NEW RELEASES (21.4.23)

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Emily Yae Woon and Deborah Smith) $40
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.
>>How language misses the mark.
>>Losing language.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright $45
The much-anticipated new novel from one of Australia’s outstanding authors. Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide after being labelled a paedophile. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. When the town is overrun by donkeys, the residents and their strange religious sects react with anger, led by the Mayor, the albino Aboriginal named Ice Pick, and his outlandishly dressed groupie women. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
”I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Alexis Wright’s work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her ‘collective memoir’ of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.” — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
>>Sovereignty of the imagination.

Participation by Anna Moschovakis $35
When the weather revolts, certainties dissolve and binaries blur as members of two reading groups converge at the intersection of theory and practice to reshape their lives, relationships, and reality itself. In Anna Moschovakis’s novel, two reading groups, unofficially called Love and Anti-Love, falter amidst political friction and signs of environmental collapse. Participation offers a prescient look at communication in a time of rupture: anonymous participants exchange fantasies and ruminations, and relationships develop and unravel. As the groups consider—or neglect—their syllabi, and connections between members deepen, a mentor disappears, a translator questions his role, a colleague known as ‘the capitalist’ becomes a point of fixation, and "the news reports" filter through in fragments. With incisive prose and surprising structural shifts, Participation forms an alluring vision of community, and a love story like no other.
”Moschovakis's take on what it means to form community in opposition to the expectations of hierarchy, anticipated outcome, or even narrative feels timely, perhaps even prescient, in an era when the only thing that seems constant is the incontrovertible need for change. Densely intellectual, the novel forces an alert reader to reconsider what it means to participate in the very act of reading.” —Kirkus

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $30
'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.
Long-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
”A darkly insightful examination of mother-daughter relationships that captivates with the suspense of a thriller. The novel's strength lies in its deft use of psychological analysis as it looks at this relationship through one lens after another.” —Kirkus Reviews
>>”The relationship between mother and child is a never-ending story.”
>>Read an extract.
>>”The better I translate, the more I erase myself.”

How Our Solar System Began: The planets, their moons, and beyond by Aina Bestard $45
We live in an amazing planetary system! From the yawning Valles Marineris on Mars and the ocean hiding beneath the ice crust of Jupiter's moon Europa, to the eerily Earth-like terrain of Saturn's moon Titan and the Sun's blazing corona, our solar system brims with wonders. This beautiful large-format book takes children on a trip across the Solar System with the aid of marvellous illustrations, lift-up flaps and a comprehensive text that helps them understand the amazing variety of landscapes within our planetary system. Lift up the layers to discover how the Sun was formed and explore the amazing landscapes of our neighbouring planets. Readers will find out which moons are the most like the Earth, what Saturn's rings are made of, where comets come from, and what lies in the Kuiper Belt, outside the very edge of the solar system.
>>Look inside!

The West: A new history of an old idea by Naoise Mac Sweeney $40
Many assume ‘Western Civilisation’ derives from a cultural inheritance that stretches back to classical antiquity, a golden thread that binds us from Plato to NATO. But what if all this is wrong? What if the Western world does not have its ultimate origins in a single cultural bloodline but rather a messy bramble of ancestors and influences? What if ‘The West’ is just an idea that has been invented, co-opted, and mythologised to serve different purposes through history? As battles over privilege, identity and prejudice rock the cultural wars, it's never been more important to understand how the concept of The West came to be. This book shows how the idea of the West was created, how it has been used to justify imperialism and racism, and also why it's still a powerful ideological tool to understand our world. Told through the lives of fourteen fascinating historical figures — from a powerful Roman matriarch to an Islamic scholar, from a crusading Greek soldier to a founding father of the United States, from a slave girl in the new Americas to a British prime minister — it casts a new light on how ‘The West’ was invented, embraced, rejected and re-imagined to shape our world today.
”One by one she takes on hoary old myths, explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past. Lots of people will enjoy this clever and thought-provoking account.” —Guardian
”A bold, sweeping bird's-eye view of thousands of years of history that provides a truly global perspective of the past. A fantastic achievement.” —Peter Frankopan
>>Disjunctions between fact and fiction.

Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh $37
In 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit succumbed to a mass poisoning. The poison induced hysteria, violent and euphoric hallucinations, and many deaths. In the years before the disaster, there lived in the town a woman named Elodie. She was the baker's wife — a plain, unremarkable person who yearned to transcend her dull existence. So when a charismatic new couple arrived in town, Elodie quickly fell under their glamorous spell. Thus began a dangerous game of cat and mouse, the intoxication of the chase slowly seeping into everything — but who was the predator and on whom did they prey?
”A shimmering fever-dream of a novel, teasing the reader while finding a fresh narrative framework for the relationship between monotonous small-town life and repressed female desire. Cursed Bread contains more riches than many a novel twice its length.” —Telegraph
”A quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh's skill. This is a book about the power desire and greed exert over reality and memory. Mackintosh has entered a brilliant new stage of writing.” —Guardian
>>The town that went insane.

