NEW RELEASES (29.11.24)
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can dispatch your books by overnight courier — or have them ready to collect from our door at 15 Church Street, Whakatū.
The Gavin Bishop Treasury: Ten favourite fairy stories and original tales by Gavin Bishop $45
Two hundred pages of fabulous storytelling and stunning artwork. This beautiful gift collection will entrance families of all ages and sizes and is the ideal inducement to snuggle up and read together. The 10 gorgeous stories included in this treasury are: ‘Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant’; ‘Bidibidi’; ‘Mr Fox’; ‘Chicken Licken’; ‘A Apple Pie’; ‘The Three Little Pigs’; ‘Little Rabbit and the Sea’; ‘Stay Awake, Bear!’; ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’; and ‘Rats!’ — four of Bishop’s delightful original tales, featuring such characters as drab Mrs McGinty, who becomes a sensation when a fast-growing plant takes off in her yard, along with a rainbow-chasing sheep, a little rabbit who longs to visit the sea, and a bear who decides he can go without his winter sleep. There are also six humour-filled fairy tale retellings, including crafty Mr Fox with an empty food sack to fill, the gloriously illustrated ‘Three Little Pigs’, and ‘Rats!’, in which Mrs Polly Piper, vexed by an infestation of cheeky rodents, accepts help from the dashing, accordion-playing Rapscallion Claw. This is an exciting publication, as most of these favourites have been out of print and very hard to find. [Hardback]
Giant by Mollie Ray $45
One morning, a teenage boy wakes to find that he has grown to the size of a giant… Inspired by the journey of the author's younger brother, this wordless wonder of a book follows the experience of a family as one of their own faces a life-threatening illness. As his health declines, can the family remain resilient on his long journey through treatment? Mollie Ray's debut graphic novel is a resonant story of empathy, healing and hope. [Hardback]
”Wonderful, moving, original book. It teaches us a new visual language for love, for worry and for family.” —Robert Macfarlane
”Mollie Ray's exquisitely rendered drawings guide us tenderly through this tale of family, courage, fear and joy.” —Katie Green
French Cooking for One by Michèle Roberts $45
”Part of the beauty of the art of cooking is that it involves transience, making something delightful that then vanishes, and that in turn involves cherishing the time we spend on perfecting a dish. Cooking yourself something delicious is rewarding, satisfying, cheering. It makes us feel capable, creative, able to take care of ourselves. Cooking for yourself makes you feel spoiled and cherished.” - Michèle Roberts
A unique work of literary and culinary joie de vivre, part food memoir, part recipe book, French Cooking for One is Michèle Roberts' first cookbook, and a personal and quirky take on Édouard de Pomiane's ten-minute cooking classic. Once a food writer for the New Statesman, Roberts was born in 1949 and raised in a bilingual French-English household, learning to cook from her French grandparents in Normandy. Her love of food and cookery has always shone through in her novels and short stories. French cuisine, classic though it is, still holds delicious surprises. From quick bites for busy days to sumptuous main courses for those who enjoy spending more time in the kitchen, the focus throughout this book is on dishes that are simple and fun to prepare, and results that are mouthwatering to contemplate and, of course, to eat. With over 160 delicious recipes, the majority of which are vegetarian, combined with piquant storytelling and feminist wit, French Cooking for One is a working cook's book with French flair, bursting with life and illustrated with the author's original ink drawings, full of charm and humour. More than a handbook of classic French dishes, French Cooking for One also bears testimony to a singular literary life. Vignettes of Roberts' childhood in Normandy and of her years living in Pays de la Loire are peppered with anecdotes about intellectual and artistic luminaries: an omelette prepared by Gertrude Stein's cook for Picasso; a simple pasta dish calling to mind the French philosopher Julia Kristeva and the Scottish poet Alison Fell's images of female orgasm; and Emma Bovary's extraordinary wedding cake, among others. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Michèle Roberts’s enchanting book French Cooking for One proves la cuisine française can be enjoyed alone, when there is nothing to interrupt the joy of preparing good ingredients and turning them into enticing dishes. Her anecdotes and notes of wisdom that accompany the recipes make her the perfect companion in the kitchen.” —Carolyn Boyd
Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro (translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle) $40
