NEW RELEASES (25.10.24)
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
Choose from this week's selection of new releases, then click through to our website to secure your copies:
The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat by Brannavan Gnanalingam $30
Kartik Popat breezes through his teenage years despite having no friends. He has no time for his fellow Indians or immigrants. He wants to earn money, without doing any work. He dreams of being a filmmaker, but ends up working at Parliament, racing through the ranks of advisors and party hacks. As the Covid lockdown sets in, he learns that there are more grifts in the world, than doing a half-arsed job. (Mr Popat disputes all of the above characterisations.) The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat casts a sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa. The novel lampoons the concept of the model minority, as Kartik makes a mockery of representational politics and reacts to the echo chambers and political movements of the day. [Paperback]
“It’s the best book I’ve read all year. It is so good. It is such a good salve for any despair you’re feeling about politics at the moment. It’s just the most wonderful, wonderful book. It’s funny. It’s crack-up funny. It’s all very astute, very clever. It’s a brilliant book.” —Pip Adam (RNZ, 22.10.24)
Final Cut by Charles Burns $85
The much-anticipated and exquisitely unsettling new graphic novel from the author of Black Hole, probing not only the personal and creative obsessions of its artist character but the deeper psychosexual territories of American film and culture. As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie — his reluctant muse — set off to a remote cabin in the woods. Armed with an old 16-millimetre camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, a homage to Brian's favourite movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams — both his damsel in distress and his saviour. Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art. [Hardback]
”I love everything about this book: the story, the drawings, its way with all things extraterrestrial. It's wraparound wonderful, as close to immersive as any comic could be — a book to be read and reread.” —Observer
”Burns's new book is a joy to read and a welcome return to his long form storytelling that he's been sorely absent from for years. The central plot is beautifully told with subtle meanderings from a bygone age of youth, but accompanied with the strange and often disturbing imagery we're so used to seeing from a creator at the top of his game. A great melding of both style and substance.” —Charlie Adlard
The White Review Anthology of Writing in Translation edited by Rosanna McLaughlin, Izabella Scott, and Skye Thomas $37
The White Review Anthology of Writing in Translation brings the most innovative and exciting international writers working today to an Anglophone audience. The anthology places the work of celebrated authors and translators alongside emerging voices. It includes excerpts from novels, full-length short stories and narrative non-fiction previously unpublished in English. Contributions to the anthology include: 'Butterflies', a short story by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell; 'Peach', a short story by Sema Kaygusuz, translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely; 'Red (Hunger)', an extract from a novel by Senthuran Varatharajah, translated from German by Vijay Khurana; 'Alegría', a story by Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo, translated from Spanish by Carolina Orloff; 'Mulberry Season' an excerpt from the novel Darkness Inside and Out by Argentinian writer Leila Sucari, translated from Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy; and the short story 'Jackals' by Haytham El-Wardany, translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls. Part of the content was selected from a global 'open call to translators'. {Paperback]
”Throughout its existence, The White Review has served as the most sparkling of birthing wards for the delicate, difficult, and delightful children of other languages' literatures that might have otherwise never found their way into life in English.” —Polly Barton
”Since the very beginning The White Review has demonstrated its aesthetic and political commitments to work in translation, actively giving space to marginalised languages, debut translators, and all manner of transcultural connections. It has always been a home for collaboration, community, experiment, and daring.” —Lauren Elkin
”Nothing less than a cultural revolution.” —Deborah Levy
[ … ] by Fady Joudah $33
Fady Joudah's powerful collection of poems opens with ‘I am unfinished business’, articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah's survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine's daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens — a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be — and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But "Repetition won't guarantee wisdom," Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language "before our wisdom is an echo." These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. Joudah reminds us, "Wonder belongs to all." [Paperback]
"Joudah's [...] offers a stunning magnification of consciousness that undertakes the work suggested by the title: reembodying in the text-beautifully, painfully-what has been systematically removed." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Within [...] pages, the poet's voice travels across centuries and continents, historicising the fate of the Palestinian people while illuminating the bewilderment, eros, and spirituality of everyday life. Joudah's integrity and craftsmanship elasticise the boundaries of the lyric and embrace a reckoning with colonial violence. But these glimmering, layered poems defy easy categorization, even as they brim with the wisdom we inherit from the dead." —Aria Aber, Yale Review
The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams $40
Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists, with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines. Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright. In Leiden, among Harry's papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining 'King Alfred', a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming 'to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society'. Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider's view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fuelled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. [Paperback with French flaps]
”It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb. This is a book white people are not ready to read yet; neither are most black people. But it is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book.” —Chester Himes (1967 review)
”If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate.” - Walter Mosley
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt $36
A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends. “Maman was exigeante — there is no English word — and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.” Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge's, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York? [A beautifully produced hardback from the New Directions' ‘Storybook ND’ series.]
