NEW RELEASES (23.4.26)

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
Who was Gertrude Stein? And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy's latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out about the avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home there and became godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. In Paris, the narrator meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks — about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language — how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. This is a book about how we put ourselves together — an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire, and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself — a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world. [Hardback]
”In one short and sly book after another, Levy writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both.” —Atlantic
”Wonderfully entertaining; a witty scherzo of a ‘fiction’. We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy — this is ‘a fiction’, after all — but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is — odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining — triumphantly proving her wrong.” —Guardian
”Ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but, at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don't need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story. Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve.” —AnOther Magazine
”A boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud. It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original. As Levy's narrator observes of Stein: ‘Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.’ A compelling contemporary fiction.” —The Conversation
>>In search of Gertrude Stein.
>>Why the novel matters.

No Ghosts by Max Lury $40
After being reunited at Annie's memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead — faces, gestures, glances — in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. The friends' journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie's — and the ghosts' — disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Read an extract.

Hell of Solitude: Selected writings by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (translated from Japanese by Ryan Choi) $40
Hell of Solitude presents a varied and eclectic selection of writings by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of the most important and beloved Japanese writers of the twentieth century. Bringing together fiction, poetry, and philosophical prose – much of it appearing in English for the first time here – this collection showcases the range and intensity of Akutagawa’s imagination. Moving from the whimsical and fantastical to the grave and introspective, the pieces reveal a writer of extraordinary clarity and psychological depth. Interwoven throughout are poems from a prolific body of verse, examples of which are sparse in English, alongside ‘Art and Other Things’, a fragmentary essay in which Akutagawa expounds his aesthetic views while drawing on examples from world literature and art. Translated with sensitivity and precision by Ryan Choi, Hell of Solitude offers a vital reintroduction to a writer whose lucidity, irony, and existential unease continue to resonate across cultures and generations. The collection includes a foreword by writer and translator Polly Barton, questioning why it is that Akutagawa’s work isn’t better known among anglophone readers, and celebrating his ambivalent relationship with the traditional practice of story-telling. [Paperback]
“Perhaps what we have, when we are given less of a story than might be expected, when we have an unstorylike story or a desolate poem, is more of ourselves. We have things as they are, our selves as they are, and life as it is, and sometimes that is hell. Nevertheless, Akutagawa shows us that sharing that hell with others can be electric.” —Polly Barton
”One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa’s style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing.” —Haruki Murakami
”The quintessential writer of his era.” —David Peace
”Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in the style, which is always crystal-clear.” —Jorge Luis Borges
”At long last, a new volume of Akutagawa’s writing has been ushered into English by the consummate translator Ryan Choi. He has rendered the master storyteller’s previously unavailable prose pieces and poetry more readable than ever. The exquisite subtlety and inimitable charm of the tales, sketches, and poems in this volume will captivate new readers and scholars alike.” —L. S. Popovich
”For the past decade, Ryan Choi has quietly been doing the heroic work of bringing Akutagawa’s lesser-known writings into English. What we are given in this collection are impressions and observations, anecdotes, philosophical digressions, stories that read like poems that read like dreams remembered the morning after. The writings are restrained, understated, precise and fractured. The surfaces of these texts crackle with the charge of Akutagawa’s inimitable mind. Choi’s translations are a revelation.” —Stephen Mortland
”Choi is Akutagawa’s boldest – and best – translator. Hell of Solitude restores Akutagawa, the most daring architect of modern Japanese literature, to his rightful state: bewildering beauty, a cascade of shifting rhythms and forms, and the penetrating alertness of a truly aesthetic mind. Akutagawa’s soul is here in this book-shaped vessel, waiting to be known.” —Dreux Richard
>>What do we have when we do not have a story?

Ashimpa: The mysterious word by Catarina Sobral $40
One day, a researcher makes an important discovery. A mysterious word buried in an old dictionary: ASHIMPA. Quickly the news spreads. Everyone wants to use the new word, but no one knows what it means or even what part of speech it belongs to. A 137-year-old is certain that it's a verb: people ashimped and would always ashimp. A linguist is convinced it's a noun. Soon there would be people who claimed to have seen live ashimpas — and in colour. "They still exist abroad. They're green!" From renowned Portuguese author and illustrator Catarina Sobral, Ashimpa is the story of language that takes on a life of its own, leading young readers through the hilariously ashimpish life and grammar of a mysterious word. [Hardback]
"A tongue-in-cheek treatise on the elasticity of language, Sobral's latest sparkles with profound wit thanks to a wonderfully bizarre premise. Ashimpishly delicious fun." —Kirkus Reviews
>>Look inside!

