NEW RELEASES (22.9.23)

A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

Some Things Wrong by Thomas Pors Koed $35
”Presence on the road. Call it a road. Somewhere with the expectations of a road. The expectation to go on. For example. The expectation to overcome the impediments to going on. The expectation that going on is possible. The expectation that going on is even to be considered. Too late. Something near necessity bound to something near impossibility. Near enough in either case. Resembling both. But contending in their imperfections. Imperfect necessity. Imperfect impossibility. No more likely candidates for hope.” Composed entirely of details that would have been better left out, Some Things Wrong is an unsparing yet strangely cheerful exploration of failure, error and incapacity. Our memories, identities, concepts and intentions are entirely dependent on the errors on which they are founded. By exhausting these errors and by calling its own content constantly into question, this book asks what it is, at base, that enables or causes us to continue. 
>>Find out more.
>>Thomas introduces and reads from the book.
>>This is the second book published by Volume Editions this year.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff $37
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her. Lauren Groff's new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how — and if — we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
"I know of few other writers whose sentences are so beautiful and so propulsive. The girl embodies a furious onward motion, as does the prose." —New York Times Book Review
”Groff is a mastermind, a masterpiece-creator, an intoxicating magician. I wait with impatience for every book and I am always surprised and delighted. The Vaster Wilds feels like her bravest yet, hallucinatory, divine, beyond belief but also entirely human.” —Daisy Johnson
>>Read Stella’s review.
>>Hear Stella’s review on RNZ.
>>Difficulty engaging.
>>”The book of the year so far.”
>>How Groff does her work.

