New releases 28.4.23
Standing Heavy by GauZ’ (translated by Frank Wynne) $38
”Initially a little intrigued, all babies eventually return the security guard's smile. The security guard adores babies. Perhaps because babies do not shoplift. Babies adore the security guard. Perhaps because he does not drag babies to the sales.”
The 1960s — Ferdinand arrives in Paris from Côte d'Ivoire, ready to take on the world and become a big somebody. The 1990s — It is the Golden Age of immigration, and Ossiri and Kassoum navigate a Paris on the brink of momentous change. The 2010s — In a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, the all-seeing eyes of a security guard observes the habits of those who come to worship at this church to consumerism. Amidst the political bickering of the inhabitants of the Residence for Students from Côte d'Ivoire and the ever-changing landscape of French immigration policy, Ferdinand, Ossiri and Kassoum, two generations of Ivoirians, attempt to make their way as undocumented workers, taking shifts as security at a flour mill. Sharply satirical, political and poignant, Standing Heavy is a searingly witty deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption, an unprecedented and unforgettable account of everything that passes under a security guard's gaze. There are fresh ideas and observations of the human condition (so to call it) on every page of this remarkable book, expressed with a concision and humour that may well change the way you think.
Short-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
”A sharp and satirical take on the legacies of French colonial history and life in Paris today. Told in a fast-paced, and fluently translated, style of shifting perspectives, Standing Heavy carries us through the decades.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>A succession of fictions.
>>Read an extract.
>>The most powerful way of fostering empathy.
May the Tigris Grieve for You by Emilienne Malfatto (translated by Lorna Fox Scott) $34
Rural Iraq, during the war against the Islamic State. A pregnancy out of wedlock. The young woman knows her fate is sealed. In crystalline prose May the Tigris Grieve for You enters the minds of all protagonists, before and after death; fragments of the legend of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian hero who carries along the memory of the country and its people, punctuate the family members' short monologues, spaced with the mythical voice of the Tigris River, who has seen it all. Inspired by her experience of Iraq's complex reality and brutal wars, Malfatto delivers an uncompromising yet compassionate insight into a rigid society ruled by fathers and sons, a world in which life matters less than honour.
”A prose poem of devastating power, conveyed in simple devastating prose. It’s about war and loss, conformity and obligation, but most importantly about misogyny, femicide, power, vulnerability, and the injustice of it all. A poignant and thought-provoking novella, that will take you an hour to read, but the inequity at its heart will stay with you for a very, very long time.” —Paul Burke
>>Read the first chapter.
Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L. Strayer) $35
For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux (the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate) has explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature. Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual's role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as a "great human meeting place, a spectacle," a space where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society. With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.
"Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by Alison Strayer. Ernaux's diary is a provocation: to accept these life scenes as worthy of our time and attention." —Kate Briggs, Washington Post
"The subject at the heart of Look at the Lights, My Love is what we reveal of ourselves in the strange sterility of the store. Ernaux's singular style conveys both the soullessness and the dreamlike charm of the place." —Tess Little, Literary Review
>>Alone together.
>>”I don’t see writing as liberation.”
>>Both comfort and alienation.
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett $32
A deceptively slender volume, Pond captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator's persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. New edition.
”Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don't be fooled by Pond’s small size. It contains multitudes.” —Jenny Offill
”Claire-Louise Bennett is a major writer to be discovered and treasured.” —Deborah Levy
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>The mind in solitude.
>>Modes of solitude.
Pathogenesis: How germs made history by Jonathan Kennedy $75
Humans did not make history — we were its host. This humbling and revelatory book shows how infectious disease has shaped humanity at every stage, from the first success of Homo sapiens over the equally intelligent Neanderthals to the fall of Rome, and the rise of Islam. How did the Black Death lead to the birth of capitalism? And how did the Industrial Revolution lead to the birth of the welfare state? Infectious diseases are not just something that happens to us, but a part of who we are. The only reason humans don't lay eggs is that a virus long ago inserted itself into our DNA. In fact, 8% of the human genome was put there by viruses. We have been thinking about the survival of the fittest all wrong- human evolution is not simply about our strength and intelligence, but about what viruses can and can't use for their benefit.
