NEW RELEASES (26.7.24)
Jumping out of the carton and into your hands. Click through to our website to secure your copies:
Woman, Life, Freedom by Marjane Satrapi et al $65
Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, returns to graphic art with this collaboration of over 20 activists, artists, journalists, and academics working together to depict the historic uprising, in solidarity with the Iranian people and in defense of feminism. On September 13th 2022, a young Iranian student, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the religious police in Tehran. Her only crime was that she wasn't properly wearing the headscarf required for women by the Islamic Republic. At the police station, she was beaten so badly she had to be taken to the hospital, where she fell into a deep coma. She died three days later. A wave of protests soon spread through the whole country, and crowds adopted the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" — words that have been chanted around the world during solidarity rallies. In order to tell the story of this major revolution happening in her homeland, Marjane Satrapi has gathered together an array of journalists, activists, academics, artists, and writers from around the world to create this powerful collection of full-color, graphic-novel-style essays and perspectives that bear witness. Contributing artists: Joann Sfar, Coco, Mana Neyastani, Catel, Pascal Rabate, Patricia Bolanos, Paco Roca, Bahareh Akrami, Hippolyte, Shabnam Adiban, Lewis Trondheim, Winshluss, Touka Neyastani, Bee, Deloupy, Nicolas Wild, and Marjane Satrapi. 3 expert perspectives on Iran: long-time journalist for Libération and political scientist Jean-Pierre Perrin; researcher and Iran specialist Farid Vahid; and UC Berkeley historian Abbas Milani, Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrates that this is not an unexpected movement, but a major uprising in a long history of women who have wanted to affirm their rights.
"A small miracle of lively, serious and joyful intelligence." —Elle (France)
"Each comic in this anthology might also function as a small lantern, an opportunity to illuminate yet another aspect of daily Iranian life and resistance under the current regime." —The Markaz Review
The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an easier life in the kitchen by Bee Wilson $70
This excellent book, compiled from a lifetime’s experience of preparing, eating, thinking and writing about food, realigns even a sophisticated cook’s basic approaches and ingredients, and makes life in the kitchen simpler, more enjoyable, and always satisfyingly productive. The Secret of Cooking is packed with solutions for how to make life in the kitchen work better for you, whether you are cooking for yourself or for a crowd. Wilson shows you how to get a meal on the table when you're tired and stretched for time, how to season properly, cook onions (or not) and what equipment really helps. The 140 recipes are doable and delicious, filled with ideas for cooking ahead or cooking alone, and the kind of unfussy food that makes everyday life taste better.
”A lifetime of kitchen wisdom here.” —Nigel Slater
”A truly remarkable cookbook that will change lives.” —Rachel Roddy
”It's not often that a genuinely game-changing cook book comes out, but this accomplished, approachable and helpful book — its writing as nourishing as the recipes — is most definitely it. Quite frankly, there's not a kitchen that should be without a copy of The Secret of Cooking.” —Nigella Lawson
”There is wisdom, and notes from a lifetime of reading, thinking, cooking and eating here. And it's not just about food but about how we live, and how we look after ourselves and each other>” —Diana Henry
”The very acest book — so utterly lovely and so utterly necessary.” —Jeremy Lee
”Bee Wilson seems to help me in my moments of crisis — both when I'm struggling to find the right words and when I've got creative fatigue. The Secret of Cooking reminds us to cut ourselves some slack. Bee focuses on probability rather than possibility. The book is brimming with clever tips, handy shortcuts and substitutions, with 15 pages devoted to the versatile and underrated box grater (NB it really isn't just for cheese).” —Yotam Ottelenghi
”It is my Book of the Year, across any genre — packed to the absolute gills with invaluable advice, hints and tips, so reassuring and warm in tone that you feel actual love for the author, and, of course, also full of fantastic, achievable, home-kitchen friendly recipes that I guarantee will immediately become part of your repertoire.” —India Knight
”I don't need a lot of convincing to pick up a pan, but Wilson's tips are so clever, her recipes so tempting, and her vignettes of family life so candid, that this is a book I can read for pleasure alone.” —Niki Segnit
”This book is the perfect cooking companion and Bee Wilson is the ultimate kitchen friend: smart, funny, conscientious and patient, this is a book you'll want to spend time with, in and out of the kitchen.” —Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer
The Raven’s Eye Runaways by Claire Mabey $25
A gripping fantasy quest set in a parallel medieval world. Three friends and a one-eyed raven find themselves up against the rulers who restrict the gifts of writing and reading to an elite few. They must go on a wild and unpredictable rescue mission. Who and what will they meet along their way? And what is the terrible truth behind everything they think they know about their world?