The Original by Nell Stevens $40
Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle’s home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls. Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena. After years missing at sea, Grace’s cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live. Deftly-plotted and shimmering with distinctive intelligence, style and wit, The Original is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original. [Hardback]
”What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell herself.” —Olivia Laing
”A delightful, playful puzzle of a novel, and a brilliant twist on the nineteenth century orphan-makes-good story. THE ORIGINAL asks whether, sometimes, faking it is the right thing to do.” —Claire Fuller
”A wonderful novel about identity, creativity, money and belonging. It's so witty and propulsive you will forget how brilliantly constructed it is, this tale that brims with the beauty of art, of how to triumph in a difficult world.” —Jessie Burton
”Intricate, and endlessly intriguing. The reader is kept guessing until the very end; as Stevens deftly raises the stakes, the pages seem to turn themselves. The narrative captivates intellectually, too, probing questions of authenticity, imitation, and self-realisation, in love and in art. The overall effect is of an author boldly stepping out on her own, pursuing themes that were hers all along.” —Observer
>>Written by the light of a lava lamp.

Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin (translated from Russian by Roger and Angela Keys) $28
A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator — Tsypkin is on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything ‘right’. Nothing is invented; everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay, Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and gives an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel. New edition. [Paperback with French flaps]
"A short poetic masterpiece." —New York Review of Books
"Gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving." —The Los Angeles Times
”While keeping to biographical fact, Tsypkin has written a novel that provides the sort of psychological insight that is only available through fiction.” —Thomas     
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Loving Dostoyevsky.

Chain of Ideas: Great Replacement Theory and the origins of our authoritarian age by Ibram X. Kendi $45
Throughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies 'great replacement theory', which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities. In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi shows how this conspiracy theory has mutated from the extremist fringe into a global ideology, embraced by leaders as varied as Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. He traces its historic roots in slavery, segregation, colonialism and Nazism, and shows how these age-old prejudices have been dressed in new language for a digital age. But this is not a book about extremists on the margins. From Anders Breivik's massacre to the chants of the Charlottesville marchers, from Brexit slogans to the Christchurch shooting, Kendi shows how these ideas have crossed borders, inspired terror and are now re-shaping parties of government. Chain of Ideas is a penetrating history of how reactionary ideas have been repackaged as common sense, and how they shape the globe today. [Paperback]
>>In twenty years most of the world could be racist dictatorships.
>>A renovation of Nazi ideas.

The Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich $38
”It was as though I was chosen-marked out by the python's kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.” Written over two decades, Erdrich's story collection features a range of characters — a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass; immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged; and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father. Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe — a creative collaboration between mother and daughter. [Paperback]
”One of the greatest American writers.” —Guardian
>>Talking animals and the analogue world.
>>Little travels.

Is a River Alive? A journey with water by Robert Macfarlane $30
An exhilarating exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings who should be recognised as such in imagination and law. The book flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. Macfarlane takes readers on these unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days. Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is the River Alive? is Macfarlane’s most personal and political book to date, reminding us what is vital: the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has. Now in paperback. [Paperback with French flaps]
” A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.” —Elif Shafak
>>’The river is writing me’ — Q&A
>>The Power of Rivers
>>Poetry and Adventure
>>The Rights of Nature
>>Read an extract
>>Can personhood recue a river?
>>Also available in hardback.

Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, tragedy, and history’s greatest Arctic rescue by Buddy Levy $39
In 1908-09, American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, in separate expeditions, both claimed they'd reached the North Pole first, but their claims were seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian Roald Amundsen — who'd made history and a name for himself by being the first to sail through the Northwest Passage and the first man to the South Pole — attempted to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location. However, Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, and launched a major rescue operation. [Paperback]

Te Ahikāroa: Artists and stories of Dunedin Public Art Gallery $70
This stunning book displays Ōtepoti’s Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s significant collection of artworks made either in Aotearoa or overseas, from the Renaissance to the present, and is full of both iconic works and suprises. Te Ahikāroa is the result of collaboration between the Gallery, mana whenua and other writers from around Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. A joint introduction by Director Cam McCracken, alongside Claire Kaahu White, Robert Sullivan and Paulette Tamati-Elliffe creates a foundation that places Kai Tahu values in relation to the journey of the Gallery since its establishment in 1884. Essays by curators Lauren Gutsell and Lucy Hammonds explore the history and vision of the Gallery. Each artwork in the book is brought to life by subject experts, who contribute new perspectives on everything from beloved historic artworks through to recently acquired contemporary works. This publication brings together written contributions from Ruth Buchanan, Komene Cassidy, Gina Cole, Sophie Davis, Edward Ellison, Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds, Rauhina Kohuwai-Banks, Moewai Marsh, Ngahiraka Mason, Sophie Matthiesson, Finn McCahon-Jones, Cam McCracken, Anna McLean, Olivia Meehan, Gerard O'Regan, Hana O'Regan, Joanna Osborne, Bridget Reweti, Anya Samarasinghe, Robert Sullivan, Taarati Taioroa, Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, Claire Kaahu White. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.