”Pathogenesis doesn't only cover thousands of years of history - it seeks radically to alter the way the reader views many of the (often very well-known) events it describes.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
>>A golden age for microbes.
The Long Form by Kate Briggs $38
It’s early morning and there’s a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she’ll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.
”The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.” —Preti Taneja
”Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.” —Kathryn Scanlan
”Briggs is a fantastic writer: that is clear by the end of this eminently strange novel. Briggs has written a work that will constantly reward a re-reading, with a voice that combines a deep complexity with moments of piercing clarity. It is an intelligent and well-read book: but it is also emphatically convincing and moving.” —Patrick Maxwell, The Big Issue
Resilience: A story of persecution, escape, survival, and triumph by Inge Woolf $35
Resilience is a Holocaust story and a New Zealand story. Born to a prosperous Jewish family, Inge Woolf witnessed the Nazis marching into Vienna in March 1938. To escape certain death, the family audaciously boarded a train to the heart of Nazi Germany – Berlin – and from there caught a plane to England, pretending they were going on holiday. Hiding their Jewish identity until after World War II, Inge and her family began a new life as impoverished refugees. A move to New Zealand signalled new beginnings. Inge met the love of her life, Ronald Woolf, and together they created the country's pre-eminent photographic studio. They settled in Wellington, raising two children when tragedy struck again with Ron killed at age 57 in a helicopter crash in 1987. Resilience is ultimately the story of a woman who harnessed her past and used it to encourage a more cohesive, inclusive society. In her later years, Inge was pivotal in establishing the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand and was its founding director. She educated thousands on the Holocaust and the dangers of antisemitism, racism and prejudice, often observing that hate starts small. She was often called on by the media to comment about antisemitism and would speak freely about the need to remember the lessons learned from the Nazi genocide.
>>Woolf’s daughter speaks about the book.
Mala’s Cat by Mala Kacenberg $26
Alone in a forest with only a cat for company, this is the true story of a little girl's remarkable survival in the shadow of the Holocaust. Growing up in the Polish village of Tarnogrod on the fringes of a deep pine forest has given twelve-year-old Mala Szorer the happiest childhood she could have hoped for. But, as the German invasion begins, her beloved village becomes a ghetto and her family and friends reduced to starvation, she takes matters into her own hands, bravely removes her yellow star and sneaks out to the surrounding villages to barter for food. It is on her way back that she sees her loved ones rounded up for deportation, and receives a smuggled letter from her sister warning her to stay away. With only her cat, Malach, and the strength of the stories taught by her family, she walks away from her village and everything she holds dear into the dangerous unknown. Malach becomes her family, her protector, her only respite from painful loneliness, and a reminder to stay hopeful even when faced with unfathomable darkness.
”Fresh, unsentimental and utterly unpredictable, this memoir, rescued from obscurity by the efforts of Mala Kacenberg's five children, should be read and cherished as a new, vital document of a history that must never be allowed to vanish.” —The New York Times
>>Mounting horrors.
Questions I am Asked about the holocaust (young readers’ edition) by Hédi Fried (translated by Alice E. Olsson) $30
Hedi Fried was nineteen when the Nazis arrested her family and transported them to Auschwitz. While there, apart from enduring the daily horrors at the concentration camp, she and her sister were forced into hard labour before being released at the end of the war. After settling in Sweden, Hedi devoted her life to educating young people about the Holocaust. In her 90s, she decided to take the most common questions (such as: "Why did you not fight back?"; "What helped you to survive?"; "Are you able to forgive?"), and her answers, and turn them into a book so that children all over the world could understand what had happened. This is an excellent illustrated edition for young readers.