”As delicate as it is potent, The Raven's Eye Runaways is a hot, pungent pot of tea. With every gulp, you'll be transported to a heady, haunting world where words are a currency reserved for the few, and paid with the price of spilled blood. A feverish love letter to the written word, I dare you to read it — you will be bewitched!” —Graci Kim
”Sparky and spooky, humorous and luminous.” —Elizabeth Knox
”I adored it.” —Rachel King
”A beautiful, warm and assured debut.” —Hera Lindsay Bird
”Claire Mabey writes like a dream.” —Anna Smaill
Marrow, And other stories by Sloane Hong $35
A collection of short comics by Sloane Hong, brought into print for the first time. Although varied in content, each story explores how we relate to each other and the world around us — through grief, love and our innate curiosity of the unknown. Plagued with intrigue and often unsettling, these gloriously stylish panels peel back layers of the human psyche, exposing them, throbbing and pulsating, for all to see.
Greek Lessons by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won) $26
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish — the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression. Now in paperback.
”By turns love letter to and critique of language itself, Greek Lessons is a brief yet, in its concision and finesse, lapidary work. One of Han's most intimate works.” —Financial Times
”In Greek Lessons Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable. Han Kang turns the well-worn idea of the mind-body disconnect into something fresh and substantial.” —Los Angeles Times
”This novel is a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language. Han is an astute chronicler of unusual, insubordinate women.” —The New York Times
”Han Kang is a writer like no other. In a few lines, she seems to traverse the entirety of human experience.” —Katie Kitamura
”Han Kang's vivid and at times violent storytelling will wake up even the most jaded of literary palates.” —Independent
Night of Power: The betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk $50
Following The Great War for Civilisation, this posthumous volumes is a chronicle of Fisk's trademark rigorous journalism, historical analysis and eyewitness reporting. Fully immersed in the Middle East and skeptical of the West's ongoing interference, Fisk was committed to uncovering complex and uncomfortable truths that rarely featured on the traditional news agenda.
”Every sentence of Robert Fisk radiates his loathing of wars and the inevitable dehumanisation they produce, which makes his (sadly) last book an everlasting warning, beyond its value as a meticulous historical recount and analysis of today's events.” —Amira Hass, journalist, Haaretz
”In his attentive, careful, detailed, historically grounded reporting — and in this remarkable posthumous book, which deserves to be widely read — the voices of people demanding freedom are given space, recognition, and dignity. This is an exemplary and deeply human work of both journalism and history.” —Anthony Arnove
”Even after 20 years, we still don't know the full depths of the strategic bankruptcy and moral depravity of America's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Legendary journalist Robert Fisk's Night of Power is essential reading to understand the full extent of the crime that was the Iraq war.” —Trita Parsi
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy $28
Claire Kilroy takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity. Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a bedtime story to a son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Spending her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets, Soldier doesn't know who she is anymore. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be but can hardly remember. Tender and harrowing, Kilroy's book portrays parenthood in all its agony and ardent joy.
