NEW RELEASES (28.10.25)

All your choices are good! 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.

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from German by Kurt Beals) $36
A collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin. Erpenbeck asks: "Is there some kind of perpetrator who makes things that I know cherish and disappear?" These things disappear, and yet do they really? Do they remain in our memories more fully than if they continued to exist? [Paperback]
"The most profound, intelligent, humane, and important writer of our times." —Neel Mukherjee
"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating-ferocious as well as virtuosic." —Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books
"Her restrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming." —Nicole Krauss
"Meditative, moving, and profoundly beautiful." —Edmund de Waal
"In these tender, poignant pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck is attuned to the silence left in the wake of an absence or disappearance. She captures the ineffable quality of memory with a quiet, haunting intensity, where a sentence or a paragraph can turn on a word and devastate." —Mary Costello
>>Junk.
>>They disappeared when the wall came down.

Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin $43
Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia — this city of hospitals — who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a medication that may help, an eye exam is required and this leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of our for-profit medical industry that "renders the Hippocratic Oath its opposite," to see poison. Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari's studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron's bedroom — polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, "I don't know what to say, I'm saying I have a cracked appearance. It's not a pity party, it's a character sketch. Insofar as you'll need to be looking at me, that your mind should fill me up with its own swaying cognitive and toxic reeds if we are to do this, your imagination should touch me with its ridiculous poison." Caren Beilin's hypnotic and fractured story is at once an homage to Shusaku Endo's terrifying novel of human vivisection The Sea and Poison and the spirit of OuLipo, the pioneering French writing group that sought new literary potential through constraints. [Paperback]
“An absurdist masterpiece. Nothing, just nothing, is as wild, outrageous, and free as Sea, Poison.” —Amina Cain
"Caren Beilin is one of the most bizarre and fearless writers of her generation." —Catherine Lacey
"I was instantly won over by Beilin's writing — so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves." —Sheila Heti, The Paris Review
"It's not often I read a work and want to know, simply, how. How did the writer write this?" —Patrick Cottrell, LA Review of Books
>>An enormous amount of ground.
>>Revenge of the Scapegoat.
>>Now and next.

Swallows by Natsuo Kirino (translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) $38
Twenty-nine-year-old Riki is sick of her dead-end job, of struggling to get by ever since she moved to Tokyo from the country. So when someone offers her the chance to become a surrogate in return for a life-changing amount of money, it's hard to turn down. But how much of herself will she be forced to give away? Retired ballet star Motoi and his wife, Yuko, have spent years trying to conceive. As Yuko begins to make peace with her childlessness, Motoi grows increasingly desperate for a child to whom he can pass on his elite genes. Their last resort is surrogacy; a business transaction, plain and simple. But as they try to exert ever more control over Riki, their contract with her starts to slip through their fingers… Vibrating with the injustices of class and gender, tradition and power, Swallows is an acerbic, witty vision of contemporary Japan, and of a young woman's fight to preserve her dignity — at any cost. [Paperback]
”Natsuo Kirino's novels bring us into direct contact with human life. Her fearless pen forces us to confront the ugliness, intensity and depth of our own desires, to the point that we cannot look away. But just as those desires reach a fever-pitch, she restores our faith in humanity, in a way that only Kirino can. The relentless beauty of her stories leaves me breathless every time.” —Meiko Kawakami
”A timely and engrossing drama about desire, precarity, and the uses of a woman's body. Kirino's psychologically compelling and sharp-witted storytelling draws us into her characters' lives, leaving us to answer: do our bodies have a price and who gets to decide?” —Ruth Ozeki
”A masterful feat of storytelling as well as a biting critique of gender, patrimony and class. . . A writer in effortless command of her craft, Kirino brilliantly upends our expectations at every twist and turn. Just when you thought things could not get any more complicated, she deftly ups the ante. The resulting tension builds to a startling ending that both disturbs and delights.” —Julie Otsuka

