NEW RELEASES (25.5.26)
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The Witch by Marie NDiaye (translated from French by Jordan Stump) $35
Lucie comes from a long line of witches, powers passed down from mother to daughter. Her own mother was formidable in her powers, but ashamed of her magic. Perhaps as a result, Lucie's own gift is weak: she can see into the future, sometimes — but more often, she can only see the present of some other location. Not very useful. And the worst part? All she can ever see are insignificant details — a scrap of outfit, the colour of the sky. Lucie's own children are initiated into their family's peculiar womanhood when they reach twelve years of age, and in a few short months, Maud and Lise are crying the curious tears of blood that denote their magical powers. Having learned, they take off quickly and fly the nest. Literally. Witty, dreamlike, vaguely unsettling, and utterly enchanting, The Witch brings the mysteries of womanhood and motherhood into sharp relief and leaves us teetering on the edge, unbalanced by questions as seemingly unbreakable relationships break down left and right. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
”Family alienation meets suburban witchcraft in this short, fantastical work from one of France’s greatest living novelists, which is finally getting an English translation nearly 30 years after it appeared in France. Lucie, a middling witch, is instructing her two daughters in the family’s matrilineal talent of seeing the future — visions produce tears of blood — but their professionally disempowered father all but approves. As the bitter marriage at the center of the family unravels, the girls embrace their new gift more fully than Lucie could have imagined. This is NDiaye at her disquieting best.” —Vulture
>>Hear an extract.
>>Read an extract.
>>The magical and the banal.
The Light Room: On art and care by Kate Zambreno $30
In The Light Room, Zambreno offers a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yuko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world. How will our memories, and our children's, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward possibility. [Paperback]
”Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in close-up.” —Annie Ernaux
”The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon.” —Sinead Gleeson
”Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing — that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone.” —Jenny Odell
>>”It’s nonwork, but I have to do it.”
The Annotated Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, edited and with an introduction by Merve Emre $67
"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." So begins Virginia Woolf's much-beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been considered Woolf's masterpiece. A pivotal work of literary modernism, its simple plot — centered on an upper-class Londoner preparing to give a party — is complicated by Woolf's satire of the English social system. For decades, Woolf's rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists, and scholars alike. In this annotated volume based on the original Hogarth Press edition, Merve Emre mines Woolf's diaries and notes on writing to take us into the making of Mrs. Dalloway, revealing the novel's depths and originality. Alongside her perceptive commentary, Emre offers hundreds of illustrations and little-known photographs from Woolf's life in this attractive and informative edition. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Annotating Mrs Dalloway.
>>Emre and Levy meet Mrs Dalloway.
Lucky Creatures by Jospeh Trinidad $35
Trinidad’s essays explore the lessons of his grandmother’s chicken farm and his grandfather’s lucky golden fish; the vibrancy of his home country and its rites of passage such as tuli, beauty pageants and national Boy Scout jamborees; the contradictions of Aotearoa, which welcomes his family’s labour but insists they leave their mother tongues at the border; and his own journey of coming out, along with the hard work of actualisation that follows as he and his partner grapple with the desire to have a baby. Inspired by the creatures of Filipino folktales and migrant touchstones such as FaceTime and 'that one cousin from the States', Lucky Creatures seeks to answer the eternal question: 'Was the move worth it?' Each resulting essay is an unforgettable exploration of life as a queer, Brown, transnational hybrid – filled with the warmth, grace and humour of the lucky creatures who can hear the call of home. [Paperback]
”There’s an entirely original voice in these essays that seems to me created out of a tremendous intimacy. Trinidad is making space on the page for the people in the stories he is telling, their languages, their lives, the money they earned and the money they didn’t, the heartbreak and the connections both.” —Alexander Chee
”Magnificent – the kind of book you can’t help telling everyone about. I was still smiling and laughing long after I put it down.” —Saraid de Silva
”An unforgettable book, with a captivating sense of conviction in the strange.” —Rose Lu
”Lucky Creatures is a vibrant intervention into the literary landscape – a playful and moving collection from one of Aotearoa's most exciting new voices.” —Lana Lopesi
Have This Heart by Lawrence Patchett $38
A story collection about men who are trying to do better. Whether training a rescue dog, starting a bucket chain to put out a raging fire, raising a marquee beside a line of Ferraris, or reporting on a sensitive workplace accident, the men in Have This Heart are striving for more — for connection, for humour, for a way back into the world. Lawrence Patchett's stories are about men at work and what happens when your life doesn't let you hide. These are tightly coiled stories, rich with rough talk and fear-sweat and tenderness. [Paperback]
”On the surface, Lawrence's writing has a rugged, frontier, quality, but underneath, holding it all together, is a delicate web, almost fragile in its nature. There is a rawness on the page that is underscored by a rich emotional intelligence that enables him to capture love and loss.” —Laurence Fearnley
For an Ecology of Images by Peter Szendy (translated from French by Marco Roth) $30
When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an ‘ecology of images’ in On Photography, she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the onslaught of images from advertising and television that she believed threatened our ability to truly see. Today, beyond deep anxieties over a diminishing ‘attention economy’, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed. Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasises the labour and time required to produce and properly view images. His inquisitive mind and sparkling, associative style of writing take us from the animal kingdom to the scientific history of the shadow, the theorems of Pliny to Nabokov's butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film and the first aerial photograph. [Paperback]
”Peter Szendy is a dazzlingly original philosopher, as witty as he is erudite. For an Ecology of Images finds him at the height of his powers, as he outlines what he calls the 'shadows' of our future.” —Adam Shatz
”Wide-ranging across the history of science, visual arts, and photography, this short book packs a lot in. Szendy understands the Kabbalistic principle that moving one letter can alter the universe: cosmicomic is cosmiconic, economy is iconomy, ecology is icology. He has shown us how to swim when we are all drowning in pictures.” —John Durham Peters
”This book made me feel wild reverence, joy, and wonder for everything Szendy looks at-like a six-year-old who, having just learned about sharks, corners you to tell you about ‘the coolest thing in the world’.” —The Paris Review
>>Sontag On Photography.
