NEW RELEASES (5.1.24)
New books for a new year! Click through for your copies:
Taranga by Reina Kahukiwa, illustrated by Robyn Kahukiwa $38
Taranga is the mother of Māui, the cultural hero in the Māori creation narrative. Here Reina Kahukiwa recounts the birth of Māui seen through the eyes of Taranga. Exquisitely llustrated throughoutby Reina's mother, the artist Robyn Kahukiwa. This is a beautiful book that will be especially treasured by mothers and mothers-to-be.
”Inā te ātaahua o tēnei pukapuka. Recommending this reo rua book by Reina Kahukiwa and illustrated by Robyn Kahukiwa. Taranga's story of birthing Māui tikitiki a Taranga, from her perspective is powerful and empowering.” —Stacey Morrison
Articulations by Henriette Bollinger $28
A well-known writer, activist, and disability rights advocate, Henrietta Bollinger’s debut essay collection speaks to their experiences as a queer, disabled person, and as a twin. Articulations is a timely, personal, and poignant appraisal of life in Aotearoa New Zealand. Soundtracked by the Topp Twins, Anika Moa, Woody Guthrie and more, Bollinger’s essays take us on a journey from first crushes and first periods to parliamentary reform and Disability Pride. They challenge the norms of our ableist society, asking us to consider better ways of being with each other and ourselves.
White Holes by Carlo Rovelli $40
Let us journey, with beloved physicist Carlo Rovelli, into the heart of a black hole. Let us slip beyond its boundary, the horizon, and tumble - on and on - down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we'll see geometry fold, we'll feel the equations draw tight around us. Eventually, we'll pass it - the remains of a star, deep and dense and falling further far. And then - the bottom. Where time and space end, and the white hole is born .
”Reading it is akin to the final psychedelic sequence in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey: you're not sure where you're heading but it feels bloody exciting. If you want to remember why you once fell in love with the idea of the cosmos, or want to fall in love with that idea for the first time, then this book is for you.” —Kevin Fong, Observer
”It is always worth reading Rovelli. He writes like he believes you are as learned and clever as he is. Yet he also writes with such care for your ignorance that it feels every page is urging and coaxing you — a non-physicist — to see what he can see.” —Tom Whipple, The Times
”Possibly the most charming book by a mainstream scientist this year. Carlo Rovelli is a maestro of imaginative science writing. The book's structure and language have a charm that I found irresistible. No one else matches the way Rovelli describes the creative and imaginative thinking behind theoretical physics .” —Clive Cookson, Financial Times
The Dead Are Always Laughing at Us words by Dominic Hoey, design by Trudi Hewitt $35
The Dead Are Always Laughing At Us is a collaboration between Dominic Hoey and designer Trudi Hewitt.
“Accessibility has shaped the way I write and perform. I’ve always resisted the idea that poetry should be a puzzle you need a 50k education to unlock. Early on I knew I wanted this to be the kind of poetry collection anyone could pick up and be drawn into immediately. With that in mind it was really important to add a visual element to the text.” — Dominic
“I saw this project as an opportunity to experiment. To rethink the rules we set for consistency and to challenge typesetting conventions of literature and poetry. Ultimately I wanted to give each of Dominic’s poems their own sense of identity by playing with pace, space, size and tension. An awesome collaboration with a very talented friend.” — Trudi
Edmonds Taku Puka Tohutau Tuatahi $28
Edmonds My First Bookbook in te reo Māori! I te ahua o nga pikitia, me te takoto o te hatepe tohutohu, ka mama noa to ako ki te tunu i enei kai e hangai pu ana ki Aotearoa. Kia tu koe hei toa ki te tao panikeke, hei toki ki te tunu potaka tiakarete, hei rehe ranei ki te mahi pihapiha. Mai i te kai ata, ki te purini, tae ana ki nga kai me nga timotimo katoa i waenganui, ka noho ko tenei kohinga, kei koni atu i te 90 ona tohutao, hei kaiwhakato i te ngakaunui mauroa o te tangata ki te tunu me te tao kai. Tirohia nga tohutao hou me te rarangi kupu e reorua ana. With an illustrated, step-by-step layout, you'll find it super easy to learn to cook these classic New Zealand recipes — and to learn te reo! Become a champion-pikelet-maker, an expert-afghan-baker or an award-winning-pizza-creator — and a fluent speaker. From breakfast through to dessert and all the meals and snacks in between, this collection of over 90 recipes will be the beginning of a life-long love of baking and cooking. Check out the new recipes and bilingual glossary. Every home needs a copy.