Beasts of England by Adam Biles $38
Adam Biles's anarchic return to Animal Farm is a warped fable; a state-of-the-farmyard novel about back-stabbers, truth-twisters and corrupt charlatans. Manor Farm has reinvented itself as the South of England's premium petting zoo. Now humans and beasts alike are invited (for a small fee) to come and stroke, fondle, and take rides on the farm's inhabitants. But life is not a bed of roses for the animals, in spite of what their leaders may want them to believe. Elections are murky, the community is beset by factions, and sacred mottos are being constantly updated. Manor Farm is descending into chaos. What's more, a mysterious illness has started ripping through its residents, killing them one by one. In Beasts of England, Adam Biles honours, updates and subverts George Orwell's classic, all the while channelling the chaos of populist politics in the internet age into a savage farmyard satire.
“Orwell is one of the great writers of fear, but where Animal Farm works by suggestion Biles’s novel puts everything on show, and in doing so stops the reader several times through its sheer brutality.” —The Telegraph
“The past decade in world politics offers plenty of easy opportunities to invoke George Orwell. But writing a sequel to Animal Farm, a book that exemplifies Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic – that we don’t need to have read it to know it – is a riskier undertaking. In Beasts of England, Adam Biles has updated and retooled Animal Farm for today, and in this clever, resourceful and at times painful novel, the risk pays off.” —The Guardian
>>On populism, post-truth, and piggybacking George Orwell.
>>We still have a great deal to learn from the animals.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray $37
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's car business is going under, but instead of doing anything about it, he's out in the woods preparing for the actual end of the world. Meanwhile his wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking local wrongun Big Mike. Their teenage daughter Cass, usually top of her class, seems determined to drink her way through the whole thing. And twelve year old PJ is spending more and more time on video game forums, where he's met a friendly boy named Ethan who never turns his camera on and wants PJ to run away from home. Digging down through layers of family history, the roots of this crisis stretch deep into the past. Meanwhile in the present, the fault lines keep spreading, ghosts slipping in through the cracks, and every step brings the Barneses closer to a fatal precipice. When the moment of reckoning finally arrives, all four of them must decide how far they're willing to go to save the family, and whether — if the story's already been written — there's still time to give it a happy ending.
”It can't be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read. Murray's brilliant new novel, about a rural Irish clan, posits the author as Dublin's answer to Jonathan Franzen . A 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment, The Bee Sting oozes pathos while being very funny to boot. Murray's observational gifts and A-game phrase-making render almost every page — every line, it sometimes seems — abuzz with fresh and funny insights. At its core this is a novel concerned with the ties that bind, secrets and lies, love and loss. They're all here, brought to life with captivating vigour in a first-class performance to cherish.” —Observer
”Expertly foreshadowed and so intricately put together, a brilliantly funny, deeply sad portrait of an Irish family in crisis. Murray is triumphantly back on home turf — troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each line soaked in irony ranging from the gentle to the savage. We live though hundreds of pages on tenterhooks, and the suspense and revelations keep coming until the end. He is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking. A tragicomic triumph, you won't read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.” —Guardian
>>Short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
>>A possible future.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch $37
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband, Larry, a trade unionist for the Teachers' Union of Ireland. Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together. Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality and devastating insight, a novel that can be read as a parable of the present, the future and the past.
”I haven't read a book that has shaken me so intensely in many years. The comparisons are inevitable — Saramago, Orwell, McCarthy — but this novel will stand entirely on its own.” —Colum McCann
”It was gripping and chilling, and terribly prescient — a novel with a darkly important message about this particular moment in time.” —Sara Baume
>>Short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
>>Radical empathy.
>>Today in Ireland.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper $33
Perennially on the outside, Brian has led a solitary life; he works at Camden Council, lunches every day at Il Castelletto café and then returns to his small flat on Kentish Town Road. It is an existence carefully crafted to avoid disturbance and yet Brian yearns for more. A visit one day to the BFI brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine: nightly visits to the cinema on London’s South Bank. Through the works of Yasujirō Ozu, Federico Fellini, Agnès Varda, Yilmaz Güney and others, Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by a curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars. A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a tangential work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.
”I don’t think I’ve ever felt such warmth for a character, or that I’ve been able to see cinema through another’s eyes insuch a lucid, sustained way. As Brian moves further and further into a life of moviegoing, ordering his days, and then years, around it, he finds companionship and a calm sense of wellbeing. As I read this beautifully subtle novel, I found the same.” —Amina Cain
”After having published his luminous Ash Before Oak, Jeremy Cooper now brings us Brian, equally a work of mysterious interiority and poetry. It confirms that however solitary life might be, art enriches both our imaginations and our realities. This is a very tender book.” —Xiaolu Guo

52 Ways of Thinking about Kafka: LRB diary for 2024 $35
”It was a comfort to read him in a year when everyone again had the same disease. She thought she could work through him, if she could not work through herself; she thought she could use his hands, if she could not use her own. —Patricia Lockwood
Mark the centenary of Kafka’s death with the LRB Diary for 2024: 52 ways of thinking about Kafka — one for each week of next year. From Kafka’s attention-seeking to Kafka’s clothes, Kafka and gay literature to Kafka and The Lord of the Rings, Kafka at the football to Kafka on BookTok, by writers including Elif Batuman, Alan Bennett, Judith Butler, Anne Carson, Amit Chaudhuri, Jenny Diski, Penelope Fitzgerald, Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Lethem, Adam Phillips, Philip Roth, Colm Tóibín, Marina Warner and many more. Also featuring entries from Kafka’s own diaries (taken from Ross Benjamin’s new translation), and original artwork by Alexander Gorlizki.
>>Look inside (there are even postcards!).

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Travelling through the land of my ancestors by Louise Erdrich $25
Erdrich travels, with her 18-month-old daughter, to the turangawaewae her ancestors inhabited for centuries: the lakes and islands of southern Ontario. Summoning to life the Ojibwe's sacred spirits and songs, their language and sorrows, Erdrich considers the many ways in which her tribe — whose name derives from the word ozhibii'ige, 'to write' — have influenced her. Her journey, through a landscape of breathtaking beauty, links ancient stone paintings with an island where a recluse built an extraordinary library, and she reveals how both have transformed her.

