NEW RELEASES (29.9.26)
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Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel $38
2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party. Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong. Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality — and may hold the key to a very different world. Exit Party is an electrifying novel about freedom and surveillance, art and survival, love and loss in a broken world. From the author of Station Eleven. [Paperback]
”Ambitious and captivating, the novel will rightly entrance new readers while gripping Mandel's existing ones. Exit Party feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author's early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven.” —The New York Times
”What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel's imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights. Extraordinary.” —The Guardian
>>Disagreeing on basic reality.
>>Don’t blame Emily St. John Mandel.
>>Seeking joy at the end of the world.
The Star Path by Witi Ihimaera Smiler $35
A young whale searches for the whale rider's heir and a teenager takes an epic voyage to Antarctica with a fleet of waka hourua to claim his lost inheritance, in this breathtaking return to the world of The Whale Rider, over thirty years on. Sixteen-year-old Teva has grown up between worlds. Raised in France, he knows almost nothing of his father's Polynesian heritage — only that a family rift has kept them apart. But when his astonishing talent is discovered by a circus master, Teva's journey leads him across the Pacific and towards a destiny older than memory. Deep within Antarctica's treacherous ice mazes, the royal tribe of Mysticeti whales fears their ancient leader has brought them there to die. Decades earlier, he stranded them on the east coast of Aotearoa. As winter closes in, they must find the whale rider's heir, the only one who can lead their chief back to warmer waters. But nobody knows who that is, let alone where they can be found. Sweeping from France to French Polynesia, Aotearoa and Antarctica, myth and reality, past and present, meet in an unforgettable story of identity, belonging and hope. [Paperback]
>>Get this edition of The Whale Rider.
The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje (translated from Dutch by David McKay) $48
Inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë, this 700-page book — acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century — pulls readers into a narrative that redefines time itself. In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May's only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it's labelled as 'ghastly' and 'immoral'. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own. In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May — both before and after her death — unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister's letters; her biographers' words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later. In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontës themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death. [Paperback]
"The reader advances across Mr. McKay's superb translation as though compelled by a fierce highland wind. In the book's telling, the Drayden sisters' imaginative visions are so powerful that they reshape the way people experience reality. Readers, too, will finish this vast, teeming novel with a sense of a world transformed." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"A sprawling meditation on death, sisterhood, and the mysteries that refuse to be buried. Daanje boldly grapples with unsettling questions, challenging our conception of time and the ways it governs our experience of death and grief. The Song of the Stork and Dromedary stands as another example of Daanje's brilliant storytelling, cementing her status as a writer to watch for years to come." —Chicago Review of Books
>>A gothic puzzle across time.
>>The translator’s passage.
This Dark Night: The life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz $50
Emily Jane Bronte was 27 when she started writing the wayward novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire. Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Lutz reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë's days, bringing us closer to the great and fierce writers, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art. This book has much to reveal to readers of Wuthering Heights, as we accompany Emily Brontë around the wild moorlands she loved so much. Also threaded through with the contemporary politics and events of the era (from the early labour movements of the Chartists and reformists, to the slave uprisings in the colonies), and authors and locals that Emily Brontë read about or knew (from proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the masculine lesbian Anne Lister). Featuring illuminating readings of her poems, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily Brontë's irrepressible spirit and wild imagination. [Hardback]
”Emerald Fennell 's hallucinatory adaptation of Wuthering Heights invited us to consider Emily Bronte in one light; Lutz's painstaking account shows her in quite another. Far from the eccentric, isolated genius , Lutz's Bronte is grounded in her material reality, from everyday household tasks to illness and grief.” —Guardian
”It says much for Lutz's skills as a writer that she succeeds in creating such a seamless and compelling narrative out of her materials. Her insight and sensitivity as a critic, as well her deep knowledge of the sources, allow her to open up the inner life of her famously reclusive subject. The result is a convincing portrait and an impressive achievement.” —Lucasta Miller, The Spectator
Hometown by Shaun Tan $40
You need to know who I am. What I think and how I feel. Then you'll know why I did what I did. Imagine living in a perfect world. You have a loving family, a beautiful home and awesome friends. Everything is just as it should be. Until one day, when a stranger arrives. A stranger who looks just like you. A stranger with a troubling message... From the creator of The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia comes a visually stunning, moving and humorous meditation on all the things that make us who we are and how we choose to live. [Hardback]
'Loved it!! Chockfull of magic!!' —Guillermo Del Toro
'I can't overstate how much Shaun's work has meant for me and my family over the years. And now, his latest is a passionate, clever and inspiring tale about how we choose which family to love. I am so excited to share this one with mine.' —Darren Aronofsky
'Where The Arrival was about leaving home for the strange but hopefully welcoming new world, Hometown is about what makes us what we are—family, friends, environment. A joyful, surprising, marvellous book.' —Kelly Link
'Here is a cornucopia of a world to set beside the densely realised imaginings of Topor or Miyazaki - a many-splendored thing.' —Dave McKean
>>Look inside!
>>Twenty years in the making.
>>Just an ordinary day.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translate from Danish by Martin Aitken) $28
In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who comes to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they perform unchristian acts and can steal people's happiness, cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake. Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe. Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources, such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires. [Now in paperback]
”Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There's nobody else doing quite what she does.” —Samantha Harvey
”I gulped The Wax Child down and dreamed wild dreams about it. Just brilliant.” —Max Porter
”An incantation that explores womanhood, motherhood and bodily autonomy. Martin Aitken's mesmerising, exquisitely precise translation is, literally, breathtaking. To be read in one sitting, on a dark winter's night.” —The Irish Times
>>Holding the skin girdle.