Little Green Fingers: Easy peasy gardening activities by Claire Philip $45
These inspiring, creative and simple activities are possible whether you have a backyard, a balcony or even just a windowsill - everyone is welcome to get their hands dirty. Growing fruits and vegetables, creating fun art projects with nature, learning about the natural world and how plants grow, learning to observe the green spaces around us — all this and more can be found in Little Green Fingers.
Atua Wāhine: A collection of writings by wāhine Māori edited by Ataria Sharman, Cassie Hart, Stacey Teague, Sinead Overbye and Faith Wilson $34
A collective of wāhine Māori writers and their pieces, versions and stories of Atua Wāhine from Papatūānuku to Hineahuone, all the way down to our grandmothers. Contributors include Jessica Maclean, Ariana Sutton, Ataria Sharman, Cassie Hart, Ruby Solly, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, Isla Martin, Ariana Sutton, Miriama Gemmell and Saskia Sassen.
Viewing Velocities: Time in contemporary art by Martin Verhagen $40
Viewing Velocities explores a contemporary art scene caught in the gears of 24/7 capitalism. It looks at artists who embrace the high-octane experience economy and others who steer closer to the slow movement. Some of the most compelling artworks addressing the cadences of contemporary labour and leisure employ distinct, even contradictory conceptions of time.
From Danh Vo's relics to Moyra Davey's photographs of dust-covered belongings, from Roman Ondak's queuing performers and Susan Miller's outdoor sleepers to Maria Eichhorn's art strike and Ruth Ewan's giant reconstruction of the French revolutionary calendar, artists have drawn out aspects of the present temporal order that are familiar to the point of near invisibility, while outlining other, more liberating ways of conceiving, organising and experiencing time. Marcus Verhagen builds on the work of theorists Jonathan Crary, Hartmut Rosa and Jacques Rancière to trace lines of insurgent art that recast struggles over time and history in novel and revealing terms.
”Compelling and groundbreaking. These analyses point toward imaginative possibilities beyond the dispiriting neoliberal imperatives now increasingly imposed on us.” —Jonathan Crary
History’s Angel by Anjum Hasan $37
Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi, at a time when Muslims in India are seen either as hapless victims or live threats. Though his life's passion is the history he teaches, it's the present that presses down on him: his wife is set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to ace her MBA exams; his teenage son wants to quit school to get rich; his supercilious colleagues are suspicious of a Muslim teaching India's history; and his old friend Ganesh has just reconnected with a childhood sweetheart with whom Alif was always rather enamored himself. And then the unthinkable happens. While Alif is leading a school field trip, a student goads him and, in a fit of anger, Alif twists his ear. His job suddenly on the line, Alif finds his life rapidly descending into chaos. Meanwhile, his home city, too, darkens under the spreading shadow of violence. In this darkly funny, sharply observed and deeply moving novel, Anjum Hasan deftly and delicately explores the force and the consequences of remembering your people's history in an increasingly indifferent milieu.
”A seething seismic tale about the disturbing times the Muslims of India are living through, in ever growing dread of worse to come. Told in a subdued, sad, ironical tenor, it is compassionate without being sentimental. The novel asserts humanity and hope in the face of widening fissures through its main protagonist who, drawing sustenance from a deep historical perspective, refuses to play the victim and negotiates the situation empathetically.” —Geentanjali Shree
The Book of Wilding: A practical guide to rewilding, big and small by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell $75
The Book of Wilding is a compendious and beautifully produced handbook for how we can all help restore nature. It is ambitious, visionary and pragmatic. The book has grown out of Tree’s and Burrell’s mission to help rewild Britain, Europe and the rest of the world by sharing knowledge from their pioneering project at Knepp in Sussex. It is inspired by the requests they receive from people wanting to learn how to rewild everything from unprofitable farms, landed estates and rivers, to ponds, allotments, churchyards, urban parks, gardens, window boxes and public spaces.. The Book of Wilding has the answers.
”A deep, dazzling and indispensable guide to the most important task of all: the restoration of the living planet.” —George Monbiot
Dream Girl by Joy Holley $30
Alice wants a heart-shaped bed. Mary, Genevieve and Angelica want to know the future. June says she wants Lena to rescue her from a rat, but really she wants Lena to make out with her. Eve wants to get Wallace alone at the strawberry farm. Olivia just wants to leave the haunted boarding school and go home. Bittersweet and intimate, comic and gothic, Dream Girl is a collection of stories about young women navigating desire in all its manifestations. In stories of romance and bad driving, ghosts and ghosting, playlists and competitive pet ownership, love never fails to leave its mark.