The Story of the Stone: Tales, entreaties and incantations by James Kelman $35
James Kelman has made use of the short form all of his writing life, calling on the different traditions where such stories are central within the culture, beginning and ending in freedom, the freedom to create.This collection of nearly a hundred pieces of very short fiction spans five decades and reveals James Kelman's mastery of the form. As ever, Kelman insists on his characters telling their stories in their own voices, whether in working-class Glaswegian dialect or the dull menace of bureaucratic babble. Everyday tragedy and bleak humour colour these marvels of narrative efficiency, yet at their core they are tender and full of human truth. Kelman’s uncompromising literary approach and radical politics caused some controversy when he was awarded the 1994 Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late. [Paperback]
"The real reason Kelman, despite his stature and reputation, remains something of a literary outsider is not, I suspect, so much that great, radical Modernist writers aren't supposed to come from working-class Glasgow, as that great, radical Modernist writers are supposed to be dead. Dead, and wrapped up in a Penguin Classic: that's when it's safe to regret that their work was underappreciated or misunderstood (or how little they were paid) in their lifetimes. You can write what you like about Beckett or Kafka and know they're not going to come round and tell you you're talking nonsense, or confound your expectations with a new work. Kelman is still alive, still writing great books, climbing." —James Meek, London Review of Books
>>Your stories are your own.

Super-Frog Saves Tokyo by Haruki Murakami (translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin), illustrated by Suzanne Dean $38
Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing over six feet tall on its hind legs. A skinny little man no more than five foot three, Katagiri was overwhelmed by the frog's imposing bulk.  “Call me \’Frog,’\" said the frog in a clear, strong voice. Katagiri stood rooted in the doorway, unable to speak. 'Don't be afraid. I'm not here to hurt you. Just come and close the door. Please.' Briefcase in his right hand, grocery bag with fresh vegetables and canned salmon cradled in his left arm, Katagiri didn't dare move. “Please, Mr. Katagiri, hurry and close the door, and take off your shoes.” Fully illustrated and beautifully designed, this special edition of Murakami's celebrated short story sees the bewildered Katagiri find meaning in his humdrum life through joining forces with Frog in an effort to save Tokyo from an existential threat. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Honeyeater by Kathleen Jennings $38
Sub-tropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, as soon as he deals with his dead aunt's house. Then Grace arrives, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire — and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy. But peeling back the rumours and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbours and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be. [Paperback]
”Gorgeously written. I was so busy admiring the writing that I didn't notice how deep the water had gotten or what was growing underneath.” —T. Kingfisher
”Eerie and mesmeric, silted with a deep sense of foreboding, Honeyeater reads like a memory-old myth, like something dangerous and true.” —Cassandra Khaw
>>From under the houses.

Anima: A wild pastoral by Kapka Kassabova $28
Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe. She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the Pirin mountains in Bulgaria. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community. Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human-animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living — one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world. [Paperback]
”A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative nonfiction at its best.” —Guardian
”A haunting, beautiful book from what feels a darkly enchanted land. Kassabova is an extraordinary writer who slips into the skin of a place. Fiercely intelligent, scalpel-sharp, at once romantic and toughly pragmatic: Anima will live with me for a long time.” —Cal Flyn

In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in living with Marion Milner by Akshi Singh $40
The celebrated psychoanalyst Marion Milner lived for the entirety of the twentieth century. By the age of ninety-eight she had written nine books revealing how free time and creativity are vital for a fulfilled life. Akshi Singh was born ninety years after Milner, in Rajasthan, over four thousand miles away from where Milner lived and worked. At first glance, the worlds of these two women seem entirely separate. Yet when Singh found herself standing at a crossroads in her life and grieving personal loss, she realised the questions and preoccupations Milner was exploring were her own. In Defence of Leisure presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question — how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner's approach — from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea — she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire. [Paperback]
”This poetic, graceful and original book not only demonstrates the richness and relevance of Marion Milner's work today but also offers many insights into the choices we make - or fail to - in love, leisure and work. Singh helps us to understand how we inhabit our lives, and how we can start thinking about inhabiting them differently. An illuminating and thought-provoking book that will appeal to a very wide audience.” —Darian Leader
”In Defence of Leisure lilts beautifully between whispering diaries and the chant of a manifesto. Akshi Singh has crafted an exquisite, open-hearted celebration of desire, friendship and lives imaginatively lived. Yet she never shies from questions of risk, of where to put our anger, or of what we concede in exchange for love. Untangling security - so often pernicious and compromising - from care, Singh insists on a wide horizon, full of freedom, for everyone.” —Marianne Brooker
>>Wrapped in foil.
>>The joys of reading in bed.
>>X.
>>Books by Marion Milner.

