NEW RELEASES (8.9.23)

A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

My Work by Olga Ravn (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $48
After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write. My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms — fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters — to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature. From the author of the International Booker-shortlisted The Employees.
”This novel from Olga Ravn, this new golden notebook, needs to be read by absolutely anyone who has known the quiet madness and claustrophobic happiness of the interior, especially mothers who also long for a life of literature. But this novel absolutely needs to be read by everyone else as well. Oh Olga Ravn, always inventing new forms, you are a genius, how do you do it?” —Kate Zambreno
”My Work is ferocious, horrific, elegant, insightful, irreverent, and funny. Can a woman still be a person after motherhood? Of course not, Ravn argues, or rather, admits. And in prose, poems, and journal entries, she documents all the absurdity and repulsiveness of growing a creature in your body and then raising it. It is a magnificent and satisfying meditation. One of the most honest and revelatory works of fiction about motherhood I have ever read. Ravn’s writing is ecstatic, philosophical, and addictive.” —Heather O’Neill
>>Eighth beginning.
>>Read our reviews of The Employees.

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright $37
”Carmel had been alone all her life. She had been alone since she was twelve years old. The baby knew all this. They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother's loneliness had been.” Nell — funny, brave and so much loved — is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel's famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love — spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter — sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.
”The Wren, The Wren is a magnificent novel. Anne Enright's stylistic brilliance seems to put the reader directly in touch with her characters and the rich territory of their lives.” —Sally Rooney
”Gritty, sad, sly, riotous. Gem-packed language that fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker. A must-read.” —Margaret Atwood

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes (translated from Italian by Anne Goldstein) $37
Out running errands, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse - she buys a shiny black notebook. Hiding it from her husband and children, she begins to record and scrutinise her life, writing of the daily domestic routine, her children's struggles in love and minor rifts in her marriage. Gradually, the solid structure of her family life crumbles away, and Valeria discovers the dissatisfaction that has been lurking behind her devotion to her family for years. What part has the notebook played in the changes which it records? Forbidden Notebook is a rediscovered classic of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri.
”Mind blown...this book is the female Stoner!” —Mia Levitin
”One of Italy's most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers.” —Jhumpa Lahiri
>>Transgressive power.

The Long Form by Kate Briggs $33
It’s early morning and there’s a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she’ll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.
”Sometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect. Makes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken.” —The Guardian
”The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.” —Preti Taneja
”Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.” —Kathryn Scanlan

The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks $37
When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman's child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences. Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it. Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention. The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human. It asks the question — just because you can do something, does it mean you should?
”This is a genuinely thought-provoking piece of fiction. You could devour it in a day and be wholly transported into the near future, then set it back down, dazed but enlightened, in the present day where you will see the world anew in all its wonders and frailties.” —The Times
”A stunning novel: profoundly moving, deeply unsettling, thought-provoking and prescient but also a wonderful and life-affirming love story.” —James Holland
”Once I had started I literally could not stop. It really is his greatest novel yet, and of course beautifully written in that wonderful, understated style.” —Antony Beevor

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer $28
This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman's life — told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease. Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia's past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform. Guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia's youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love. In turn, each will take their place in the shifting landscape of Lia's body; at the center of which dances a gleeful narrator, learning her life from the inside, growing more emboldened by the day. Longlisted for the Booker Prize. Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize. Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
”An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language.” —Daisy Johnson

Korean Home Cooking: 100 authentic everyday recipes, from Bulgogi to Bibimbap by Jina Jung $55
Elegantly simple, big on flavour and strong on comfort, these family favourites with step-by-step instructions make an ideal introduction to Korean cooking at your place. Combining several small dishes allows for a constant flow of people at the table, and a bright array of colours and flavours. Start with traditional, simple and tasty family recipes such as Kimchi Fried Rice, Bibimbap and Pork Bulgolgi, and stay for the opportunity to learn new skills, like fermenting your own pickles, and creating classic stews, soups and your own Korean barbecue.
>>Look inside!

The World According to Colour: A cultural history by James Fox $32
The world comes to us in colour.  But colour lives as much in our imaginations as it does in our surroundings, as this book reveals. Each chapter immerses the reader in a single colour, drawing together stories from the histories of art and humanity to illuminate the meanings it has been given over the eras and around the globe. Showing how artists, scientists, writers, philosophers, explorers and inventors have both shaped and been shaped by these myriad meanings, Fox reveals how, through colour, we can better understand their cultures, as well as our own.

Control: The dark history and troubling present of eugenics by Adam Rutherford $30
Control is a book about what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls "a defining idea of the twentieth century." Inspired by Darwin's ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for moulding the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty years — from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing techniques — have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream. Eugenics has "a short history, but a long past," Rutherford writes. The first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their genocidal enactment in the twentieth century. The second part of the audiobook explores how eugenics operates today, as part of our language and culture, as part of current political and racial discussions, and as an eternal temptation to powerful people who wish to sculpt society through reproductive control. Chilling and perceptive. Now in paperback.

Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky by Rebecca Lim $20
What if you were forced to set sail for a country that didn't want you, to meet a father you couldn't remember? Thirteen-year-old Fu, his younger sister, Pei, and their mother live in a small rural community in Southern China that is already enduring famine conditions when it is collectivised as part of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward campaign that ultimately led to economic disaster, widespread famine and millions of deaths. After tragedy strikes, and threatened with separation, Fu and Pei set out on a perilous journey across countries and oceans to find their father, who left for Australia almost a decade earlier. With nothing to guide them but a photograph and some letters in a language they cannot read, they must draw on all their courage and tenacity just to survive - and perhaps forge a better life for themselves.