Cold Kitchen: A year of culinary journeys by Caroline Eden $50
”With its union of practicality and magic, a kitchen is a portal offering extended range and providing unlikely paths out of the ordinary. Offering opportunities to cook, imagine and create ways back into other times, other lives and other territories. Central Asia, Turkey, Ukraine, the South Caucasus, Russia, the Baltics and Poland. Places that have eased into my marrow over the years shaping my life, writing and thinking. They are here, these lands I return to, in this kitchen.” A welcoming refuge with its tempting pantry, shelves of books and inquisitive dog, Caroline Eden finds comfort away from the road in her basement Edinburgh kitchen. Join her as she cooks recipes from her travels, reflects on past adventures and contemplates the kitchen's unique ability to tell human stories. This is a hauntingly honest, and at times heartbreaking, memoir with the smell, taste and preparation of food at its heart. From late night baking as a route back to Ukraine to capturing the beauty of Uzbek porcelain, and from the troublesome nature of food and art in Poland to the magic of cloudberries, Cold Kitchen celebrates the importance of curiosity and of feeling at home in the world. Nicely written [Hardback]
”A quiet and beautiful book, a unique blend of history, place, love, food and belonging. Eden writes so sincerely and so intimately you miss her as soon as you've read the last page.” —Diana Henry
”Powerfully evocative and beautifully written Cold Kitchen will warm your heart. Curl up with this book and let it gently take you places near and far; you will find a sense of home, the hearthstone of our shared humanity.” —Elif Shafak
”A hugely accomplished work that manages to be wildly enjoyable, often moving and always thoughtful.” — Olivia Potts, The Spectator
”One of the most brilliant travel writers of her generation, Caroline Eden is masterful at evoking the flavours and emotions of her encounters while on the road in eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Cold Kitchen, she weaves together the contemporary and the historical, the mundane and the magical, in a heartfelt memoir on the meanings of both distant adventures and the comforts of home.” —Fuchsia Dunlop
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton $45
”Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end. This happened to me.” When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself custodian of a newly born hare. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival. Raising Hare chronicles their journey together and the challenges of caring for the leveret and preparing for its return to the wild. We witness an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife. This improbable bond of trust serves to remind us that the most remarkable experiences, inspiring the most hope, often arise when we least expect them. [Hardback]
”I savoured every carefully chosen and perfectly polished word and I cared so deeply about Hare that I found myself holding my breath . . . This is more than a wildlife memoir, it's a philosophical masterpiece ruminating on our place as human beings in nature.” —Clare Balding
”Raising Hare is an astounding achievement. Not since I read Salar the Salmon by Henry Williamson have I witnessed such insight into a creature of the wild. This is a great and important tale for our times, for all of us, in the same league as Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Thomas Hardy and indeed Henry Williamson himself. I am so pleased Chloe Dalton told us about raising hare. I will not forget it and nor will anyone who reads it.” —Michael Morpurgo
”A beautiful book that makes you think profoundly about how we so often tune out the natural world around us. Chloe Dalton is a tender, curious, wise, mind-expanding guide, connecting readers with the wild we humans once knew so well. I will be recommending this to everyone.” —Matt Haig
Mrs Calder and the Hyena by Marjorie Ann Watts $38
”Mrs Calder is frail and distracted. She annoys her daughter by living in disorder, taking up with vagrants, hanging around churchyards and giving free rein to her imagination (she thinks about her doctor with no clothes on). But the real hindrances to right perception in this tale, and throughout Marjorie Ann Watts’s exhilarating second collection, produced at the tender age of ninety-eight, are not the fantasies by which we sustain ourselves but the suffocating illusions of others. Particularly those who want what’s best for us. Where is safe? Where can we start again? Whether in homes troubled by age and bereavement or foreign cities consumed by idealistic revolution, ‘there are no answers’, as Mrs Calder herself puts it, except to pick up these stories wherever we left off, and – gratefully – read on.” —Will Eaves
”As in the fiction of Penelope Fitzgerald, which whom Watts shares attributes, there runs through these stories the sometimes unnerving perspective of the visionary. Watts is especially good on the alchemy that chance affinities between seemingly disparate sorts can generate. An extension of this is her sense of the liberation that attends a confluence between the natural world and the human spirit. Humankind, with its frailties and follies but occasional defiant triumphs, is portrayed within a world where birdsong, the scent of wild narcissi, the sound of water and the broad palette of skies complement the coolly ironic but compassionate voice of a born storyteller.” —Salley Vickers, Spectator
Playing Possum: How animals understand death by Susana Mons $58
When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralysed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom. With humour and empathy, Susana Mons tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Mons, an expert on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own. Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal. [Hardback]
"Mons upends our anthropocentric views of death and makes the case that other species possess the cognitive requirements to understand death and mortality." —Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
"Playing Possum is an unexpected mix of witty and grisly, cerebral and earthy. Monso doesn't so much answer questions about death as raise new ones, encouraging us to shed our reflexive anthropocentrism by paying close attention to what animals do, even when it fails to accord with human modes of behavior." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"Playing Possum identifies a new discipline: comparative thanatology, the study of 'how animals react to individuals who are dead or close to dying, the physiological processes that underlie their reactions, and what these behaviors tell us about the minds of animals.' Monso is tender-hearted in her empathic descriptions but hard-headed when it comes to interpreting what an animal might be experiencing."—David P. Barash, Wall Street Journal