Fifteen years after killing her husband's lover, Inés is fresh out of prison and trying to put together a new life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they've started a business — FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies — dedicated to pest control and private investigation, by women, for women. But Señora Bonar, one of their clients, wants Inés to do more than kill bugs — she wants her expertise, and her criminal past, to help her kill her husband's lover, too. Crimes against women versus crimes by women; culpability, fallibility, and our responsibilities to each other — this is Piñeiro at her wry, earthy best, alive to all the ways we shape ourselves to be understandable, to be understood, by family and love and other hostile forces. Includes an intermittent chorus of feminist voices: Rebecca Solnit, Rita Segato, Judith Butler, Vivian Gornick, Marguerite Duras! From the author of Elena Knows. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Time of the Flies is orchestral: a page turner that is also a crime novel, a thriller, a meditation on feminism, our choices, our lack of choices. As Piñeiro unpacks her Pandora’s box of stories, voices, preoccupations, characters, you wonder, how on earth will she weave them together? Not that you care — her ability to be everybody and everything, including flies, carries you along. An absorbing read, for sure, and oh what a satisfying pleasure to see all the pieces come together — painful satisfaction, because then, you know, the novel will soon be over." —Julia Alvarez
Taboon: Sweet and savoury delights from the Lebanese bakery by Hisham Assaad $60
"There is bread and salt between us." This phrase, symbolizing the act of breaking bread together, welcome, gratitude, friendship, and trust, epitomizes the spirit of the baking culture of the Middle East. And the oven is the beating heart of every community. This beautifully photographed cookbook explores the vibrant baking culture of Lebanon. Perfectly poised between the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Lebanese food draws influences from myriad cultures and offers a delicious collection of baking recipes to tempt the home baker seeking new taste adventures. Lebanon is a land of culinary richness and a vibrant spirit, and this book tells the story of its baking cuisine: exploring all its regional influences and traditions. Here you will find over 80 recipes for classic home-style breads, traditional family favorites that have been handed down through generations, alongside pastry-shop delicacies, classic cakes, and street-food treats. [Hardback]
Palo Alto: A history of California, Capitalism, and the world by Malcolm Harris $30
The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an extraordinary story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative. Palo Alto's weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, racial genetics, and ‘broken windows’ theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. The book ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.[New paperback edition]
Quarterlife by Devika Rege $38
The Bharat Party has come to power after an intensely divisive election. Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured home to Mumbai by their promise of ' better days '. With him is Amanda, eager to escape her New England town by volunteering in a Muslim-majority slum. Inspired by them, Naren's charismatic brother Rohit sets out to explore his ancestral heritage in the countryside, where he falls in with the very young men who drive the Hindu nationalist machine. As they each come to grips with the new India, their journeys coalesce into a riveting milieu characterised by brutal debates and desires as fraught as they are compulsive. The result is an ever-widening chorus that feeds into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets — and the simmering unrest erupts. [Paperback]
”What begins as a novel of ideas becomes the secret history of a nation. A superb read, both moving and inspiring.” —Jeet Thayil
Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud by Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt $48
In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realisation or failure of second chances — outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone. The authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter's Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, "it is the mending that matters." [Hardback]
"A fearless book. Greenblatt and Phillips speak to each other, and to us, with unflinching candor, wisdom, and tenderness about the possibility of renewing or remaking our lives. Second Chances stages a grand reckoning with fate and free will, fantasy and reality, and, above all, with the excitement and the terror of suddenly finding ourselves in a strange story, in a brave new world." —Merve Emre
Walking Practice by Dolki Min (translated from Korean by Victoria Caudle) $35