Mushroom (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Sara Rich $23
They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. The mushroom is an ordinary object whose encounters with humans are usually limited to a couple of species prepackaged at the grocery store. This book offers mushrooms as much more than a pasta ingredient or trendy coffee alternative. It presents these objects as the firmament for life as we know it, enablers of mystical traditions, menders of minds lost to depression. But it acknowledges, too, that this firmament only exists because of death and rot. Rummaging through philosophical, literary, medical, ecological, and anthropological texts only serves to confirm what the average forager already knows: that mushrooms are to be regarded with a reverence deserving of only the most powerful entities: those who create and destroy, and thrive on both.
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock by Jenny Odell $40
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the ‘attention economy’ to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don’t have time to spend? In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardised units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
>>A radical act.

Still Life With Bones: Field notes on forensics and loss by Alexa Hagerty $38
An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice. "Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration-of building something new with the pile of broken mirrors that is loss and mourning." Over the course of Guatemala's thirty-year armed conflict -the longest ever in Central America-over 200,000 people were killed. During Argentina's military dictatorship in the seventies, over 30,000 people were disappeared. Today, forensic anthropologists in each country are gathering evidence to prove atrocities and seek justice. But these teams do more than just study skeletons—they work to repair families and countries torn apart by violence.
”When Hagerty talks about ‘lives being violently made into bones’, I defy you not to be moved. The text is unflinching, but then the crimes and the victims deserve nothing less. I guarantee this will make you think long and hard about cruelty and human rights and the dedication and humanity of the forensic scientist." — Sue Black

Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Davis, Erica Meiners, Beth Ritchie, and Gina Dent $28
Abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause—the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people's homes. As these four scholars assert, abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times.

Blue Jeans (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Carolyn Purnell $23
Few clothing items are as ubiquitous or casual as blue jeans. Yet, their simplicity is deceptive. Blue jeans are nothing if not an exercise in opposites. Americans have accepted jeans as a symbol of their culture, but today jeans are a global consumer product category. Levi Strauss made blue jeans in the 1870s to withstand the hard work of mining, but denim has since become the epitome of leisure. In the 1950s, celebrities like Marlon Brando transformed the utilitarian clothing of industrial labor into a glamorous statement of youthful rebellion, and now, you can find jeans on chic fashion runways. For some, indigo blue might be the color of freedom, but for workers who have produced the dye, it has often been a color of oppression and tyranny. Blue Jeans considers the versatility of this iconic garment and investigates what makes denim a universal signifier, ready to fit any context, meaning, and body.
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.

The Real Work: On the mystery of mastery by Adam Gopnik $38
For decades, Adam Gopnik has been a perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental matter: How did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In The Real Work—his title the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age hand at things he assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up, piece by piece—and that true mastery, in any field, requires mastering other people's minds.
”Among the uplifting pleasures of Gopnik's writing is the range and ardour of his enthusiasms. If his only truly fanatical pursuit is making sentences, he seems to intuit that his best ones — his truest — are those that are unselfconsciously committed to their subject, and vitalised by the passionate curiosity that also reins them in.” —New Statesman
”A springboard for a discussion of art, family, empathy, mortality. Via memoir, analysis and criticism he assembles a celebration of the flaws that make us human. Gopnik is at his most moving when addressing the limited time we have on Earth.” —Guardian
>>How we gain new skills.

Andaza: A memoir of food, flavour and freedom in the Pakistani kitchen by Sumayya Usmani $50
Usmani conjures a story of what it was like growing up in Pakistan and how the women in her life inspired her to trust her instincts in the kitchen. From a young age, food was Sumayya's portal to nurturing, love and self-expression. She spent the first eight years of her life at sea, with a father who captained merchant ships and a mother who preferred to cook for the family herself on a tiny electric stove in their cabin rather than eat in the officer's mess. When the family moved to Karachi, Sumayya grew up torn between the social expectations of life as a young girl in Pakistan, and the inspiration she felt in the kitchen, watching her mother, and her Nani Mummy (maternal grandmother) and Dadi's (paternal grandmother) confidence, intuition and effortless ability to build complex, layered flavours in their cooking. This food memoir — which includes the most meaningful recipes of Sumayya's childhood — tells the story of how Sumayya's self-belief grew throughout her young life, allowing her to trust her instincts and find her own path between the expectations of following in her father's footsteps as a lawyer and the pressures of a Pakistani woman's presumed place in the household.
”Sumayya Usmani is a brilliant storyteller. She transports us with her delicious descriptions of the smells and flavours of the kitchen.” —Jay Rayner
>>Look inside.
>>When spice hits the oil.

What’s That, Jack? by Cédric Ramadier and Vincent Bourgeau $30
Jack and George are resting quietly when BOOM! A huge and strange ball lands beside them. "What's that, Jack?" "I don't know, George. Maybe it's a rock?" No—too soft. But it rolls. Fast! Jack, George and the ball roll right off the cliff and now it's a parachute. But watch out, they're going to land in the river! Jack and George have a brilliant day full of adventure with this object that changes with the landscape, then turns into a blanket to keep them warm.