NEW RELEASES (25.8.23)
New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from German by Michael Hofmann) $40
The much-anticipated new novel from this fine and thoughtful writer is set in the years straddling the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
”In this granular and, at times, shockingly intimate narrative of an all-consuming love affair that ultimately turns abusive, Jenny Erpenbeck has written an allegory of her nation, a country that has ceased to exist — East Germany. No writer on the world stage can make the texture and details of individual lives articulate so seamlessly and unobtrusively the way humans are subjects of, and subjected to, history. The ending is like a bomb thrown into your room — you'll be reeling for days and weeks to come.” —Neel Mukherjee
>>The turbulence of history.
>>Returning to East Berlin.
>>Reading and rereading.
>>Read our reviews of several others of Erpenbeck’s books.
The Flavour Thesaurus: More flavours by Niki Segnit $43
The first volume of Niki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus has a special place on our kitchen bookcase, and we consult it often, either because we are wondering how ingredients can go together (or not) in something we are about to make, or just because Segnit’s wit, wisdom and snide comments make the book endlessly dippable and a good way to spend those few minutes waiting for the dish to be ‘done’. Segnit introduces us to an ingredient and then ‘cross-references’ it with a whole range of other ingredients, describing the effects and resonances of that combination or flavour collision. Deeply researched and packed with notes, The Flavour Thesaurus is the perfect guide to cooking something exactly the way you want it to be, whether you are a kitchen novice or an experienced chef. It is also a way of avoiding disasters (or at least of going into them with your eyes open). We have had the first volume for years, and now we are delighted with the second volume, which adds another 92 mostly plant-based flavours and over 800 entries — double the delight!
>>The Flavour Thesaurus (1).
>>The Flavour Thesaurus: More flavours (2).
>>Segnit’s Lateral Cooking is also a brilliant and original aid to understanding and innovating food.
Great Liberty by Julien Cracq (translated from French by George MacLennan) $38
In 1941, Julien Gracq, newly released from a German prisoner-of-war camp, wrote a series of prose poems that would come to represent the only properly Surrealist writings in his oeuvre. Surrealism provided Gracq with a means of counteracting his disturbing wartime experiences; his newfound freedom inspired a new freedom of personal expression, and he gave the collection an appropriate title, Great Liberty: "In the occult dictionary of Surrealism, the true name of poetry is liberation." Gracq the poet rather than the novelist is at work here: Surrealist fireworks lace through bewitching modernist romance, fantasy, black humor and deadpan absurdism. A later, postwar section entitled ‘The Habitable Earth’ presents Gracq as visionary traveler exploring the Andes and Flanders and returning to the narrative impulse of his better-known fiction. Great Liberty is a liminal work that exists on an unmapped borderline. This is the first appearance of this key work in English translation.
>>Some other books published by Wakefield Press.
This Other Eden by Paul Harding $37
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered an island where they could make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain there, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbors — a pair of sisters raising three Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their nocturnal brood; the prophetic Zachary Hand To God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who carves Biblical images in a hollow tree. Then comes the intrusion of "civilisation" — eugenics-minded state officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark. Full of lyricism and power, This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference. A beautiful hardback.
”The Pulitzer prize-winning author's gifts have found their fullest expression. This Other Eden impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding's sentences, their breathless angelic light>” —Obsercer
”This Other Eden is a story of good intentions, bad faith, worse science, but also a tribute to community and human dignity and the possibility of another world. In both, it has much to say to our times.” —Guardian
Granta 163: Best of young British novelists $33
Every ten years, Granta dedicates an issue to the twenty most significant British novelists under forty. In this issue Granta announces the fifth generation of the Best of Young British Novelists. This cohort was selected by judges Tash Aw, Rachel Cusk, Brian Dillon, Helen Oyeyemi and Sigrid Rausing. Featured are: Graeme Armstrong, Jennifer Atkins, Sara Baume, Sarah Bernstein, Natasha Brown, Eleanor Catton, Eliza Clark, Tom Crewe, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Camilla Grudova, Isabella Hammad, Sophie Mackintosh, Anna Metcalfe, Thomas Morris, Derek Owusu, K Patrick, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Saba Sams, Olivia Sudjic and Eley Williams.
>>’Doubtful Sound’ — Eleanor Catton’s piece included in this issue.
>>Meet the class of 2023 (and a few alumni).