After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien find themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled by Earth's gravity. To survive, they will need to practice walking. And what better way than to hunt for food As they discover, humans are delicious. Intelligent, clever, and adaptable, the alien shifts their gender, appearance, and conduct to suit a prey's sexual preference, then attacks at the pivotal moment of their encounter. They use a variety of hunting tools, including a popular dating app, to target the juiciest prey, and carry a backpack filled with torturous instruments and cleaning equipment. But the alien's existence begins to unravel one night when they fail to kill their latest meal. Thrust into an ill-fated chase across the city, the alien is confronted with the psychological and physical tolls their experience on Earth has taken. Questioning what they must do to sustain their own survival, they begin to understand why humans also fight to live. But their hunger is insatiable, and the alien once again targets a new prey, not knowing what awaits. Dolki Min's haunting debut novel is part psychological thriller, part searing critique of the social structures that marginalize those who are different — the disabled, queer, and nonconformist. Walking Practice uncovers humanity in who we consider to be alien, and illuminates how alienation can shape the human experience. [Paperback; 21 line drawings throughout]
"Walking Practice explores the burden of gender expectations, the struggle of having a flesh prison body, having to feed yourself and wanting to be loved, and even the awkwardness of dealing with other people on the subway. But what really makes this story sing is the uniqueness of the narrator's voice — both compelling and witty. It is moving and funny, critical and crass. This one is for anyone who is made to feel like an alien in their own body." —Tor
Myths of Geography: Eight ways we get the world wrong by Paul Richardson $40
Our maps may no longer be stalked by dragons and monsters, but our perceptions of the world are still shaped by geographic myths. Myths like Europe being the centre of the world. Or that border walls are the solution to migration. Or that Russia is predestined to threaten its neighbours. Richardson challenges recent popular accounts of geographical determinism and shows that how the world is represented often isn't how it really is — that the map is not the territory. Along the way we visit some remarkable places: Iceland's Thingvellir National Park, where you can swim between two continents, and Bir Tawil in North Africa, one of the world's only territories not claimed by any country. We follow the first train that ran across Eurasia between Yiwu in east China and Barking in east London, and scale the US-Mexico border wall to find out why such fortifications don't work. [Paperback]
”As continents, borders, nations, economic growth and sovereignty become the buzzwords of today's global conflicts, Paul Richardson's Myths of Geography skewers each one with elegant precision. His book places political geography at the heart of how we understand the challenges of the twenty-first century. A bracing and important book.” —Jerry Brotton
Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (translated from Arabic by Robin Moger) $45
Cairo, 1963: Enayat al-Zayyat's suicide becomes a byword for talent tragically cut down, even as Love and Silence, her only novel, languishes unpublished. Four years after al-Zayyat's death, the novel will be brought out, adapted for film and radio, praised, and then, cursorily, forgotten. For the next three decades it's as if al-Zayyat never existed. Yet when poet Iman Mersal stumbles across Love and Silence in the nineties, she is immediately hooked. Who was Enayat? Did the thought of her novel's rejection really lead to her suicide? Where did this startling voice come from? And why did Love and Silence disappear from literary history? To answer these questions, Mersal traces Enayat's life, interviews family members and friends, reconstructs the afterlife of Enayat in the media, and tracks down the flats, schools, archaeological institutes, and sanatoriums among which Enayat divided her days. Touching on everything from dubious antidepressants to domestic abuse and divorce law, from rubbish-strewn squats in the City of the Dead to the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema, this wide-ranging, unclassifiable masterpiece gives us a remarkable portrait of a woman artist striving to live on her own terms. [Paperback]
”A brooding, atmospheric read charged with a singular magical beauty. Iman Mersal conjures up the zeitgeist of artistic Cairo after the July revolution and reveals a merciless and inflexible world behind the genteel, cultivated image.” —Leila Aboulela
Black Village by Lutz Bassmann [Antoine Volodine] (translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman) $38
Tassili, Goodmann, and Myriam. Two men and a woman, dressed in rags — former poets, and former members of a dystopian military service — walk the bardo, the dark afterlife between death and rebirth. The road is monotonous and seemingly endless. To pass the time, they decide to tell each other stories: bizarre anecdotes set in a post-apocalyptic world, replete with mutant creatures, Buddhist monks, and ruthless killers. The result is a mysterious, dreamlike series of events, trapped outside of time as we know it, where all the rules of narrative are upended and remade. [Paperback]
"With Black Village, Lutz Bassmann, a heteronym of Antoine Volodine, pens a collection of rare intensity, carried by writing of staggering power. By breaking the codes of narrative, by upsetting genres, he offers, within the disaster that this book tells, a literature that reinvents and affirms the infinite potential of language." —Art Press
