NEW RELEASES (7.6.24)
Keep warm with one (some) of these new books — just out of the carton:
The Garden Against Time: In search of a common paradise by Olivia Laing $50
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the costs of making paradise on earth. But amidst larger patterns of privilege and exclusion, she also finds rebel outposts and communal dreams, including Derek Jarman's improbable queer utopia and William Morris's fertile vision of a common Eden. The Garden Against Time is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens — not as places to hide from the world but as sites of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
”I don't think I've ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind.” —Observer
”What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.” —Nigel Slater
”A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden's contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise.” —Neil Tennant
”Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read.” —Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well Gardened Mind
”No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained.” —Philip Hoare
Do Not Send Me Out among Strangers by Johua Segun-Lean $36
Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers is a wholly remarkable text considering shame, isolation, and the strange terrain where private and public grief meet. 31 illustrations: black-and-white and colour photos, iPhone dawings.
”Beautiful, strange, captivating.” —Olivia Laing
”Clear-eyed and brilliant and desperately sad.” —Sara Baume
Foraging New Zealand: Over 250 plants and fungi to forage in New Zealand by Peter Langlands $50
Aotearoa is full of incredible, edible wild foods — fruit, fungi and seaweed; berries, herbs and more — you only need to know where to look and how to use it safely. This remarkable, definitive book is the ultimate guide to unearthing more than 250 of our tastiest wild plants. Packed with stunning photography, up-to-date information and helpful tips, this book will have you venturing into the countryside or your own garden, viewing urban weeds with fresh eyes, and returning to the larder with zest. Peter Langlands has spent a lifetime compiling Aotearoa's largest database of wild foraged species, running workshops and sourcing wild produce for chefs as one of our only licensed professional foragers. He brings his years of expertise together in this essential compendium. This book will change the way you eat and the way you think of where you live.
The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon $38
A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. In the Edo Period, a samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen. In upstate New York, a formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town and attempts to build a family. The Hive and the Honey is a bold and indelible collection that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in the far east of Russia?
Missing Persons, Or, My grandmother’s secrets by Clair Wills $50
A history of unmarried motherhood and concealed secrets through three generations of an Irish family. How far would you go for the missing? When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence. How could a whole family — a whole country — abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child. There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence — stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.
I”n its account of one family's history of silence and secrecy, Clair Wills has written a compelling book which demonstrates the uncanny universality of even the most personal stories. Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present, this is a history shaken by intimacy — a brave and rigorously humane book.” —Sean Hewitt
”If the past is a mass of tangled wool, Clair Wills frees a long strand and knits it into clarity, line by line, inviting the reader to see the complexity of the pattern she reveals. Written with elegance and erudition, Missing Persons is an extraordinary, moving achievement.” —Doireann Ni Ghriofa
”Clair Wills retrieves from time's abyss a speculative history of universal import. This is a penetrating and affecting study, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the profound contradictions, the secrets and lies that define post-famine Ireland.” —Paul Lynch
Glorious People by Sasha Salzmann (translated from Russian by Imogen Taylor) $40
What did the disintegration of the Soviet Union feel like for the people who lived through it? As a child, Lena longs to pick hazelnuts in the woods with her grandmother. Instead, she is raised to be a good socialist: sent to Pioneer summer camps where she’s taught to worship Lenin and sing songs in praise of the glorious Soviet Union. But perestroika is coming. Lena’s corner of the USSR is now Ukraine, and corruption and patronage are the only ways to get by – to secure a place at university, an apartment, treatment for a sick baby. For Tatjana, the shock of the new means the first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union and certified foreign whisky, but no food in the shops; it means terrible choices about how to love. Eventually both women must decide whether to stay or to emigrate, but the trauma they carry is handed down to their daughters, who struggle to make sense of their own identities. Glorious People is a vivid depiction of how the collapse of the Soviet Union reverberated through the lives of ordinary people.
''A story of several generations of women that poignantly demonstrates the imprint of history on people's lives, often with tragic consequences. Salzmann conveys the emotional turmoil and agonizing choices their characters make with exquisite nuance and sensitivity. Their distinctive voice, elegant prose and engaging narrative result in a marvelous work.” —Victoria Belim
”Glorious People is hypnotic, sweeping, and more relevant than ever. The mothers and daughters of Glorious People will stick with you long after you turn the last page of this mesmerizing, sharp, and devastating novel. They are searching for meaning and belonging as immigrants, mothers, wives, professionals, and citizens of a complex and ever-changing world. This novel offers a fresh take on the Soviet diaspora that offers both a meaningful critique and a semblance of much-needed hope for the future.' —Maria Kuznetsova
How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir by Safiya Sinclair $38
There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved. Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Safiya Sinclair grew up guarding herself against an ever-present threat. Her father, a volatile reggae musician and strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari, railed against Babylon, the corrupting influence of the immoral Western world just beyond their gate. Rastas were ostracised in Jamaica, and in this isolation Safiya's father's rule was absolute. To protect the purity of the women in their family he forbade almost everything: no short skirts and no opinions, nowhere but home and school, no friends but this family and no future but this path. Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books, poetry and education. But as Safiya's imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it greater clashes with her ever more radical father. Safiya realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. But how? In seeking to understand the past of her family, Safiya Sinclair takes readers inside a world that is little understood by those outside it and offers an astonishing personal reckoning.