>>Look inside.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad $38
After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn't been back since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. Once at Haneen's, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertude's lines in classical Arabic and spending more time in Ramallah than in Haifa with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, each want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer it becomes clear just how many invasive and violent obstacles stand before a troupe of Palestinian actors. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
”Outstanding. Aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally and culturally satisfying. It is astonishing but true that Isabella Hammad is incapable of striking a false note. She immerses her heroine in volatile territory with the accuracy, compassion and coolness of a surgical knife sliding into a diseased body. The result is a stunning beauty — an eye-opening, uplifting novel that grants its vulnerable cast and their endeavors a rare and graceful dignity.” —Leila Aboulela
Aftermath: Colonialism, violence and memory in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific edited by Angela Wanhalla, Lyndall Ryan and Camille Nurka $50
”What we choose to remember and what we choose to forget about the violent past tell us something about the society we live in now. Whether we like it or not, we’re part of each other’s story. So how do we talk about the past?“ —Joanna Kidman and Vincent O’Malley
Aftermaths explores the life-changing intergenerational effects of colonial violence in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. The settings of these accessible, illustrated short essays range from Ōrākau pā in the Waikato to the Kimberleys in northwest Australia, from orphanages in Fiji to the ancestral lands of the Wiyot Tribe in Northern California. Contributors include: Tony Ballantyne, Rachel Burgess, Penelope Edmonds, Anaru Eketone, Stephanie Gilbert, Victoria Haskins, Anna Johnston, Joanna Kidman, Shino Konishi, Jane Lydon, Caitlin Lynch, Keri Mills, Kirstine Moffat, Grace Moore, Amanda Nettelbeck, Erica Newman, Camille Nurka, Patricia O’Brien, Vincent O’Malley, Lachy Paterson, Lyndall Ryan, Sian Smith, Kate Stevens and Angela Wanhalla.
“Story by story, this collection powerfully reveals the living legacy of historical events, showing how they have been remembered (and misremembered) within families and communities into the present day.
'It is a rare publication that can cross the difficult divide between academic history and accessible reading. Every chapter is well-written and evocative. Aftermaths will open eyes. Aftermaths makes a powerful case for ending our historical ignorance. It forces readers to confront the violence embedded in our collective colonial past and it reveals the many reverberations of that violence in our present. It also asks us to unbury the skeletons in our own closets and fairly carry our share of this ‘emotional freight’ and trauma. It asks us to be brave and unchain our dragons.” —Maartje Abbenhuis, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
Laughing in the Dark by Barbara Else $40
By the time Barbara Else was in her forties, she was married to a globally recognised academic physician, had two beautiful teenage daughters and a house in Karori. Gradually she realised her husband didn't want her to have a career of her own or do anything outside his orbit. He refused to acknowledge there was a problem. In the end, the man who became her second husband offered a way out. It was a huge risk. But she fled, with a laundry basket of oddments, two suitcases, and her little Mac Plus and dot matrix printer. The result was best-selling books and literary honours. With her wit and humour, Barbara describes her transformation from a shy but stubborn child into a fulfilled and successful adult.
”I laughed and laughed, and I cried and cried. It's got everything in it except a murder.” —Lesley Graham, soprano (and totally unbiased sister)
>>It’s been quite a ride.
Abigail and the Making of the Moon by Matthew Cunningham and Sarah Wilkins $21
One clear day, Abigail thinks of a question and knows that she won't be able to do anything else if she doesn't have an answer to it. "Daddy," she asked, "where did the Moon come from?""From the Earth, Abigail," replied Daddy. "The Moon was once a part of the Earth.""It was?" Abigail asked. "But how did it get in the sky? And how does it stay in the sky? And why do we only ever see one side of the Moon?" What follows is an evocatively simple story within a story explaining how the newborn Earth collided with another planet, and how gravity acts like invisible hands reaching out and keeping the Moon spinning around the Earth, the Earth spinning around the Sun, and the Sun spinning around the galaxy. And of course by dinner time, Abigail has thought of a new big question...