NEW RELEASES (25.9.25)

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

Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades $35
Hiding Places is a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby. Partly a slowly unfurling unsent love letter to an admired writer, partly a “book of essays that is a notebook about trying to write a book of essays”, and partly an attempt to simply hang on through tumultuous times, Hiding Places deftly blends personal reflection with family history, social critique and literary analysis. The result is a fresh, funny and deeply moving look at what it means to care and to create – at what gets lost or hidden in the process, and what is found or revealed. “It’s not what she says,” writes Edmeades, “but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath.” Resonant with, yet distinct from, the works of writers like Maggie Nelson, Kate Zambreno, Olga Ravn and Chris Kraus, Hiding Places is an inspiring read for anyone interested in the dangerous yet fruitful zones where life and art overlap. [Paperback]

No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for uneven terrain by Rebecca Solnit $40
This book's title is an evocation and a declaration.  Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away — logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through — but to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, and to embrace slowness and imperfection, which, she argues, are key to understanding the possibilities of change.  In her latest essay collection, she explores responses to the climate crisis, as well as reflections on women's rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible. [Hardback]
”A book of fierce and poetic thinking — and a guide for navigating a rapidly changing, non-linear, living world.” —Merlin Sheldrake
”With her deep sense of the movement of history, her agile intellect, hope in the possibilities of action and nimble prose, Solnit continues to surprise and delight. This new collection of essays is a tonic in dark times.” —Lisa Appignanesi
>>Flair and capacity.
>>Indirect consequences.
>>Other books by Rebecca Solnit.

The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride $38
”So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine.” It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love. Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud? Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face. [Paperback]
"An immersive battle between the faultlines dividing us and the bonds which unite us. McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure." —Claire Kilroy
"The natural heir to Joyce and Beckett: she is one of the finest writers at work today." —Anne Enright
"Supple, unexpected, funny, libidinous. A work of fierce intimacy, fearless in its descriptions of the inner lives of its characters, racked as they are by desire and hurt." —Naomi Booth
"McBride is a writer with the courage to reinvent the sentence as she pleases, and the virtuosity required to pull it off." —Literary Review
"[This is] McBride at the pinnacle of her craft. McBride is at her most virtuosic in this novel when excavating forbidden emotional depths too dark to be confronted outside the pages of fiction. With its vividly realised characters, lurid plot and lyrically compacted prose, The City Changes Its Face is a typical McBride work. Praise doesn't come much higher." —Financial Times
"It's a rare feat to encounter a writer whose work feels both entirely original and timeless, but Eimear McBride is just that." —AnOther
>>Space. thought, and sanity.
>>Each book has its own requirements.
>>Radical empathy.
>>Other books by Eimear McBride.

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga $28
In New York City, an Albanian interpreter cannot help but become entangled in her clients' struggles, despite her husband's cautions. When she reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions, his nightmares stir up her own buried memories; while an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan. As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardising the nameless narrator's marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not. Ruminative and propulsive, Misinterpretation interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Absolutely gorgeous. Taut as a thriller, lovely as a watercolour.” —Jennifer Croft
”Deft and insightful. Exceptional.” —Idra Novey
”Xhoga interprets our brave, new multicultural world with a sly, benign wit. Read her novel. You'll be glad you did.” —Tom Grimes
”A heart-stopping, emotional thriller. Violence hovers in the book's borders. I loved it.” —Rita Bullwinkel
”Compelling, startling, original.” —Priscilla Morris
>>There is nothing you can see that is not a flower.
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Homeland: The War on Terror in American life by Richard Beck $69
To see America through the lens of this important book is to understand the United States like never before. For years after 9/11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time, with all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home. Richard Beck grippingly explores how life took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people s sense of themselves, their neighbours and the strangers they sat next to on planes. He describes the NFL games fortified like military bases in enemy territory. The surging sales of guns, SUVs and pickup trucks. The racism and xenophobia, erosion of free speech and normalisation of mass surveillance. A war launched to avenge an attack committed by two dozen people quickly came to span much of the globe. Beck searchingly asks why those Americans who excused or endorsed the worst abuses of the war on terror also had the easiest time under standing themselves as patriots. It is a drastic oversimplification to say that the war on terror betrayed US values. In many respects, it embodied them. This is a fascinating and defining account of the meaning of twenty-first-century America. [Hardback]
”Homeland is an expansive tome about how Americans became the anxious, hateful and paranoid citizens of a permanent security state. It is impossible not to admire the nerve and scope pf Beck’s treatise.” —Washington Post
”Describes, with a beguiling mix of intellectual precision and passion, and from a novel perspective, the sinister mutations in American life induced by the war on terror. Everyone interested in the fate of democracy, or simple how violence abroad comes home, should read it.” —Pankaj Mishra
>>The righteous community.

