NEW RELEASES (9.4.26)

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Night, Ma by Elizabeth Knox $40
For three and a half years, calamities hit Elizabeth Knox and family in rapid succession. Her sister suffered a psychotic break and was hospitalised against her will, her husband’s brother died by violence, and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.  In time, she was able to write about it. Night, Ma is a book about the net of family which people are held by, but also slip through. About the actual daily work of love; the physical and cognitive work love requires.  Knox is a gifted storyteller who has given us other worlds; now she invites us into her own. With characteristic generosity and transcendence, she guides us through time, illness, loss, and the loneliness of unutterable experiences. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Absolutely brilliant. This radiant, radically honest memoir pulls the pin on a sequence of domestic grenades, from the perils of semi-feral childhood to a cruelly compacted series of family crises that, like shock waves, sweep all before. Armed with inimitable wit, the consolation of cats and a forensic gaze that spares no one, least of all herself, Knox interrogates the act of caring; the ties that burn and bind, that we somehow survive.” —Diana Wichtel 
”An unforgettable record of love and pain, as wide and deep as the ocean and as mighty. There is such life in this, such wit and goodness. Telling the truth of how we are, all of us, trembling on the edge of a great and terrible mystery.” —Noelle McCarthy 
>>Never letting up.
>>Workshopping.
>>The film that laid an egg.
>>The closely noticed husband.

The Clean: In the dreamlife you need a rubber soul by Richard Langston $50
In 1978 in Dunedin the Kilgour brothers, Hamish and David, and their schoolfriend Peter Gutteridge, got together to form a band called The Clean. When Robert Scott joined in 1980 the band found a combination that endured for nearly forty years. The Clean profoundly changed alternative music: hitting the New Zealand charts for months with a single made for $50, 'Tally Ho!'; helping establish Flying Nun and a music scene independent of the big labels; pioneering a low-fi, do-it-yourself approach to rock music; and touring internationally to influence bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. Raw and immediate, this is the story as told by members of The Clean and their inner circle - fellow musicians such as Chris Knox, Martin Phillipps, Graeme Downes and Ira Kaplan, friends and family, pub promoters and sound engineers, and their good friend, Richard Langston. From teenagers in a Dunedin practice room to New York City on 9/11 - this is the band's history as it unfolds. A remarkable piece of multivocal oral history, bursting with images both familiar and surprising. [Flexibound]
”Much needed and long overdue. … A book that tells the story of the band at the heart of New Zealand underground music and that became synonymous with things like Flying Nun Records and the "Dunedin Sound" that travelled around the world. It is written by the ideal author who was not only there when it all happened, but who also recognised why it really mattered more than most.” —Matthew Goody, author of Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988
”In 1980 The Clean blew my mind open at Coronation Hall on a Sunday afternoon. I stood adrift on a sea of wooden floorboards, drinking classic clanging brilliant amp sound, guitar notes shimmering all around me like scattered metal hail . . . All I knew was that this was where all music came from.” —Alastair Galbraith
>>Look inside.
>>Anything could happen.
>>Getting older.
>>Obscurity blues.

Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne $42
Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly... Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her. [Paperback]
”Ghost Driver devises a new genre of administrative horror: by turns addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar. Malory's inner and outer worlds, like the novel's prose, feel agonisingly poised on a knife edge - gothic in the cruellest, off-kilter sense. I am obsessed.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Nell Osborne is a genius. Ghost Driver is brilliant and hilarious and dark and true. I loved it.” —Sarah Bernstien
>>Every wrong turn.
>>Getting evil freely.
>>A tapestry of humiliation.