The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook: Habits for hope in a changing world by Kirsten Bradley $50
Packed with practical skills and projects, this is a book of regenerative living for busy people who want to make a positive impact in a world out of balance.  Discover how simple changes to your every day can make a big difference. Maybe it's decluttering your home, growing sprouts on your windowsill, connecting with your community or taking on a locavore mini-challenge. Maybe it's going waste-free or falling in love with compost. Inspired by the life-affirming principles of permaculture, all 60 habits will help you reconnect with your ecosystem, save money and celebrate sustainable living. 
>>Look inside.
>>The other Milkwood book.
>>A taste of Milkwood.

Blue Machine: How the ocean shapes our world by Helen Czerski $40
All of the Earth's ocean, from the equator to the poles, is a single engine powered by sunlight — a blue machine. Human history has been dictated by the ocean — the location of cities, access to resources and the gateways to new lands have all revolved around water. We live inside the weather the ocean generates and breathe in what it breathes out. Yet despite our dependence, our awareness of its totality is minimal. In a book that will recalibrate our view of this defining feature of our planet, physicist Helen Czerski dives deep to illuminate the murky depths of the ocean engine, examining the messengers, passengers and voyagers that live in it, travel over it, and survive because of it. From the ancient Polynesians who navigated the Pacific by reading the waves to permanent residents of the deep such as the Greenland shark that can live for hundreds of years, she explains the vast currents, invisible ocean walls and underwater waterfalls that all have their place in the ocean's complex, interlinked system.

Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell $23
”It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.” A boy called Christopher is visiting his reclusive grandfather when he witnesses an avalanche of mythical creatures come tearing down the hill. This is how Christopher learns that his grandfather is the guardian of one of the ways between the non-magical world and a place called the Archipelago, a cluster of magical islands where all the creatures we tell of in myth live and breed and thrive alongside humans. They have been protected from being discovered for thousands of years; now, terrifyingly, the protection has worn thin, and creatures are breaking through. Then a girl, Mal, appears in Christopher's world. She is in possession of a flying coat, is being pursued by a killer and is herself in pursuit of a baby griffin. Mal, Christopher and the griffin embark on an urgent quest across the wild splendour of the Archipelago, where sphinxes hold secrets and centaurs do murder, to find the truth — with unimaginable consequences for both their worlds.
”There was Tolkien, there is Pullman, and now there is Katherine Rundell. Wondrous invention, marvellous writing. This book is her best yet, and that's saying something. Just riveting, quite extraordinary.” —Michael Morpurgo
“Katherine Rundell is a phenomenon. She not only understands what fantasy is for and why children (and the rest of us) need it, but she crafts original and brilliant books that delight readers of all ages and kinds, while stretching our minds and filling our hearts.” —Neil Gaiman
>>”All the creatures of myth are still alive.”
>>All of Rundell’s books are superb.

A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto by China Miéville $28
In 1848, a strange political tract was published by two German émigrés. Marx and Engles's apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system, which penetrates every corner of the globe, reduces every relationship to that of profit, and bursts asunder the old forms of production and of politics, remains a picture of our world. And the vampiric energy of that system is once again highly contentious. The Manifesto shows no sign of fading into antiquarian obscurity, and remains a key touchstone for modern political debate. China Miéville is not a writer hemmed in by conventions of disciplinary boundaries or genre, and this is a strikingly imaginative take on Marx and what his most haunting book has to say to us today. Like the Manifesto itself, this is a book haunted by ghosts, sorcery and creative destruction.
”It's thrilling to accompany Miéville as he wrestles — in critical good faith and incandescent commitment — with a manifesto that still calls on us to build a new world>\.” —Naomi Klein
”Read this and be dazzled by its contemporaneity.” —Mike Davis
”A rich, luminous reflection of and on a light that never quite goes out.” —Andreas Malm