'“Dazzling. Potent. Vital.” —Tara Westover
”To read it is to believe that words can save.” —Marlon James
”Unforgettable, mesmerising, heartbreaking and heartwarming. One of the best memoirs in world literature.” —Elif Shafak
Sebze: Vegetarian recipes from my Turkish kitchen by Özlem Warren $65
Here you will find Kahvati (all day breakfast), Meze and Salata, Sokak Yemekleri (street food) as well as breads, mains, pickles, and sweets. Everything looks and sounds delicious. Winter garden favourites could be Pazih Lebeniye Corbasi (Yoghurt Soup with Chickpeas and Swiss Chard), Pazih, Cevizli Eriste (Eriste Noodles with Chard, Walnuts and Crumbly Cheese), or Firinda Sebzeli Karnabahar Mucveri (it’s a baked cauliflower dish!).
Wild Figs and Fennel: A year in an Italian kitchen by Letitia Clark $65
A beautifully presented delight. It’s a seasonal culinary journey through the sun-soaked landscapes of Italy sure to please. In the Winter section there’s the always popular Spaghetti Puttanesca, Lemon and Wild Fennel Polpette and the wonderfully named Ricotta Cloudballs. Packed with recipes for everyday and special occasions.
Empire, Incorporated: The corporations that built British colonialism by Philip J. Stern $74
Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan — a legal fiction with very real power. Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.
The Other Side: A journey into women, art, and the spirit world by Jennifer Higgie $30
In an illuminating blend of memoir and art history, The Other Side explores the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women artists. From the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen and the nineteenth-century spiritualist Georgiana Houghton to the pioneering Hilma af Klint, these women all — in their own unique ways — shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of their myriad lives, Jennifer Higgie considers the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. New paperback edition.
”In effervescent and atmospheric prose, Jennifer Higgie explores some of history's most innovative artists and their spiritual investigations into this realm and the next. I was entranced from start to finish, as she takes us on both a personal and artistic journey across time and across the globe. The Other Side is an exhilarating read.” —Katy Hessel
”The Other Side lit up my brain. A radical, fascinating exploration of art and the otherworldly, Higgie is an expert and erudite guide in this brilliant reclamation of female artists.” —Sinead Gleeson
Mediterranean (‘The Passenger’) $40
The word ‘Mediterranean’ evokes something larger than geography, and has historically marked a distinct cultural space, one where different people have met, traded, and clashed. Today the Mediterranean appears to be in crisis, neglected by the EU, and at the centre of one of the greatest migrations in history. While millions of tourists flock to its shores, hundreds of thousands of people face a dramatic journey in the opposite direction-to escape wars, persecutions, and poverty. The liquid road, as Homer called it, is increasingly militarized, trafficked, and polluted-as well as overheated and overfished. But the Mediterranean remains a source of wonder and fascination-a space not entirely colonized by modernity, where time flows differently, and where multiple cultures and languages are in very close contact and dialogue. Includes: ‘The Sea Between Lands’ by David Abulalfia; ‘The Liquid Road’ by Leila Slimani; ‘The Cold One, the Hot One, the Mad One, and the Angry One’ by Nick Hunt — plus: the sounds and smells of the Mediterranean; the invention of the Mediterranean diet; and more.
Like a Charm by Elle McNicoll $20
Edinburgh is a city filled with magical creatures. No one can see them… until Ramya Knox. As she is pulled into her family’s world of secrets and spells, Ramya sets out to discover the truth behind the Hidden Folk with only three words of warning from her grandfather: Beware the Sirens. Plunged into an adventure that will change everything, Ramya is about to learn that there is more to her powers than she ever imagined.
The Great Wave: The era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider by Michiko Kakutani $38
In the twenty-first century, a wave of political, cultural and technological change has capsized our old certainties and assumptions, creating both opportunity and danger. As people lose their faith in old institutions and elites, radical voices at the margins and the grassroots are disrupting the status quo. This is the time of the outsider — the protester, the populist, the hacker. Some of these outsiders have sown chaos, and others have provided inspirational leadership. But all have grasped this precarious moment to make something new. Writing with a critic’s incisive understanding of cultural trends, Michiko Kakutani outlines the consequences of these new asymmetries of power, and looks back to similar hinge moments in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Second World War, to find a way forward. For there is, Kakutani argues, always the promise of transformation in times of turmoil. We can surrender to the waters, give in to the gathering chaos, or we can use the wave’s momentum to propel us into a more stable and sustainable future.
”Michiko Kakutani offers a profoundly inspiring and prophetic perspective on the contemporary world. The Great Wave is an exceptionally rare book, marked by its deep, sincere, and precise comprehension of the formidable challenges that humanity faces in the third millennium. This may well be a pivotal turning point.” —Ai Weiwei