Hekla and Laki by Marine Schneider $40
Carried in by a strong wind, a tiny creature named Hekla twirls delicately into a crater, falling at the feet — and, very suddenly, into the life — of an old giant named Laki. Each is vastly different from the other: Laki is a solitary being, preferring order and calmness, while Hekla is young, spirited, and messy. But in their newfound state of coexistence, they learn to live together and help each other grow, forging an attachment that binds them in life — and in death. Inspired by two Icelandic volcanoes, Hekla and Laki is a story about the beauty and the brutality of life, the passing of knowledge over time, and new possibilities that follow loss. [Hardback]
The National Telepathy by Roque Larraquy (translated from Spanish by Frank Wynne) $38
In September 1933, the Peruvian Rubber Company delivers nineteen indigenous people from the Amazon to businessman Amado Dam, intended for Argentina's first Ethnographic Theme Park. Unexpected among the human cargo is an artefact harbouring a sloth with a fascinating yet terrifying secret: the ability to create erotically explosive telepathic connections between people. What ensues is a raucous satire of men's fear of women's bodies, of the illusion of logic in the structures of so-called civilisation, and the way class and race obscure identities when the observer is a man with power. In The National Telepathy, Roque Larraquy, one of the most original voices in contemporary Argentinian literature, brings us a literary high-wire act, an over-the-top comic grotesque about atrocity. This shocking, bizarre, funny, imaginative novel lays all-too-bare the secret longings and not-so-secret machinations of a social class that will stop at nothing in order to stay on top. [Paperback with French flaps]
"The National Telepathy is a graphic, acerbic work of satirical science fiction unlike anything you're likely to have ever read." —The Skinny
The Elements of Baking: Make any recipe gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, or vegan by Katarina Cermelj $70
The definitive guide to making any recipe gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, vegan or even gluten-free vegan. With a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry, Katarina Cermelj lays out the science behind baking and the ingredients that make it work, so you can easily adapt your baking to your diet and lifestyle, and still make sure it tastes spectacular. With an abundance of mouth-watering recipes together with actual quantitative rules that you can use to convert any recipe into whatever version you fancy, The Elements of Baking will transform the way you think about ingredients. It will be a constant companion in the kitchen and the book you refer to every time you want to bake. Interesting and useful for gluten-inclusive, dairy-inclusive, egg-inclusive no-vegans too! [Hardback]
The Universe in Verse: 15 portals to wonder through science and poetry by Maria Popova $40
Poetry and science, as Popova writes in her introduction, "are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply." In 15 short essays on subjects ranging from the mystery of dark matter and the infinity of pi to the resilience of trees and the intelligence of octopuses, Popova tells the stories of scientific searching and discovery. These stories are interwoven with details from the very real and human lives of scientists--many of them women, many underrecognized--and poets inspired by the same questions and the beauty they reveal. Each essay is paired with a poem reflecting its subject by poets ranging from Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, and Tracy K. Smith, and is stunningly illustrated by celebrated artist Ofra Amit. Together, they wake us to a "reality aglow with wonder." [Hardback]
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine story by Nathan Thrall $30
Milad is five years old and excited for his school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but tragedy awaits- his bus is involved in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, rushes to the chaotic site, only to find Milad has already been taken away. Abed sets off on a journey to learn Milad's fate, navigating a maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must face as a Palestinian. Interwoven with Abed's odyssey are the stories of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and pasts unexpectedly converge- a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a deeply immersive, stunningly detailed portrait of life in Israel and Palestine, and an illumination of the reality of one of the most contested places on earth. [New paperback edition]
”A deeply immersive portrait of daily life in Israel and the West Bank arranged around the story of a Palestinian child and a school trip that ends in tragedy following a traffic accident. Weaving together the ordinary and interwoven lives of Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants, Thrall, a Jerusalem-based author and journalist, illuminates the complex realities of one of the world's most contested regions.” —Financial Times
How to Choose a Chess Move by Andrew Soltis $37
International Grandmaster Andrew Soltis brings you a foolproof guide to choosing your best next chess move, every time. There are more than 30 moves you can choose from an average position, yet Chess Masters regularly manage to select the best moves - and they do it faster, more confidently and with less calculation than other players. This practical guide, a brand new, fully updated edition of a chess classic, explains the tricks, techniques and shortcuts Masters employ to find the best way forward, at every stage of a game. Drawing on the wisdom of some of the greatest chess players of all time, with analysis from over 180 games, it covers: Employing specific cues to identify good moves. Streamlining analysis of the consequences of moves. Using both objective and highly subjective criteria to find the right move - from any position. This invaluable book provides a fascinating insight into the way Chess Masters think, and is a must for all players who want to hone their decision-making skills. [Paperback]