Spit by David Brennan $38
Welcome to the village of Spit, where Danny Mulcahy is losing the run of himself, and where, as he and his friends dream of escaping, an unexpected death sets the rumour mill into motion. Suffering an unexplained, perpetual banishment the Spook of Spit is watching everyone and everything - nothing goes unnoticed. Bearing witness to the village's half-truths and suppressed secrets, fragments of its own dark and obscured history are unveiled. As events spiral out of control, the past, present and future are set to collide. Can there be redemption for past deeds? How do you escape when you are fated to remain? What does it take to break free from the confines of Spit? [Paperback]
”There are whispers of Synge and Kevin Barry but Brennan has a full-throated and thrilling voice of his own. Spit gets hold of you and won't let you go.” —Estelle Birdy, The Irish Independent
”Crackling with dark humour and incantatory force, every line pulses with linguistic relish.” —The Irish Times

The Rot by Evelyn Araluen $30
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar. Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise. From the author of Dropbear, winner of the 2022 Stella Prize. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Stella Prize.
”Rageful, desireful, artful, sorrowful, hauntful. A blaze of a book.” —Michelle de Kretser
”Evelyn Araluen's poetry and prose is created with a passionate intensity, razor-sharp intellect, beauty and compassion as she turns her mind to the broad sweep of history and a dynamic engagement with the spirit of our times.” —Alexis Wright"
”Blistering, brilliant, lacerating, wry, elegiac, The Rot is a hymn to girlhood, to resistance, to solidarity. Araluen is a masterful stylist, braiding air-fryer abjectioncore with bathtub meditations on the machinery of colonialism — and the whiplash and fury of witnessing and protesting genocide in the digital age. For all its allusions to mould and decay, The Rot is exhilarating in its defiance and staunchness.” —Jennifer Down 
>>Dissecting the rot.
>>Poetry, rage, and the power of not surrendering.
>>”I wrote The Rot.”

Three Stories of Forgetting by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (translated from Portuguese by Alison Entrekin) $35
Three men haunt these pages. Perhaps they are tormented ghosts who cannot find rest. All three have been expelled in some way, sent on solitary journeys into the night. Celestino, an old slave trader, returns to the solitude of his home and garden after a life of horrors. Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan who served on the Portuguese side in the Colonial War and has become a valet in Lisbon, writes endlessly to his daughter, asking for her forgiveness. And Bruma, an enslaved man, initiates a young writer, Eça de Queirós, into the world of literature. In discrete yet overlapping tales, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Three Stories of Forgetting explores the experiences of those who live within the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese Empire. In these unstable chapters, we find incarnations of our despair at the questions that history does not answer, and allegories that may yet reveal new ways of seeing through the dark. [Paperback]
"A brilliant, yet understated, critique of a past that Portugal most likely hopes to forget. Lyrical, enigmatic, and subtle: an accomplished work." —Kirkus Reviews
>>What the garden remembers.
>>600 years of colonialism.
>>Co-creatoirs.

The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson $48
The Wayfinder is an epic, sweeping novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu’i Tonga Empire. At its heart is Korero, a young girl chosen to save her people from the brink of starvation. Her quest takes her from her remote island home on a daring seafaring journey across a vast ocean empire built on power, consumption, and bloodshed. With the grandeur of Wolf Hall, Shogun, and War and Peace, The Wayfinder immerses readers in a world untouched by Western influence, evoking the lost art of oral storytelling. Far from a conventional swashbuckling adventure, it conjures a world of outrigger canoes and celestial navigation, weaving a narrative that is as much about survival and self-discovery as it is about the sweeping history of the Tongan people. In this monumental literary work, Adam Johnson explores themes of indigeneity, ecological balance, and the resilience of humanity in the face of scarcity, marking the novel as a meditation on both individual and cultural legacy. [Paperback]
"Novels are long divorced from the oral tradition; few are designed to last beyond their reading. But some books — Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), for instance, or Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (1985) — continue to be passed down, like legends. Predicting posterity is impossible, but The Wayfinder is this kind of work, modern and mythological. It is good enough, wondrous enough, to endure." —The Wall Street Journal
"An epic that feels less created than unearthed, Johnson's dizzying attention to the mercurial crosscurrents of conquest recalls Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. His bold melding of magic and psychological realism casts a spell as captivating as Marlon James's Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Yet The Wayfinder is sui generis — a tapestry of South Pacific myth, archetypal quest, political allegory, environmental jeremiad and feminist revision that feels both ancient and impossibly relevant." —The Washington Post
>>Celestial navigation.
>>A very real experience.

