NEW RELEASES (8.10.26)

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And How Are Things With You by Mia Farlane $40
Franny is AWOL from her French translation job, her cat-sitting gig is making her anxious, and an obsessive personal project is shooting off in more directions than the London Underground. She needs to leave the UK and return home. But Aotearoa turns out to be less relaxing than she thought it would be, because she keeps running into people she’d rather avoid. Wellington is a nostalgia trip on repeat and the last thing Franny needs is distraction. For her own reasons, she is researching suicide, and the material she’s unearthing is almost overwhelming. Bit by bit Wellington begins to grow on her. She finds herself chatting to a woman over kūmara wedges, getting real with a nonagenarian aunt and attending a ‘die-in’ at a bank to protest global extinction. Meanwhile, Franny books a seat to watch the parliamentary debates for the End of Life Choice bill, and her research takes a startling turn. And How Are Things With You is shot through with the dark humour and dry observations that readers loved in Footnotes to Sex, a novel British broadcaster Bidisha described as ‘Seinfeld meets Dorothy Parker’. [Paperback]
 ‘A frank, acerbic and darkly comic exploration of a deeply serious taboo.’ — Carl Shuker 
‘Farlane’s novel is the perfect companion for an overly interesting age: darkly funny, quietly and steadfastly loving, with a charmingly singular protagonist.’ — A.L. Kennedy
>>Exploring a taboo subject.

Sovereignty: The case for consitutional transformation by Claire Charters $20
‘The legitimacy of the state is at best questionable and certainly remains legally unsettled.’ Legal scholar Claire Charters (Ngāti Whakaue, Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi and Tainui) confronts the deeply rooted questions surrounding the legitimacy of the New Zealand state and its sovereignty over Māori. Drawing from her infl uential writings and speeches, Charters critiques the judiciary’s historical silence on the state’s claim to sovereignty, revealing the profound implications of this silence for justice in Aotearoa. Through a rigorous examination of legal doctrines and the role of tikanga Māori, she exposes the contradictions in New Zealand’s constitutional narrative and argues for transformative constitutional reform. [Paperback]
>>A problem for legitimacy.

Anti-Zionism: A Jewish history by Benjamin Moser $75
Until relatively recently, anti-Zionism has been an almost exclusively Jewish position, and it continues to be a stongly held position for many Jews. In this revelatory book, Benjamin Moser uncovers a suppressed tradition that has shaped Jewish thought for generations. Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists and politicians — from Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America — Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism's moral and political stakes — often at devastating personal cost, including censorship, exile and death. Their lives form a sweeping, global narrative that dismantles a powerful myth: that anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. Spanning continents and centuries, these voices — people from the right and the left, Reform and Orthodox, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, men and women, gay and straight — differ sharply in belief and background, yet converge on a shared warning about the consequences of a nationalist project built on exclusion. What emerges is not only a rediscovered tradition of Jewish moral thought, but a startling reappraisal of Zionism itself. Moser's work restores the full scale and depth of Jewish ethical imagination, affirming that Judaism is older and larger than any single political project. Lucid, unsparing and deeply humane, Anti-Zionism cements Moser's place as one of our foremost Jewish writers and presents a framework through which this history — and its meanings — will be understood for years to come. [Hardback]
'An important and revelatory contribution.' —William Dalrymple
'A book of extraordinary moral clarity.' —Nathan Thrall
'A lovingly-written historical primer for the free-thinkers of the West today.' —Isabella Hammad
'What I learned in these pages has profoundly changed my understanding of history — the world's, my people's, my family's, and my own.' —Ayelet Waldman
>>The loss that cannot be repaired.

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (translated from Italian by Tim Parks) $35
Set in post-war Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's novel begins simply and innocently enough: `At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell'. But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the offhanded knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the seemingly perfect new girl, Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. [Paperback]
"Dipped in the blue ink of adolescence, Fleur Jaeggy's pen is an engraver's needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness, growing in the splendid isolation of the small Swiss garden of knowledge into full leaf until it obscures every perspective. Extraordinary prose. Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author: the rest of one's life." —Joseph Brodsky

Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro (translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle) $33
In a quiet middle-class neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, the body of a teenage girl is found dismembered and burned. Thirty years later, her family still lives in the aftermath: Lia, the middle sister, enraged and extranged from her past, now a bookshop owner in Spain, but no further from the pain of that early loss; Carmen, frozen in religious fervour and certainty; their father, widowed, alone, and desperate for a connection with his daughters, alive and dead. Piñeiro takes on the institutions that shape our most intimate connections with unsparing clarity. Church, family, sibling rivalry, sex, cowardice, and rage are the forces that might tear a family apart, but will also never let you go. [Paperback with French flaps]
"One of her strongest novels to date." —Irish Times
"Pineiro beautifully blends mystery and true crime tropes with incisive insights into the church's sexual repression and subjugation of women. It's an illuminating page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly
"With her characteristic edge-of-the-seat storytelling, Pineiro exposes not only the monsters we live among, but also the society that produces them." —The Conversation
"Pineiro is not only a masterful novelist but also a tireless feminist activist. This book is an urgent act of witness. Through myth, noir and social realism, it exposes the violence of patriarchy, the cruelty of church and state, and the extraordinary resilience of women who refuse to vanish. Thrilling, witty, enraged and alive." —Morning Star

All Them Dogs by Djamel White $38
Things are different since Tony Ward landed back in town. The West Dublin gangland has changed. His old mentor is dead, and his best pal Kenny Boyle is on the straight and narrow. After five years keeping quiet across the way, Tony is keen to reinstate himself, and when the opportunity arises to work side by side with Darren 'Flute' Walsh, a top enforcer of notorious crime boss Angus Lavelle, it feels like a no brainer. Biting off more than he can chew has never bothered Tony Ward, but Flute Walsh is not the meek, quiet boy Tony remembers from school. Brooding, stoic and unpredictably dangerous, Tony finds himself drawn to his new associate in more ways than one. With retribution from his past actions always close in the rear view, the protection offered by Flute's standing in the gang is crucial. But how safe is Tony really, when a mutual attraction starts to complicate matters? [Paperback]
”In the best Irish style, Djamel White uses a local voice to blast through language and make it new. His hero, Tony Ward, is a bittersweet confection of self-defeating swagger. A stylish, adroit and gritty debut.” —Anne Enright
”All Them Dogs is a book you inhale, devour, grapple with, and reel from more than read. A coming-of-age novel for an age that comes breathing down the back of your neck. The kind of book where everything is on the edge of a knife and where love, like death, is either a kiss or a bullet away.” —Marlon James
”A moving, fast-paced novel about masculinity, violence and vulnerability, set in parts of Dublin that rarely appear in literature and written in prose at once glittering and tender.” —Sarah Moss

Radical Attention by Julia Bell $40
In recent years tech companies have turned attention into a commodity, a resource to be mined and sold.The terms of the deal appear simple: in exchange for our attention we receive information, entertainment,and convenience. But what are the hidden costs? And what happens to our inner lives when we lose the ability to decide how we wish to pay attention?In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell examines big tech's wide- ranging and extractive assault on human attention, while asking how we might reclaim it. Selected by Ali Smith as one of the five most important books to navigate the next twenty years, this new edition features a new foreword by radical economist Grace Blakeley and an afterword by the author. [Paperback]
”Dazzling, angry, lucid, and shining with insight. Julia Bell has written a book that feels like a dynamite stick.” —Marina Benjamin
>>Redirecting our focus.