”Dream Girl is a winning concoction – sweet, heady, funny, tight, sharp – wittily charting the lightweight antics of “unattainably hot” girls, wearing its love-bites saucily and watching its crushes play out with wry sidelong glances. Its stories start as they mean to go on – with charm, chic, laughter, skill and sting.” —Tracey Slaughter
”These funny, original stories are the new cool girls of fiction. You’ll want to sit next to them.” —Emily Perkins
”I imagine travelling back in time and giving myself this book, Dream Girl. At sixteen. At twenty. What a world-changing read it would be to me then.” —Naomi Mary Smith, Takahē
”'Dream Girl by Joy Holley might just be Aotearoa's sexiest, dreamiest, most swoonsome book.'“ —Donna Robertson
”A tender and liberating book.” —Emma Hislop, RNZ
Saga by Hannah Mettner $25
In Saga, the permafrost is melting and the secrets frozen within are emerging. Nothing is spared, from the old family recipe for pineapple cheesecake to the portrait of an ancestor, from the wife who sleeps with an axe under her bed to the tough heart of a man that beats beneath the skin. With an uneasy grace, these poems explore questions of love, sexuality, family, friendship and politics. They visit a childhood playground in a storm, women painted on the walls of churches, and the fjords and riot grrrls of Hannah Mettner’s history. They are woven through with wild blackberry and everyday magic.
‘Hannah Mettner’s poems are funny and clever and lusty. They make me want to go out and look at the world again, to conjure up eternal life, and to dip my toe into the lake of flame.’ —Morgan Bach
'The poetry here is full, the lines long, not pared back to a minimal bleakness but more maximal and exuberant, like a river in flood, gushing and tumbling along freely, going in multiple directions effortlessly.' —Piet Nieuwland, Landfall
'Give me true art, real desire, genuine darkness, or nothing. Even if the replicated cavern with its faux-dankness ultimately didn’t trigger the hairs at the narrator’s nape, this book reeks of realness. I’d give it five stars on Fragrantica.' —Rebecca Hawkes, Newsroom
How Life Works: A user’s guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball $40
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time). With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
Flavour by Sabrina Ghayour $50
'Sabrina Ghayour's Middle-Eastern plus food is all flavour, no fuss — and makes me very, very happy' —Nigella Lawson
Over 100 new, authentic and appraocahble recipes from the author of Persiana. Recipes include: Zaatar onion, tomato and aubergine tartines with labneh; Chicken shawarma salad: Herb koftas with warm yoghurt, mint amd pul biber; Ras el Hanout and orange lamb cutlet platter; Mama ghanoush; Pan-fried salmon with barbary butter; Nut butter noodles; Lime, coconut and cardamom loaf cake; Tea, cranberry, orange and macadamia shortbreads.
Stay True by Hua Hsu $40
When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Capturing a coming-of-age cut short, and a portrait of a beautiful friendship, Stay True is a deeply moving and intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
”One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith’s Just Kids.” —The Atlantic
Wellness by Nathan Hill $40
When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the 90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other. Moving from the gritty 90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria, Wellness mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection.
”Wellness is one of the funniest, saddest, smartest novels I've ever read. It's a flat-out masterpiece.” —Anthony Marra
The Price of Time: The real story of interest by Edward Chancellor $32
In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. The practice wasn't always popular — in the ancient world, usury was generally viewed as exploitative, a potential path to debt bondage and slavery. Yet as capitalism became established from the late Middle Ages onwards, denunciations of interest were tempered because interest was a necessary reward for lenders to part with their capital. And interest performs many other vital functions: it encourages people to save; enables them to place a value on precious assets, such as houses and all manner of financial securities; and allows us to price risk. All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest is often described as the ‘price of money’, but it is better called the ‘price of time’: time is scarce, time has value, interest is the time value of money. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, interest rates have sunk lower than ever before. Easy money after the global financial crisis in 2007/2008 has produced several ill effects, including the appearance of multiple asset price bubbles, a reduction in productivity growth, discouraging savings and exacerbating inequality, and forcing yield-starved investors to take on excessive risk.
Godfather Death by Sally Nicholls, illustrated by Júlia Sardà $33
When a poor fisherman chooses Death to be godfather to his son, he’s sure he’s made a good choice – for surely there’s no-one more honest than Death? At the christening, Death gives the fisherman a gift that seems at first to be the key to the family’s fortune, but when greed overcomes the fisherman, he learns that nobody can truly cheat Death.