NEW RELEASES (4.9.25)
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Seascraper by Benjamin Wood $40
Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa's trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach to scrape for shrimp; spending the rest of the day selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream. When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas? Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows. [Hardback]
Long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.
”A quiet, unassuming book about honest work and modest dreams, about sons and their duty, and those brief, wonderful moments when we glimpse the possibility of living a different life. Benjamin Wood is a magnificent writer and I intend to read everything he has written.” —Douglas Stuart
”One of the finest British novelists of his generation. He packs more poetry into his opening paragraph than many a Booker-winner achieves in their entire oeuvre.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times
”The wonder of this book is how Wood delivers so much in a few words.Seascraper reads like the forging of a new myth: one about how an alternative life is possible, and may even be starting to happen inside you already.” —John Self
”Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.” —Jude Cook, Guardian
>>Read an extract.
>>On the bench.
Endling by Maria Reva $38
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country's forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and start a family of her own. What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men-not for love, but to fund her work — entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. [Paperback]
Long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.
”Maria Reva has made a fantastic novel. It's about so much and yet is laser focused. A scientist who funds her research with sex work, a wild and, at the same time, sensible and normal move. This novel turns corners and tables. I love works that are smarter than I am and this is one.” —Percival Everett
”In Maria Reva's all-around brilliant novel Endling, the fate of some snails serves as a harbinger for the fate of Ukraine. The book is funny and smart, full of science, longing and adventure, all the while reminding us what the world stands to lose, and what it has already lost. This is essential reading.” —Ann Patchett
>>Chaos seeps into order.
>>Read an extract.
Empathy by Bryan Walpert $40
Marketing executive Alison Morris bets her reputation on a project to sell empathy in a perfume bottle. Her husband, Jim, is inspired to try a similar thing in a game he's developing — sinking all their money into EmPath, where people progress by learning to understand one another without direct communication. All at once Alison's fragrance develops dangerous effects and Jim's game falters in the market, then the chemist working on the perfume project vanishes. His son, David, seems to be the only one looking for him. A widower with two children, David is a man of routine who just wants to get on with his life, but his love for his father takes him into a murky world where empathy can be bought and sold and can lead to murder. A nail-biting Aotearoa deep-concept thriller. [Paperback]
>>Listen to Stella’s RNZ review.
>>Also recommended: Entanglement .
Atavists by Lydia Millet $53
Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals. The various "-ists" who people these linked stories — from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists — include a professor who's morbidly fixated on an old friend's Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel's fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard. As they pick away at the splitting seams in American culture, Millet's characters shimmer with the sense of powerlessness we share in an era of mass overwhelm. In its rich warp and weft of humiliations and human error, Atavists returns to the trenchant, playful social commentary that made A Children's Bible a runaway hit. In these stories sharp observations of middle-class mores and sanctimony give way to moments of raw exposure and longing: Atavists performs an uncanny fictional magic, full of revelation but also hilarious, unpretentious, and warm. [Hardback]
"Very few writers can make the apocalypse hilarious and sentimental. Millet is the kind of contemporary genius who should be at every book festival and on every creative writing course." —Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
"Millet knows how to put a story together. How to pace drama and consummate tension, when to turn up the volume and when to leave us alone with what she's put in motion." —Fiona Maazel, The New York Times
"Although optimism is understandably in short supply, Millet delivers her doom with a generous dose of subversive humour." —Mia Levitin, Financial Times
>>Writing in the here-and-now.
Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse by Luke Kemp $40
A radical retelling of human history through collapse — from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twentieth-first century and beyond — based on the latest research and a database of more than 440 societal lifespans over the last 5,000 years. Why do civilisations collapse? Is human progress possible? Are we approaching our endgame? For the first 200,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilisations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change. Slowly, reluctantly we congregated in the first farms and cities, and people began to rely on lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. When more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organisation. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires — with vast bureaucracies and militaries — carved up and dominated the globe. What brought them down? From Rome and the Aztec empire and the early cities of Cahokia and Teotihuacan, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power which hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population. Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth-obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech, and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now faces a choice — we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last. [Paperback]
>>Self-termination is most likely.