"A staggeringly intelligent examination into the nature of truth, love, respect, beauty and trust. This is that rare thing, or merle blanc, as maman might say: a perfect book. I've read it four times, which you can do between breakfast and lunch." —Nicola Shulman, The Times Literary Supplement
"This is a short, sharp sliver of a story — only 64 pages — but every single word is pitch perfect. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a shot of ice-cold vodka-Belvedere or Grey Goose only, of course." —Lucy Scholes, Prospect
"For a wonderfully sideways take on the complex intersections between class, wealth and power — intersections that invariably favour those who have most of them already — I recommend reading The English Understand Wool, by the American writer Helen DeWitt." —Alex Clark, The Observer
"The English Understand Wool is Helen DeWitt's best and funniest book so far — quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work. Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading." —Heather Cass White, The Times Literary Supplement
Nine Minds: Inner lives on the spectrum by Daniel Tammet $45
Meet nine extraordinary people on the autism spectrum. A Japanese researcher in psychology sets out to measure loneliness while drawing on her own experience of autism. A quirky boy growing up in 1950s Ottawa sows the seeds of his future Hollywood stardom. In the US, a non-verbal man explores body language, gesture by eloquent gesture, in his mother's yoga classes. Nine Minds delves into the extraordinary lives of nine neurodivergent men and women from around the globe. From a Fields Medal-winning mathematician to a murder detective, a pioneering surgeon to a bestselling novelist, each is remarkable in their field, and each is changing how the world sees those on the spectrum. Exploding the tired stereotypes of autism, Daniel Tammet — autistic himself — reaches across the divides of age, gender, sexuality and nationality to draw out the inner worlds of his subjects. Telling stories as richly diverse as the spectrum itself, this illuminating, life-affirming work of narrative nonfiction celebrates the power and beauty of the neurodivergent mind, and the daring freedom with which these individuals have built their lives. [Hardback]
”Tammet's exquisite portraits remind us that the variety of brains is every bit as essential as any other form of diversity.” —Andrew Solomon
”Daniel Tammet's wonderful portraits of autistic people's inner lives illustrate the range of neurodivergent talents and experiences, and celebrate human cognitive diversity.” —Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre
”Beautifully rendered, painstakingly researched, and completely absorbing, Nine Minds offers something that autistic people urgently need: it humanises us.” —Katherine May
”In Nine Minds, Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant and author of Born on a Blue Day, reports on the unique lives and cognitive differences of nine neurodivergent people. This fascinating book engages by imaginatively entering its subjects' inner worlds. Each profile is based on hours of interviews. Readers will discover a spectrum filled with valuable different kinds of minds.” —Temple Grandin
The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on hope and freedom by Nasser Abu Srour (translated from Arabic by Luke Lefgren) $50
This is the story of a wall that somehow chose me as the witness of what it said and did. Nasser Abu Srour grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. As a child, he played in its shadow and explored the little world within the camp. As he grew older, he began questioning the boundaries that limited his existence. Later, sentenced to life in prison, with no hope of parole, he found himself surrounded by a physical wall. This is the story of how, over thirty years in captivity, he crafted a new definition of freedom. Turning to writings by philosophers as varied as Derrida, Kirkegaard and Freud, he begins to let go of freedom as a question that demanded an answer, in order to preserve it as a dream. The wall becomes his stable point of reference, his anchor, both physically and psychologically. As each year brings with it new waves of releases of prisoners, he dares to hope, and seeks refuge in the wall when these hopes are dashed. And, in a small miracle, he finds love with a lawyer from the outside — while in her absence, the wall is his solace and his curse. A testimony of how the most difficult of circumstances can build a person up instead of tearing them down, The Tale of a Wall is an extraordinary record of the vast confinement and power of the mind. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The Tale of a Wall is the reason we have literature. Nasser has made art out of poison with his honesty and golden pen. He brings to light the specificity of experience of the Palestinian prisoner in a manner that makes every reader think about the incarcerated in their own countries without forgetting Palestine. It helps us understand the consequences on others when we do not wield whatever power we each hold for solidarity. A profound and important work.” —Sarah Schulman
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru $37
A novel about beauty, power, and capital's influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it. Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height — the greater public panicked in quarantine — and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn't recovered from the effects of a recent Covid infection. When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see again: Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more different: as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won't recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well, setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion. Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind. [Paperback