Negative Essays: On death, love, and depressive realism by Julie Reshe $60
While belonging to the tradition of philosophical pessimism and negative philosophy, these essays approach love, rather than mortality, as what most deeply wounds being. Love knows the darkest truth that death only conceals. Across thirteen essays, Julie Reshe develops a negative philosophy of our involvement with others, moving through depressive realism, the death drive, feminist Satanism, trauma, suicide, motherhood, narcissism, entropy, autism, disability, and aging. Essays include ‘Humor and Depressive Realism’, ‘Therapeutic Society’, ‘Toxic Positivity’, ‘Critical Psychology’, ‘Feminist Satanism’, 'Trauma as Initiation’, ‘Depression as Compassion’, ‘Suicide That Is Not One's Own’, and ‘The Negative Body’. [Paperback]
”Negative Essays is a brave, unsettling, and deeply moving book. Julie Reshe refuses every easy consolation and every therapeutic injunction to transform suffering into recovery. Through death, depression, humor, love, motherhood, disability, and aging, she develops a radically relational account of existence: we do not suffer alone, because we never exist alone. Negativity is not the opposite of love but its most intimate condition-the wound through which we are exposed to one another. At once philosophically incisive and painfully personal, these essays bring thought as close as possible to what thought usually keeps at a distance. A remarkable and necessary book.” —Catherine Malabou
”Julie Reshe is the philosopher of the negative. In addition to her radical reading of the death drive, Reshe here develops a negative philosophy that undermines previous forms of pessimism by locating negativity in our essential involvement with others, not in isolation. It is precisely this involvement with others that is the source of the worst of our wounds rather than any existential loneliness. Reshe radically redefines negativity and the idea of community by turning all expectations about both on their heads. It's a startling book not to be missed by anyone who's ever felt destroyed by someone else.” —Todd McGowan
”I pride myself on knowing Hegel's ‘night of the world’ that pure abyss of negativity that constitutes the subject. And yet Negative Essays is like a map that marks the location of the candle I secretly lit in the basement, the cupboard light that glows through the cracks of a closed door, the torch I've hidden under the duvet. These essays are so uncompromising that they rob the reader of that last defence against the suffering of being: reflection upon it. While the work is philosophically rich, the words have such an existential intensity that you cannot help but feel the burn of the black sun they describe. There is no escape into fantasy here. No therapeutic cure, political utopia or religious salvation. So, with all that in mind, why would I ever put myself through the hell of reading these essays? Because of the sheer enjoyment each one produces.” —Peter Rollins
>>Nonseparation.

Patron Saints of Roadkill, And other stories by Susanna Elliffe $38
A ghost moves into a woman's apartment and begins to cough up teeth. A town keeps building as the sea prepares to take it back. A daughter inherits hunger like an heirloom. In this collection of short stories set along a shifting coastline, the boundaries between body and memory, human and nonhuman, landscape and ocean begin to slip and strain. Houses tilt, animals and ghosts press in, and what is carried — grief, desire, damage — refuses to stay contained. Patron Saints of Roadkill is a darkly tender collection, revealing a world where the familiar is made strange and the strange is given its rightful place in the landscape of things. [Paperback]
>>Unease.

Sebze: Vegetarian recipes from my Turkish kitchen by Özlem Warren $65
A collection of 90 vegetarian and vegan recipes celebrating Türkiye and its food. Inspired by thousands of years of rich and diverse culinary heritage, Sebze champions dishes such as Stuffed Flatbreads, Menemen, Baked Fig and Feta, and Baklava, with recipes that are easy, accessible, seasonal, and sustainable — not to mention delicious. A passionate and skilled advocate for her national cuisine, Özlem Warren will show you how to make meals that you want to — and can — cook, making Sebze the perfect introduction to Turkish food for the home cook. [Hardback]
"An absolute feast of Turkish home cooking" —Diana Henry
"I absolutely love getting lost in this book. Wonderful recipe after wonderful recipe. You are in excellent hands with Özlem as your guide. The text and stories transport you, while simultaneously making you extremely hungry, for food and discovery alike." —Joe Woodhouse
"Sebze is a celebration of some of Turkey's most celebrated and most loved vegetable recipes and there is nobody better equipped to share them with us than Özlem." —Sabrina Ghayour
>>Look inside!
>>Ozlem’s Turkish table.

Palestine: A short history by Rashid Khalidi $38
'Come for a walk with me, if you would, along the streets of Jerusalem. My family has walked these streets for more than a thousand years.' With this invitation, Khalidi offers a powerful introduction to Palestinian history through a century of conflict and resistance. Blending research with his own family memories, Khalidi traces Palestine's story from the British occupation to Israel's ongoing colonial war. Explaining the history behind the world's most visible — and misunderstood — conflict, Khalidi explores why Israel has long fought against Palestine. Engaging and accessible, this book offers everyone a clear and concise account of a century of struggle — and the future of the Palestinian state. Adapted from The Hundred Years War on Palestine for a new generation of readers. [Paperback]
'Informed and passionate. Khalidi's is an elegy for the Palestinians.' —Guardian
'Rigorous and lucid. Rashid Khalidi, the intellectual heir to Edward Said, has written one of the great books on the Israeli-Palestinian question.' —Financial Times
'This act of retelling is itself a form of resistance' —The Nation
'The best book to appear on the struggle for Palestine.' —Avi Shlaim
>>The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.