>>Witch trials and wax narrators.
>>Get the hardback!
>>Other books by Olga Ravn.
This Little World: A new history of Tudor and Stuart England by Nandini Das $65
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England Shakespeare's 'scepter'd isle', proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. But beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, lies a more complex and connected reality. England at this time was far from insular. Travelling in and out of the country were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, African innkeepers and Native American envoys. There were people like the Flemish artist Levina Teerlinc, probably the only painter to be employed by four English monarchs. There was William Adams, a Kentish navigator who became Japan's first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the colony in Virginia, who battled in the courts for herself and her son. Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life, yet alive to the sweep of history, This Little World offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England's past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making on the cusp of empire told through the traces of those often written out of it. In reframing England's story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental ideas — about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging. [Hardback]
”Contains a wonderful gallery of precisely drawn yet constantly surprising Tudor and Stuart portraits, like an album of perfect Hilliard miniatures that dazzle us with their cosmopolitan attitudes and globalised lives. Taking us from Italian renaissance scholars in Oxford to English Jesuits in Goa via a Kentish samurai in 17th-century Edo, this is a perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic and provincial terms.” —William Dalrymple, Guardian
”Look into the early modern period with Das as your guide and you will find that strangers, as they were called, were everywhere. Das is so immersed in the material that her imagination can take flight. It is unusual for historians to write with contemporary issues so openly at the forefront of their thinking, but Das is no ordinary historian. This Little World is at once an engaging and entirely fresh look at a period that is a foundational part of our national identity and an impassioned examination of our ideas about inclusion and exclusion, belonging and non-belonging, hope and fear. It works because it is rooted in exciting scholarship and lifted by wonderful writing, pulsing with "the restless energy of the in-between space." —Lucy Moore, Spectator
Reason, Carnival and Honour: An anthropology of free speech by Matei Candea $50
What does ‘free speech’ really mean? How does our understanding of it differ around the world? Why does it divide us — and how can we find common ground? What free speech really means is hotly contested. Is it increasingly under attack in our democracies, or is it being weaponised by the powerful? These debates don't just happen in the news: they divide families, strain relationships. This is because, anthropologist Matei Candea shows, arguments about free speech are not just about abstract principles: they question what it means to be a good person, to have empathy and courage. They involve fears for the future and longings for the past — and they demand that you pick a side, right now! In order to move away from the simple binaries of polarised debate, Candea shows us that we need to start counting to three. Deploying the power of thinking anthropologically, Reason, Carnival and Honour outlines three visions of free speech — Reason, or civil rational debate; Carnival, or the right to be outrageous; and Honour, the duty to stand by one's word. Sometimes supporting each other and sometimes at odds, they entail very different understandings of what language is and does, of what it means to be free. Building on years of research and an exploration of anthropological literature from around the globe — from tales of French cartoonists to Egyptian Bedouin women, Finnish talk-show hosts to Tibetan Buddhist monks — Reason, Carnival and Honour reveals a richer landscape of differences, to help us find new alliances and even answers to the question of what it is we're really arguing about. [Hardback]
”A book like no other on free speech, Candea deftly sidesteps polarised debates, bringing an anthropologist's eye to what people really mean and, in doing so, offers fresh, illuminating ways to understand ourselves and one another.” —Alpa Shah
Hīkoi: A Māori alphabet book for little (and not-so-little) activists [and] Toitū by Pania Tahau-Hodegs and Josie Selkirk $29 each
Inspired by the hīkoi in response to the Treaty Principles Bill, this story draws on the words of resilience and resistance that have inspired generations of Māori in the determination for our land, language and right to live as Māori and shape our own destiny. In the story, a koro and his moko join the hīkoi to parliament and remember past actions and activists who marched for justice. In the march, there are many figures from many communities and many walks of life, but they all walk in the same direction, unified in a vision of the future in which people thrive. The words of the story inspire us to be resilient and remind us that we are not alone, and that in coming together we are powerful. Hīkoi introduces Māori words, with the text in English; Toitū is entirely in te reo Māori. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!
The Issa Valley by Czesław Miłosz (translated from Polish by Louis Iribarne) $25
'Thomas was born in the village of Gine at that time of year when a ripe apple thumps to the ground during an afternoon lull.' So a boy's life begins in a winding river valley on the Polish-Russian border where time is measured by seasonal rhythms and ancient songs. For Thomas, the ghosts in the forest are as real as the magical water-snakes that live in the Issa; in the village he is entranced by the women with their cinched waists and the men in their long boots. But when he is shown a map, he discovers a kingdom all his own and starts to dream of leaving the valley behind. [Paperback]
”A lyrical account of a rural boyhood, dominated by family, nature and village life. One is constantly aware of being in the hands of a master — of a talent that is original, unhurried, almost serene. He is a remarkable writer.” —Larry McMurty
”An idyll of immense charm and poetic depth. It takes a masterpiece to reveal the sheer unreality of our modern creative modes and poses, and Milosz's novel is such a masterpiece.” —John Bayley, The New York Review of Books
Capitalism and Its Critics: A battle of ideas in the modern world by John Cassidy $40
At a time when we are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability and morality of the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence. John Cassidy adopts a new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system's critics. From eighteenth-century weavers who rebelled against early factory automation to Eric Williams's paradigm-changing work on slavery and capitalism, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, this absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It looks at familiar figures - Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi - from a fresh perspective, but also focuses on many less familiar, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labour union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; and J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics. Blending biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time. [Paperback]