"That wild time of youth is brilliantly conjured throughout Blue Ruin in flashback scenes that seem to pulsate with the roar of drunken parties and the thump of dance music. We are instantly swept along by the laconic grace and psychological acuity of Mr. Kunzru's writing and by the commotion he unleashes at will and to great effect. Indeed, Mr. Kunzru has drawn a narrator so appealing that we forgive him almost anything. In a novel where little happens, at least on the surface, and where the making and selling of art is examined at length, Jay's odyssey also broadens a narrative that might otherwise have become fatally introspective or, worse still, pretentious. But Mr. Kunzru's satirical eye, keen wit and compassionate intelligence guard against any such slide. Blue Ruin may end with the fate of a valuable painting hanging in the balance and millions of dollars about to vanish with a single drunken gunshot. By then, however, we care as little as Jay does about the fate of objects. Mr. Kunzru has made his point." —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal
”Even as Blue Ruin delves into the past with Proustian specificity, it does not succumb to nostalgic cliche about a time when young artists could achieve success almost overnight. Rather, Kunzru focuses on how the lives of the three friends diverge. Blue Ruin's success stems from its uncompromising connection between the pains of the past and the decomposition of the present, without celebrating either. Through the simple story of a once-lauded artist becoming a delivery driver in an effort to push his career-and himself-to the limit, Kunzru creates a trajectory in which social tensions are rising, liberalism is disappearing and fascism is once more gathering momentum." —Ed Luker, Frieze
Happy Apocalypse: A history of technological risk by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz $45
Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and mea culpas. But the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose. In response, Happy Apocalypse plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity. Societies of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.
”Happy Apocalypse offers a compelling, powerful and very timely critique of the claim that we live in a period unprecedentedly marked by an awareness of technological crises and environmental risks. Fressoz shows instead, and in striking detail, how in France and Britain in the decades around 1800, in major fields of concern such as public health, industrial safety and environmental impact, calculations of risk and estimates of safety were both impressively widespread and energetically debated. The book offers a brilliantly original analysis of how industrialists and entrepreneurs, legislators and scientists, public lobbies and private interests, all made sense of the processes that accompanied the establishment of new kinds of capitalist society and their models of welfare, profit and security. Happy Apocalypse will be required reading for anyone concerned with the ways in which current crises of safety and survival can be better understood in their proper historical settings.” —Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
England: A natural history by John Lewis-Stempel $70
England's landscape is iconic — a tapestry of distinctive habitats that together make up a country unique for its rich diversity of flora and fauna. Concentrating on twelve habitats, John Lewis-Stempel leads us from estuary to park, chalk downland to woodland , river to field, village to moor, lake to heath, fen to coastal cliffs, in a book that is unquestionably his magnum opus. Referencing beloved great writers in whose footsteps he treads — Gilbert White, John Clare, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas — and combining breathtakingly beautiful prose with detailed wildlife observation, botanical fact and ancient folklore, Lewis-Stempel immerses himself in each place, discovering their singular atmosphere, the play of the seasons; the feel of the wind in midwinter; the sounds of daybreak; how twilight settles. England: A Natural History is the definitive volume on the English landscape, and the capstone of John Lewis-Stempel's nature writing. [Hardback]
”No-one comes close to Lewis-Stempel's ability to paint the English landscape in words. Maddeningly brilliant.” —Sally Coulthard
”It is now expected of the modern nature writer to draw together landscape, wildlife, history and culture, but few — if any — do it as deftly as Lewis-Stempel does here. There is still a place for this kind of assured and expert countryside writing. Not just a place, but acres of room.” —Richard Smythe, Times Literary Supplement
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) $37
Mariana Enriquez's first story collection since the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, the occult and the macabre, the stories explore love, womanhood, LGBTQ counterculture, parenthood and Argentina's brutal past. [Paperback]
”One of Latin America's most exciting authors.” —Silvia Moreno-Garcia
”A mesmerising writer who demands to be read. Her fiction hits with the force of a freight train.” —Dave Eggers
The Hotel Balzaar (A Norendy tale) by Kat DiCamillo, illustrated by Júlia Sardà $28
In the land of Norendy, tales swirl within tales-and every moment is a story in the making. At the Hotel Balzaar, Marta's mother rises before the sun, puts on her uniform, and instructs Marta to roam as she will but quietly, invisibly — like a little mouse. While her mother cleans rooms, Marta slips down the back staircase to the grand lobby to chat with the bellman, study the painting of an angel's wing over the fireplace, and watch a cat chase a mouse around the face of the grandfather clock, all the while dreaming of the return of her soldier father, who has gone missing. One day, a mysterious countess with a parrot checks in, promising a story-in fact, seven stories in all, each to be told in its proper order. As the stories unfold, Marta begins to wonder: could the secret to her father's disappearance lie in the countess's tales? [Illustrated hardback]
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst $38
A dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man's acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age. Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles's envy and violence. As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys' careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician. Our Evenings is Dave Win's own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.