Love Forms by Claire Adams $38
Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption. Dawn tries to carry on with her life - a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce - but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been. Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn's long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer? [Paperback]
”The story, heartbreaking in its own right, comes second to its narration. Dawn’s voice haunts us still, with its beautiful and quiet urgency. Love Forms is a rare and low-pitched achievement. It reads like a hushed conversation overheard in the next room.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation
”Reads like a Claire Keegan short story expanded by Elizabeth Strout.” —The Times
”From very first page, I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller. An utterly arresting tale of love and grief, of the wounding and healing powers of family, of the many guises of a mother's love. It's an absolute triumph.” —Sara Collins
”Exquisitely written. A compelling and tender story of what-and who-is hidden in almost every family that feels as old as the hills and yet acutely contemporary.” —Monique Roffey
”An arresting voice that made me think of silk: its delicate beauty belies its intrinsic strength.” —Claire Kilroy
>>Missing pieces.
>>A deeply mysterious bond.
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked toward Darkness by Irene Solà (translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem)
Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years' worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women's stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Joana who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be. I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Sol explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory. [Hardback]
”A heady, exhilarating, compact tale that seems as old as the Catalan mountains and as fresh as a newly plucked chicken. Solà beautifully aligns past and present. Exuding a kind of alt-magical realism, the novel refuses to distinguish between bewitcher and bewitched: this is its triumph.” —Financial Times
”The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Solà's serious attention to the nonhuman makes most contemporary realist literary fiction feel narrow and timid, wilfully deaf to the other forms of life with which all human drama is interdependent.” —Guardian
”Forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine. A fecund and daring book.” —Catherine Lacey
”Irene Sola is unlike any other writer — she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book.” —Daisy Johnson
”Solà's imagery is beyond arresting — it burns itself into your retina as you read.” —The Skinny
>>Memory and oblivion.
>>Rural damnation.
>>”The tide carries my books from my head.”

Good Things: Recipes to share with people you love by Samin Nosrat $70
The much-anticipated new book from the author of the transformative Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
”Once I hand them off to you, these recipes are no longer mine. They're yours, to do with as you please. And maybe, in the act of receiving, a little thread of connection will be woven between me and each of you.”
How can a recipe express the joy of sharing a meal in person? This is the feeling that Samin Nosrat sets out to capture in Good Things, offering more than 125 recipes for the things she most loves to cook. You'll find go-to recipes for ricotta custard pancakes, chicken braised with apricots and harissa, a crunchy Calabrian chili crisp, super-chewy sky-high focaccia and a decades-in-the-making, childhood-evoking yellow cake. Nosrat also shares tips and techniques, from how to buy olive oil (check the harvest date) to when to splurge on the best ingredients (salad dressing) to the one acceptable substitute for Parmigiano Reggiano (Grana Padano, if you must). Good Things captures, with Samin's trademark blend of warmth and precision, the essence of what makes cooking such an important source of comfort and delight, and invites you to join her at the table. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

A Wilder Way: How gardens grow us by Poppy Okotcha $45
A Wilder Way is a memoir of a relationship with an ever-changing garden, of setting down roots and becoming embedded in nature, and of how tending to a patch of land will not only grow us as individuals, but can also help to grow a better world. Join Poppy Okotcha in her wild little garden in Devon, where, over the course of a year, she shares the inspiring, the mundane and the magical moments that arise from tending a garden through the seasons, and what they can teach us about living more sustainably. Alongside tips for sowing and growing, wild ingredients to be found and delicious seasonal recipes to make, she shows us how the small joys of engaging with the natural world are imperative for our physical and emotional wellbeing. How the more we look at the world around us, the more we learn and the more we care. Woven throughout are folktales from her English and Nigerian heritage stories with nature at their heart that have inspired her, and will inspire us to live a little more wildly. [Hardback]
”Poppy's fresh-eyed look at her own little corner of the county gave me a renewed sense of wonder and delight at the joys and challenges of loving and (on good days) living off a small patch of land. Plus some truly brilliant ideas for getting the most from it. She had me at worm tea.” —Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
>>”Plants taught me about myself.”
>>Loving winter.

Is It Asleep? by Olivier Tallec $30
Squirrel and his best friend, Pock the mushroom, sit on the old stump, watching birds fly by. When they’re tired of this, they take the path to the yellow meadow to listen to the blackbird sing. But today, the bird’s not there. The friends look everywhere. Finally they find it on the path, all stretched out and quite still. It must be sleeping. They sit down quietly and wait for the bird to wake. This true-to-child story of a natural encounter with an animal that has died is both dryly humorous and a profound example of how to manage the comings and goings of life. The book ends with birdsong. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

My Bohemian Kitchen: A nostalgic guide to modern Czech cooking by Evie Harbury $45
My Bohemian Kitchen is a charming collection of Czech recipes with roots in nostalgia and a surprisingly modern take on seasonality and sustainability in the kitchen. Welcome to the food of Evie Harbury, whose Bohemian kitchen bridges the Czech Republic of her heritage and her home in East London. The book brings to life her long summers spent at her granny's mill in South Bohemia with her personal stories about Czech food and culture. As Evie's childhood memories simmered alongside more recent days spent with friends and family in Bohemian kitchens, Evie realised how much of the Bohemian spirit lives through hospitality and knew she had to write about the cultural ties between this unique country and its relationship with food. Alongside the snapshots of this food are her deliciously simple recipes that capture the influences of the Czech Republic's neighbouring countries. Even if you know nothing of this region, there's so much to discover and enjoy. The quaint and quirky chapters include: A Bit(e) of History Granny (Babička) Beer Snacks such as Marinated Cheese (Nakládaný Hermelín) Soups such as Chanterelle and Dill (Kulajda) The Main Event such as Beef Goulash (Hovězí guláš) Meatless Mains such as Lucky Lentils (Čočka na kyselo) Something Sweet such as Strawberry Dumplings (Jahodové knedlíky) Bohemian Baking such as Honey Cake (Medovník). [Hardback]
>>Look inside.