"Oh this novel! Powerful beyond description. I read it in a day, holding my breath, heart bursting. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever felt swallowed alive by caring for a child, and essential reading for everyone who hasn't." —Barbara Kingsolver
"The most vivid account I've ever read of how difficult it is to cope with the demands of an infant. Through a prism of love and despair, Kilroy's narrator illuminates how a baby can tear away at a woman's sense of self, as her needs disintegrate in the face of her child's interminable demands.., if a woman chooses to devote herself to ensuring her child's wellbeing, then someone needs to take care of her too." —John Boyne
Mask by Sharrona Pearl $23
From the theater mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks — as faces — are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponised and politicised, Sharrona Pearl looks at the politics of the mask, exploring how identity itself is read on this object. By exploring who we do (and do not) seek to protect through different forms of masking, Sharrona Pearl's long history of masks helps us to better understand what it is we value.
”Masking is, as Sharrona Pearl wisely observes, a complicated enterprise: masks can protect and buffer even as they diminish, eviscerate, and lie. With a historian's rigor and a human's candor, Pearl addresses all of this and more. From public health to performance and ritual, Mask interrogates the personal, public, and inevitably paradoxical ways we both conceal and reveal our increasingly imperiled selves.” —Jessica Helfand
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie $25
In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich. Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband's abuse have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-three years. She has told no one of her own visions and knows that time is running out for her to do so. The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything. Vivid and humane, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain cracks history open to reveal the lives of two extraordinary women. New paperback edition.
”A tiny marvel, tenderly illuminating the inner lives of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.” —Guardian
”Electrifying — This slim novel is a pocket epic; you will read it in no time but be thinking about it for ages after. You feel in every sentence the weight of history pressing down on and confining these women.” — Frank Cotterell-Boyce, Guardian
”A beautiful book. I loved it. Margery and Julian are both so alive. The invisible balancing and weighing MacKenzie has done across the whole to bring them dialogue with each other and to bring the reader into emotional and spiritual connectedness with them is just so brilliant. And it's funny. It warmed my heart.” —Max Porter
To the City: Life and death along the ancient walls of Istanbul by Alexander Christie-Miller $40
Caught between two seas and two continents, with a contested past and an imperiled future, Istanbul represents the precipitous moment civilizations around the world are currently facing. To the City seamlessly blends two narratives: the fears and hopes of the present-day inhabitants, and the story of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II's siege and capture of the city in 1453. That event still looms large in Turkey, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan like a latter-day sultan invokes its memory as part of his effort to transform Turkey in an echo of its imperial past. Istanbul stands at the centre of the most pressing challenges of our time. Environmental decay, rapacious development and a refugee crisis are straining the city to breaking point, while its civil society gutters in the face of resurgent authoritarianism. Yet, the city has endured despite centuries of instability. Christie-Miller introduces us to people who are experiencing the looming crisis and fighting back, sometimes triumphing despite the odds. Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country's history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future.
”The author is a sensitive and patient presence, piecing together these stories over many pages. Spending time at a teahouse, an animal shelter and a former Dervish hall that is now an academic institution, he brings to life the rich variety of these neighbourhoods. While Christie-Miller's focus remains on the streets surrounding the walls, his characters offer broader insights into Turkey's social and political make-up. He is also sensitive to the poetry of his surroundings, captured in moments of lyrical precision.” —Financial Times
Father and Son: A memoir about family, the past, and mortality by Jonathan Raban $40
On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body. Learning to use a wheelchair in a rehab facility outside Seattle and resisting the ministrations of the nurses overseeing his recovery, Raban began to reflect upon the measure of his own life in the face of his own mortality. Together with the chronicle of his recovery is the extraordinary story of his parents' marriage, the early years of which were conducted by letter while his father fought in the Second World War.