A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the dark heart of the city by Edward Chisholm $28
A waiter's job is to deceive you. They want you to believe in a luxurious calm because on the other side of that door... is hell. Edward Chisholm's spellbinding memoir of his time as a Parisian waiter is the perfect summer read. It takes you below the surface of one of the most iconic cities in the world and right into its glorious underbelly. He inhabits a world of inhuman hours, snatched sleep and dive bars; scraping by on coffee, bread and cigarettes, often under sadistic managers, with a wage so low you're fighting your colleagues for tips. Colleagues - including thieves, narcissists, ex-Legionnaires, paperless immigrants, wannabe actors and drug dealers - who are the closest thing to family that you've got. It's physically demanding, frequently humiliating and incredibly competitive. But it doesn't matter because you're in Paris, the centre of the universe, and there's nowhere else you'd rather be in the world.
”This astonishing book describes a cruel, feral existence and is worthy of standing on the shelf next to George Orwell's Down And Out In Paris And London (1933) as another classic about human exploitation.” —Daily Mail
>>What’s it really like?
Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools by Júlia Sardà (illustrator), Myriam Dahman, Nicolas Digard $30
Leina owns the only boat in town - she ferries townsfolk over to the forest where they chop trees and hunt animals. But everyone in the town fears the forest and not everyone who goes in comes back out again. When Leina's friend, Oren, doesn't return, she goes on a mission to find him. In the forest she meets the mysterious Mr Spadefoot who introduces himself as The Lord of the Toadstools. Mr Spadefoot is strange and magical and Leina suspects that he knows where she can find Oren. She accepts his invitation for dinner in his underground palace and there she discovers the secret of the forest and the mystery of the missing townsfolk. Featuring the lush and wondrous illustrations of Júlia Sardà, who also illustrated The Wolf’s Secret.
>>Look inside!
>>Those illustrations are wonderful!
The Last Days of Roger Federer, And other endings by Geoff Dyer $25
How and when do artists and athletes know that their careers are coming to an end? What if the end comes early in a writer’s life? How to keep going even as the ability to do so diminishes? In this ingeniously structured meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, musicians, and sports stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. With playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he considers Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner’s proto-abstract paintings of blazing light, Jean Rhys’s late-life resurgence, John Coltrane’s final works. Ranging from Burning Man to Beethoven, from Eve Babitz to William Basinski, from Annie Dillard to De Chirico, Dyer’s study of last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty — and the sudden rejuvenation offered by books, films and music discovered late in life. Dyer has blended criticism, memoir, and badinage of the most serious kind into something entirely new. The Last Days of Roger Federer is a summation of Dyer’s passions, and the perfect introduction to his sly and joyous work. Now in paperback (but also still available as a pleasing hardback).
“Perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today,” —Tom Bissell
>>Those shelves!
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A sister’s search for justice by Cristina Rivera Garza $37
On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza's sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide. She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master's degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him. Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence — handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints 3 to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister's voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.
”Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer. A dexterous creator of atmospheres, with a powerful style, an evocative and indomitable language.” —Lina Meruane
>>Reshaping the conversation about femcide.
>>How can these stories be told?
>>”To write is to create empty space.”
>>Thomas reviews two other books by Cristina Rivera Garza.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett $35
In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.
”Those who want fiction to soothe, bolster and cheer will love Tom Lake.” —Guardian
>>”Quiet and reassuring.”
Now I Am Here by Chidi Ebere $38
In Now I Am Here, we begin at the end. The armies of the National Defence Movement have been crushed and our unnamed narrator and his unit are surrounded. Prepared for defeat at the hands of the enemy and with only his sins for company, he turns to confession. As he recounts the events leading to his disastrous finale, we learn how this gentle man is gradually transformed into a war criminal, committing acts he wouldn't have thought himself capable. Chidi Ebere's debut is a reflection on how good people can do terrible things — precipitated by circumstances and the violence of war. Unflinching and thought-provoking, Now I Am Here resonates far beyond the individual story of our narrator.
>>By any means necessary.
Wine by Meg Bernhard $23
While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste. Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage.
”Meg Bernhard's Wine is a beautiful gem of a book, thankfully free of what we find in so much wine writing. This wine book is anything but typical. Bernhard covers a lot of ground in a short number of pages with her unique mix of memoir, travel writing, natural history, sensory science, and reporting on the social issues surrounding wine. But the beating heart of this book is Bernhard's experiences working at Spanish wineries and in the vineyards of Castilla-La Mancha and Catalonia, which she memorably brings to life.” —Jason Wilson
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.