Land Is All That Matters: The struggle that shaped Irish history by Myles Dungan $39
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe everyone lived 'off the land' in one way or another. In Ireland, however, almost everyone lived 'on the land' as well. Agriculture was the only economic resource for the vast majority of the population outside the north-east of the country. Land was vital. But most of it was owned by a class of Protestant, English, and often aristocratic landlords. The dream of having more control over their farms, even of owning them, drove many of the most explosive conflicts in Irish history. Rebellions against British rule were rare, but savage outbreaks of murder related to resentments over land ownership, and draconian state repression, were a regular feature of Irish rural life. The struggle for the land was also crucial in driving support for Irish nationalist demands for Home Rule and independence. Dungan examines two hundred years of agrarian conflict from the ruinous famine of 1741 to the eve of World War Two. It explores the pivotal moments that shaped Irish history: the rise of 'moonlighting', the infamous Whiteboys and Rightboys, the insurrection of Captain Rock, the Tithe War of 1831-36, the Great Famine of 1845 that devastated the country and drastically reduced the Irish population, and the Land War of 1878-1909, which ended by transferring almost all the landlords' holdings to their tenants. These events take place against the backdrop of prevailing British rule and stark class and wealth inequality. Land Is All that Matters tells the story of the agrarian revolution that fundamentally shaped modern Ireland. [Paperback]
Unreel: A life in review by Diana Wichtel $40
Born to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and a 1950s Kiwi tradwife too busy to police her viewing, Diana Wichtel cut her teeth on the Golden Age of television. But in the 1960s, things fell apart. Diana's fractured family left Canada and blew in to New Zealand, just missing the Beatles, and minus a father. Diana watched television being born again half a world away, and twenty years later walked into the smoky, clacking offices of the Listener where she became the country's foremost television critic — loved and loathed, with the hate mail in seething capital letters to prove it. Meanwhile, television's sometimes-pale imitation — real life — unreeled. This is a sharply funny, wise and profound memoir of growing up and becoming a writer, of parents and children, early marriage and divorce, finding love again — and of the box we gathered around in our living rooms that changed the world.
Other Rivers: A Chinese education by Peter Hessler $40
An account of two generations of students in China's heartland, chronicling a country in the midst of tumultuous change through the prism of its education system. More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties - members of China's "Reform generation" - and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler's students were the first of their families to enrol in higher education, sons and daughters of subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student - an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler's new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China's boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme 'meritocracy' at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him a first-hand view of raising a child in China.In Peter Hessler's hands, China's education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what's happened to the country, where it's going, and what we can learn from it. [Paperback]
Island (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Julian Hanna $23
Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago "a little world within itself," unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path - strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and traveling to islands as far afield as Madeira and Cape Verde, Orkney and Svalbard, the Aran Islands and the Gulf Islands, Hong Kong and Manhattan. Islands have long been viewed as both paradise and prison - we project onto them our deepest desires for freedom and escape, but also our greatest fears of forced isolation. This book asks: what can islands teach us about living sustainably, being alone or coexisting with others, coping with uncertainty, and making do? [Paperback]
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson $26
a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles's return. Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it's like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem — moving, disturbing and delightful.
”This book is amazing — I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing.” —Alice Munro
”Anne Carson has created, from fragments of the Greek poet Stesichoros, a profound love story told as forty-seven compulsively readable long-lined poems of intense cinematic detail.” —Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review
”Totally engrossing.’ —Ocean Vuong