”A beautiful, compelling memoir. Father and Son is an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous achievement." —Ian McEwan
Inheritance: The evolutionary origins of the modern world by Harvey Whitehouse $40
Every human being is endowed with an inheritance. A set of ancient biases — forged by natural selection and fine-tuned by millennia of culture — that shape every facet of our behaviour. For countless generations, this inheritance has been taking us to ever greater heights — driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organised religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it is failing us. Suddenly, we find ourselves on a path to destruction.Here, a leading anthropologist offers a sweeping account of how our inheritance has shaped humanity's past and future. Unveiling a pioneering new way of viewing our collective history — one that weaves together psychological experiments, on-the-ground fieldwork, and big data — Harvey Whitehouse introduces three evolved biases that shape human behaviour everywhere — conformism, religiosity, and tribalism. He recounts how our tools for managing these biases have catalysed the greatest transformations in human history — the birth of agriculture and the invention of kingship, the rise and fall of human sacrifice and the creation of the first crusading empires. And he takes readers deep into the modern-day tribes — from Indonesian terrorist cells to Libyan militias to American ad agencies — that show how our three biases are now spiralling out of control.Above all, he argues that only by understanding our ancient inheritance can we solve our thorniest modern problems, whether violent extremism, political polarisation or environmental catastrophe. The result is a powerful new perspective on the human journey; one that transforms our understanding of where we have been and where we are going.
”A bold and sweeping analysis that ranges widely through time, across geographies and through different kinds of human societies. A book of rare ambition and scope.” —Peter Frankopan
”A compelling, thoughtful, nuanced, and ultimately hopeful new perspective on our history, present crises, and future potential. This book is a masterpiece - important, thought-provoking, and great fun to read.” —Kate Fox
The Wrong Shoes by Tom Percival $22
There's a bunch of kids in there and suddenly they're all looking at me like someone who can actually do something, not just some weirdo with the wrong shoes and a rubbish coat . Will has the wrong shoes – he's always known it but doesn't know how to change it. Navigating the difficulties of home and school when you feel you stick out is tough, but finding confidence with the help and empathy of friends can be all you need to see the way. A sensitive exploration of the experience of child poverty.
”Reading fiction is about walking in the shoes of people whose lives are very different to ours and allowing more readers to see themselves in stories. The Wrong Shoes is the perfect example of both — the right book at the right time.” —Tom Palmer
Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen $23
Eighteen-year-old Aihui Ying dreams of becoming a brilliant engineer just like her beloved father - but her life is torn apart when she arrives a moment too late to stop his murder, and worse, lets the killer slip out of reach. Left with only a journal containing his greatest engineering secrets and a jade pendant snatched from the assassin, Ying vows to take revenge into her own hands.Disguised as her brother, Ying heads to the capital city, and discovers that the answer to finding who killed her father lies behind the walls of the prestigious Engineers Guild - the home of a past her father never wanted to talk about. With the help of an unlikely ally - Aogiya Ye-yang, a taciturn (but very handsome) young prince - Ying must navigate a world fraught with rules, challenges and politics she can barely grasp, let alone understand.But to survive, she must fight to stay one step ahead of everyone. And when faced with the choice between doing what's right and what's necessary, Ying will have to decide if her revenge is truly worthwhile, if it means going against everything her father stood for…
Newspaper by Maggie Messitt $23
Newspaper is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from censorship and the intentional destruction of historic record, to partisan and white supremacist campaigns, to the story of an instrument that has been central to democracy and to holding the powerful to account. This is a 400-year history of a nearly-endangered object as seen by journalist Maggie Messitt in the two democratic nations she calls home — the United States and South Africa. The ‘first draft of history’, newspapers figure prominently through each movement and period of unrest in both nations — from the first colonial papers published by slave traders and an advocate for press freedom to those published on id cards, wallpaper, and folio sheets during civil wars. Offices were set on fire. Presses were pushed into bodies of water. Editors were run out of town. And journalists were arrested. Newspaper reflects on a tool that has been used to push down and to rise up, and a journey alongside the hidden lives that have harnessed its power.
Good Night, Belly Button by Lucie Brunellière $22
A delightful interactive board book! Baby is ready to sleep so it's time to say good night — all the way from toes to nose! With each new blanket-page longer than the previous one, the cosy check blanket gradually covers the baby's whole body. One by one, we say good night to little feet, little ankles, little knees... And what about you, little eyes — are you ready to close?