A Woman’s Eye, Her Art: Reframing the narrative through art and life by Drusilla Modjeska $65
When a woman makes art, what does she see? When she picks up her brush and looks in the mirror? When she takes off her clothes and paints herself naked? Or when she raises her camera and turns it towards another woman, a model naked there in front of her? And how is she seen when she turns to face the men, the artists, her colleagues, her friends, her lovers? A Woman's Eye, Her Art looks back to the lives and art of European modernist women who recast the ways in which women's bodies could be seen — from the self-portraits of Paula Modersohn-Becker, to the Surrealist Claude Cahun who exposed the masquerades of femininity, to the radical nudes of photo-artists Lee Miller and Dora Maar. Alongside them in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century were many artist-women, their friends and colleagues, including Clara Westhoff-Rilke and Gabriele Münter, Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim. In this book, Drusilla Modjeska examines why these women still matter and connects their past to our present. This book is about the spirit it took for these artist-women to step out on that path, and the courage it took to stay there. It is the story of what they saw, and how they were seen as they crashed against the hypocrisies that are embedded deep in the structures of society. And it is about hard-fought freedoms as in their different ways they changed the landscape of the art world and reframed the narrative. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Not seeing the shadow.

The Nuclear Age: An epic race for arms, power, and survival by Serhii Plokhy $45
On 16 July 1945, the Nuclear Age began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the words quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer — “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”. While the threat of mutually assured destruction may have kept a lid on a simmering and tense geopolitical landscape, events like the Chernobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction, mistake, or miscommunication away. Now, as governments re-arm their nuclear arsenals, treaties designed to limit the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons fall away, and nuclear weapons come increasingly within reach of non-state actors, we are on the brink of a renaissance of the nuclear industry. In The Nuclear Age, Plokhy paints an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. From the first artificial splitting of the atom in 1917 and the race to create the first atomic bomb in World War II, through the fraught arms race of the Cold War, to the imperialism, neo-colonial motivation and wars being waged today, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is as pertinent as ever. As he examines the motivations of key players, Plokhy confronts the crucial question of our age — what can we learn from the first nuclear arms race that can help us to stop the new one? [Paperback]
”Few historians write with Serhii Plokhy's authority, clarity or global vision. The Nuclear Age is not only the definitive account of how nuclear power and peril have shaped the modern world, but a profound warning about the risks we still face. This is essential reading, and a marvellous book.” —Peter Frankopan
”Panoramic in scope and fastidious in detail. Plokhy's perfectly timed, compelling and essential book reminds us that the spectre of nuclear extinction is not a cold war nightmare but a permanent condition of modern life.” —Financial Times
>>Other books by Serhii Plokhy.

Feathers of Aotearoa: An illustrated journal by Niels Meyer-Westfeld $60
Meyer-Westfeld explores the feathers of Aotearoa’s native birds, from the long wing feathers of an albatross that enable it to soar endlessly over the oceans, to the tiny, insulating feathers of a penguin. Feathers are one of nature’s most remarkable evolutionary developments, an ingenious solution to the countless environmental challenges that birds face. This exquisitely illustrated book, that combines artwork with compelling insights, will reveal a largely unknown aspect of the avian world, and will appeal to anyone with an interest in our unique bird life. [Large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!