Frank the Monster by Mats Strandberg and Sofia Falkenhem $20
Frank is nipped by a dog on his ninth birthday, and his life turns inside out. His nights fill with mysterious dreams and eery adventures. A wild beast is reported roaming the town after dark. Frightening encounters lead to Frank’s discovery that he is the werewolf. But he can’t understand why everyone is afraid. Frank is still a nine-year-old boy inside—one who feels a strong urge to have his tummy scratched. Forced to own his new identity, Frank learns about the town’s secret underbelly. Beneath the streets live other monsters, cast out of their human families. Perhaps he has found his pack of misfits. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>Don’t get bitten by a Woof.
John of John by Douglas Stuart $38
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son's long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted. John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. From the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. [Paperback]
”John of John has the emotional range and sense of sympathy of his earlier books, but this book is special, it has an urgency, an immediacy, a brilliant sense of place, the drama of fierce emotion repressed, concealed and volcanically exposed.” —Colm Toibin
”To read John of John is to move to the Isle of Harris and take up residence in the family croft. The novel is so immersive, so all-encompassing, that I felt like I was living in it. Douglas Stuart has written something brilliant and rare.” —Ann Patchett
”John of John is a fierce, glorious sting of a novel. Douglas Stuart has somehow lifted the rocky, windswept landscape of the Scottish Western Isles — as well as its externally stark and thwarted, if internally blazing, characters — and replicated both with utter flawlessness on the page. What an astonishing feat of literary fiction.” —Lauren Groff
The Lost Girls of Autism: The untold story of women on the spectrum by Gina Rippon $45
The history of autism is male. Nearly all the first studies focused on boys. The classic hallmarks of autism, such as avoiding eye contact, are heavily biased towards men. When autistic girls meet doctors, they are still misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, and even personality disorders. As millions of women discover they have the condition later in life, we are only now starting to realise what has been missed. In this groundbreaking book, neurologist Gina Rippon examines why neurodivergence in women has been systematically ignored and why girls have been denied the help and support they need. Raising huge questions about how boys and girls are socialised differently, Rippon reveals the fascinating science behind female neurodivergence and what it tells us about the medical establishment. Exploring the unique challenges faced by women who have lived undiagnosed for years, Rippon argues it is high time for society to recognise and embrace the full spectrum of autistic experience. [Paperback]
”A treasure trove of information and good humour.” —Cordelia Fine
>>What has been missed.
>>Unmasked.
>>Off the spectrum.
A Moon Will Rise from the Darkness: Reports on Israel's genocide in Palestine by Francesca Albanese $36
Israel's genocide in Palestine and the complicity of powerful Western states is undermining international human rights and the UN system. The United States has imposed sanctions on lawyers, UN experts, and Palestinian officials in an attempt to bully and intimidate them into silence. One prominent example is UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has played an important role in documenting Israel's atrocities and those who profit from its oppression of Palestinians. This book compiles Albanese's indispensable and damning reports on Israel's conduct in Palestine since October 2023. First outlining the case that this period should be understood as a genocide, Albanese goes on to explain how the ongoing violence fits into a longer history of Israel's settler colonialism, and finally presents a devastating indictment against the international corporations that treat mass killing and destruction as a business opportunity. [Paperback]
"Francesca Albanese's clear moral voice and expert analysis sheds light on Palestine's darkest moment in history. This book will help to judge those who were on the right and wrong side of history." —Ilan Pappe
"When I came out of Gaza at the end of November 2023, I discovered that Israel was only the tip of the genocidal iceberg. The rest of the iceberg was the enablement apparatus — a system of states, institutions and individuals whose sole purpose was to ensure the longevity of a genocidal project now into its third year. This book dissects this apparatus, shedding light on its constitutive accomplices." —Ghassan Abu-Sittah, trauma surgeon
Silent Coup: How corporations overthrew democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard $33
As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a rebirth for democracy, what emerged was a silent coup — namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power. Exposing the origins of this epic power grab as well as its present-day consequences, Silent Coup is the result of two investigative journalists' reports from 30 countries around the world. It provides a guide to the rise of a corporate empire that now dictates how resources are allocated, how countries are governed, and how justice is defined. [Paperback]
”Silent Coup is a crime story: a gripping description of the murky legal, and regulatory structures and policy changes that privilege big corporations. It's a tragedy, outlining the terrible consequences for people and nature, for democracy and accountability. It's a lesson in economics, providing fascinating and important insights into the functioning of global capitalism today. But finally it's also a story of hope, about apparently powerless people resisting these trends in the struggle for better and more just futures. Don't miss this.” —Jayati Ghosh