Selfish Girls by Abigail Bergstrom $38
Nothing hurts like family. Ines is reluctantly moving home on the edge of a breakdown, her childhood sweetheart in tow. He's only ever wanted what was best for her. Gwen is elated that her prodigal daughter has returned. Dylan is still licking her wounds from a rejection she can't forget. And Emma is quietly suffocating in the perfect marriage she wanted so badly. They were inseparable once. But that was a long time ago. Now, they're back in the Welsh town where they grew up, peeling back the layers of a once forgotten, haunting past. What they find may be the end of them. Uninhibited, claustrophobic and complex, Selfish Girls spans generations, buried resentments, and an unexpected love story. It is a clear-eyed portrait of a dysfunctional family and the pain we inflict on those we love most. [Paperback]
”Anyone who has a sister knows what a treasured, complex, fraught and precious bond it is — a theme that Abigail Bergstrom puts at the heart of her new psychologically charged novel Selfish Girls. Following the lives of close-knit siblings growing up in a dysfunctional household in a small Welsh town, the narrative unravels across generations as each character navigates the legacy of family trauma and the complexities of female relationships. With a central mystery to uncover, this is at once a suspenseful thriller and a subtle portrait of domestic interactions, with a healthy dose of humour and hope offsetting its darker moments.” —Harper's Bazaar
>>A psychological umbilical cord.
I Crawl Through It by A.S. King $26
Four accomplished teenagers are on the verge of explosion. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender — senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope — but no one is listening. So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away from the pressure — but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it. A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction. It will mesmerise readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience — and find the way out. [New paperback edition]
"Kurt Vonnegut might have written a book like this." —New York Times Book Review
Perspectives by Laurent Binet (translated from French by Sam Taylor) $38
Florence, New Year's Day, 1557. As dawn breaks, a painter is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him, the paintings he laboured over for more than a decade. At his home, a hidden painting scandalously depicting Maria de Medici, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Florence, as a naked Venus. Who is the murderer? Who is behind the painting? As the city erupts in chaos, Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation. Letters fly back and forth carrying news of political plots and speculation about the killer's identity — between Maria and her aunt Catherine de' Medici, the queen of France; between Catherine and her scheming agents in Florence; and between Vasari and his friend Michelangelo. Meanwhile, the Pope is banning books and branding works of art immoral. And the truth, when it comes to light, is as shocking as the bold new artworks that have made Florence the red-hot centre of Europe. A historical murder-mystery soaking in Renaissance art. [Paperback]
Raising Hare: The heart-warming true story of an unlikely friendship by Chloe Dalton $28
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end. This happened to me.
When Chloe Dalton, a city-dwelling professional with a high-pressure job, finds a newly born hare, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival — despite being the least likely caregiver to this wild animal. Raising Hare is the story of their journey together. It chronicles an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife. Their improbable bond of trust reminds us that the most remarkable experiences, inspiring the most hope, often arise when we least expect them. This new edition includes a new chapter. [Paperback]
“A great and important tale for our times.” —Michael Morpurgo
”This is more than a wildlife memoir, it's a philosophical masterpiece.” —Clare Balding
”This book is exceptional. A simply wonderful story, profoundly beautiful.” —Chris Packham
”A glorious book — for its warmth, its precision, its joy. It's not dreamy or romantic about the natural world — it's something far better than that.” —Katherine Rundell
>>Also available as a beautiful hardback.
The Nightmare Sequence by Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed $37
A collaboration between poet Omar Sakr and visual artist Safdar Ahmed, bearing witness from Australia to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies. Through poetry and drawings, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed record these injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media — including their own. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness — the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively complicit in crimes against humanity overseas. With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, The Nightmare Sequence is an insightful work of testimony that also considers how art is complicit in Empire. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>The author’s note.
Persiana Easy by Sabrina Ghayour $50
Ghayour’s new book makes achieving her irresistible Middle Eastern flavours as simple as possible.
CONTENTS INCLUDE: —Dips, Snacks and Light Bites including Sweet Potato, Basil and Feta Dip; Crispy Za'atar Salt and Pepper Prawns; Popcorn Halloumi. —Bread and Pastry: including Turkish Pide Bread; Easy Bake Bagels(ish); Fig, Goat Cheese, Thyme and Honey Rolls. —Salads: including Smoked Aubergine Salad with Pickled Chillies and Feta; Duck and Pomegranate Salad with Honey Pomegranate Sauce; Broad Bean, Pea, Orange and Goats Cheese Salad. —Midweek Meals: including Lamb Kofta Patties with Yogurt and Burnt Orange; Butterflied Orange Paprika Butter Chicken; Shish Kebab. —Comfort Food: including Turkish Lentil Soup; Couscous Royale with Spiced Lamb Shanks; Orange Spiced Pork with Charred Spring Onions and Pineapple. —Roasts and Traybakes: including Spiced Saffron Chicken Kebabs; Tray-baked Harissa Lamb Chops; Baked Meatballs with Tomato, Harissa and Feta. —Vegetables and Side Dishes: including Hot and Sour Green Beans; Mashed Chickpeas with Spice Oil; Stuffed Baby Peppers with Date Couscous and Feta. —Sweet Treats: including Citrus and Spice Almond Tart; Bokaj; Apple Borek. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Other books by Sabrina Ghayour.