The Raven’s Eye Rebellion by Calire Mabey $25
When Getwin, Lea and Buckle — with the help of Sharp the raven — unearth the trickster Book of Blacke, they embark on a quest to undo the controls on their world, seeking justice for the Scribes who are forced to work and for those who have never been allowed to read or write. The city of Wyle comes alive with danger and intrigue as our heroes contend with the secrets of the Scholars Library, a magical boat, curious creatures, a secret reading and writing society, sleeping trees and the twists and turns of the ancient city. Can the friends stay safe? Will they be able to free the Scribes? Will Getwin's family ever be reunited? This sequel to award-winning The Raven's Eye Runaways is rich with wonder and a thirst for justice. [Paperback]
”Sparky and spooky, humorous and luminous.” —Elizabeth Knox

Kin by Tayari Jones $38
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother's death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life. A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South. From the author of An American Marriage. [Paperback]
"Tayari Jones's great subject is family loyalty. Kin alternates with metronomic precision between her main characters' first-person narratives. Loyalties and fortitude are repeatedly tested in this immersive drama. Resilience abounds." —The Wall Street Journal
"Jones's dazzling novel traces the complex range of the Black experience — rich and poor, queer and straight, blessed and cursed — in the Jim Crow South." —People
"One of the many pleasures of Kin is how deftly Jones builds the story within the context of the Jim Crow South in mid-twentieth century America. Another novelist might have made these broad social concerns the focus of the story, but Jones foregrounds her characters and lets them navigate these national tensions as naturally and confidently as they move through the streets of Atlanta and Memphis." —Ron Charles

Lost Wonders: 10 tales of extinction from the 21st century by Tom Lathan $28
Lost Wonders is a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth. From giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies, Tom Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime. Drawing on the personal recollections of the people who studied these species, as well as those who tried but ultimately failed to save them, Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world. It is also an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp. Most of the species considered in this interesting book were unique to isolated locations in the Pacific. [Paperback]
”Lathan's superb storytelling makes ecological crisis personal, local and often scarily visible. He doesn't let the tragedy hide, as it usually does, behind graphs and abstractions. Yet there's hope here too, in spades. This is an exhilarating and vital book.” —Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild
”A beautifully crafted elegy for the lost species of our age. In repopulating the world with extinct snails, lizards, bats and rats, Tom Lathan makes us marvel and care almost as much as the conservationists who tried and failed to save them.” —Kate Teltscher

The Only Way Is Up: On foot to Rome by Jennifer Andrewes $38
Setting out from Canterbury and walking some 2400 km to Rome along the Via Francigena, Jennifer Andrewes undertakes a personal journey across England, France, Switzerland and Italy. What begins as a physical journey soon becomes something deeper: an exploration of momentum, mindset, and the quiet power of putting one foot in front of the other when the way ahead is uncertain. Structured as a series of daily stages, the book follows the rhythms of pilgrimage life — early starts, long days on the road, chance encounters, moments of solitude, and the simple rituals that sustain a walker: coffee stops, conversations, rest, reflection. Along the way, Jennifer meets fellow walkers from around the world, navigates doubt and discomfort, and learns to trust the unfolding path rather than trying to control the outcome. While written through the lens of walking to Rome, The Only Way Is Up speaks to anyone standing at a crossroads. The author’s experience living with Parkinson’s is part of the landscape, but it does not dominate the narrative. [Paperback]
”'I have not walked the Via Francigena, but I recognise much in Jennifer's account from my own journeys on foot. Walking has always given me clarity, perspective and a steadier sense of leadership and decision-making. This book captures that rhythm beautifully. With insight and honesty, Jennifer shows how sustained movement builds resilience, momentum, and unexpected connection. A generous, reflective and uplifting account of pilgrimage as a framework for navigating change.” —Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand
>>The power of walking.