”The best novel that's been written about contemporary Britain in the past ten years. It's funny but desperately moving too.” —The Sunday Times
”The finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time.” — The Guardian
”Our Evenings is a truly astonishing novel, by turns delicate and ferocious, radical in the way it explores questions of race, class, sexuality and origins in a genteel English Home Counties setting. It is the story of a country undergoing great change, even if its people aren't aware of it — the novel moves through time so beautifully that I felt such a sense of loss at the end.” —Tash Aw
Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki (translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell) $40
In 2008, the unnamed narrator of Gifted is working as a hostess and living in Tokyo's nightlife district. One day, her estranged mother, who is seriously ill, suddenly turns up at her door. As the mother approaches the end of her life, the two women must navigate their strained relationship, while the narrator also reckons with events happening in her own life, including the death of a close friend — all under the bright lights of Tokyo's 'sleepless town', Kabukicho. In sharp, elegant prose, and based on the author's own experiences as a sex worker, Gifted heralds the breakthrough of an exciting new literary talent. [Paperback]
”Demonstrates that death is the only way forward. Oozes with maternal cruelty.” —Yoko Ogawa
The Hidden Globe: How wealth hacks the world by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian $40
Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. The Hidden Globe is a riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had—bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by by foreign governments and multinational foreign corporations—and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids. By mapping the hidden geography that decides who wins and who loses in this new global order—and how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires. [Paperback]
”In describing insidiously interconnected global regimes of inequality and injustice, Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.” —Pankaj Mishra
This Earthly Globe: A Venetian cartographer and the quest to map the world by Andrea di Robilant $38
In the autumn of 1550, an anonymously authored volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). This was closely followed by two further volumes that, when taken together, constituted the largest release of geographical data in history, and could well be considered the birth of modern geography. The editor of these volumes was a little-known public servant in the Venetian government, Giovambattista Ramusio. He gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo to detailed reports from the Muslim scholar and diplomat Leo Africanus. In an enthralling narrative, Andrea di Robilant brings to life the man who used all his political skill, along with the help of conniving diplomats and spies, to democratise knowledge and show how the world was much larger than anyone previously imagined.
”An extraordinary story that reads more like a thriller than a book about history. A dazzling tale, brilliantly told.” —Peter Frankopan
Kai Feast: Food stories and recipes from the maunga to the moana by Christall Lowe $50
Nau mai, haere mai ki tenei kai hākari wainene! Christall Lowe invites you to a hākari at her family table — replete with mouthwatering dishes infused with the flavours of Aotearoa, brimming with manaakitanga, and served with wonderful tales of nostalgia. In this illustrated story of feasting you'll find a bountiful basket of kai and korero gathered all the way from the mountains to the sea. It's lip-smackingly good kai — from soul-warming kaimoana hot pot, umu pulled pork and hāngī infused with native rongoa, to kūmara donuts, sweet korimako cake and burnt sugar steamed pudding. Recipes are woven with stories of traditional gathering and feasting, tips on cooking for a crowd and notes on foraging and using native herbs. With Kai Feast in your kitchen, you'll be prepared for any occasion, big or small. [Hardback]
Party Rhyme! by Antonia Pesenti $24
It's PARTY RHYME! Put on your PARTY BAT, enjoy the LIZZIE DRINKS, but don't eat too much HAIRY BREAD! Flip the flaps to reveal clever puns, witty rhymes, and playful language. Perfect for children's love of birthday parties, Party Rhyme combines bold illustrations and kid-friendly jokes that will appeal to both younger and older children. Huge fun. [Board book with reverse gatefold flaps]