NEW RELEASES (9.6.23)

New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies.

Pet by Catherine Chidgey $38
The new novel from the winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine's sense that something isn't quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie. Set in New Zealand in the 1980s and probing themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism, Pet will take a rightful place next to other classic portraits of childhood betrayal.
"A writer of formidable resources, a deft stylist possessed of uncanny imaginative acuity." —The Guardian
>>Wrestling with admiration.
>>Find out about the Acorn-winning The Axeman’s Carnival.
>>Other books by Catherine Chidgey.

Through Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1860—1960 by Lissa Mitchell $70
The contribution of women to the first century of photography has been overlooked across the world, including in New Zealand. With few exceptions, photographic histories have tended to focus on the male maker. This important book tilts the balance, unearthing a large and hitherto unknown number of women photographers, both professional and amateur, who operated in New Zealand from the 1860s to 1960, either as assistants in the early studios or later running studios in their own right. Through images and individual stories, it brings an important group of photographers into the light.
>>Have a look inside!

The Specters of Algeria by Hwang Yeo Jung (translated from Korean by Yewon Jung) $38
A group of dramatists commit what was a subversive act during the South Korean military dictatorships of the twentieth century — distributing copies of Karl Marx’s only surviving play, The Specters of Algeria. The consequences of the brutal crackdown by the authorities would set the directions of the lives of two children of the group’s members, Yul and Jing. Despite the deep connection between them, Yul would open up an alteration shop in Seoul and Jing would move to Europe. But now, Cheolsu, a dissatisfied employee at a community theatre, is unearthing the truth about The Specters of Algeria and questioning whether the human situation is as absurd as the play asserts.
>>Fact and fiction are irrevelant.

Owlish by Dorothy Tse (translated by Natascha Bruce) $35
In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition — a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalisingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty. Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, Dorothy Tse's extraordinary novel is a inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.
”Beguilingly eerie, richly textured, the pages of Owlish are drenched in strange beauty and menace. Like all the best fairy tales, it reveals the dark truths that we would rather not look at directly, and does so with a surreal and singular clarity.” —Sophie Mackintosh
”Dorothy Tse is a magnificent historian of unreal places. Her sage and serious characters are cast adrift in realities that are neither sage nor serious at all — and possibly impossible. Her parallel worlds and paradoxes brilliantly illuminate our own reality, with all its fictions masquerading as facts (and vice versa). Boundlessly creative, richly philosophical — I loved this book.” —Joanna Kavenna
>>The translator reads from the novel.

Fresh Dirt from the Grave by Giovanna Rivero (translated by Isabel Adey) $38
In Fresh Dirt from the Grave , a hillside is "an emerald saddle teeming with evil and beauty." It is this collision of harshness and tenderness that animates Giovanna Rivero's short stories, where no degree of darkness (buried bodies, lost children, wild paroxysms of violence) can take away from the gentleness she shows all violated creatures. A mad aunt haunts her family, two Bolivian children are left on the outskirts of a Metis reservation outside Winnipeg, a widow teaches origami in a women's prison and murders, housefires, and poisonings abound, but so does the persistent bravery of people trying to forge ahead in the face of the world. They are offered cruelty, often, indifference at best, and yet they keep going. Rivero has reworked the boundaries of the gothic to engage with pre-Columbian ritual, folk tales, sci-fi and eroticism, and found in the wound their humanity and the possibility of hope.
>>Other books by Latin American authors published by the wonderful Charco Press.

Honouring Our Ancestors: Takatāpui, Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQI+ well-being edited by Alison Green and Leonie Pihama $35
In these rigorous and challenging essays, writers from Aotearoa and Turtle Island (Canada and the United States of America) explore the well-being of takatāpui, two-spirit, and Māori and Indigenous LGBTQI+ communities. Themes include resistance, reclamation, empowerment, transformation and healing. Central to Honouring Our Ancestors is the knowledge that, before colonisation, Indigenous peoples had their own healthy understandings of gender, sexual identities and sexuality. Some of these understandings have survived the onslaught of colonisation; others require decolonisation so that our Indigenous nations can begin to heal. Through this lens, the writers gathered here contribute their knowledge and experience of structural and social change.

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel $23
This novel tells the story of an unnamed narrator’s involvement in a seemingly unequal romantic relationship. With a clear and unforgiving eye, Sheena Patel makes startling connections between power struggles at the heart of human relationships to those in the wider world, offering a devastating critique of social media, access and patriarchal systems.
”A fast, fizzing cherry bomb of a debut, mining the darkest depths of coercion, seduction and abuser dynamics. Like a sociopathic ex who's stalking your Twitter, I'm a Fan will stick with you for a very long time.” —Observer
”I'm a Fan digs its nails deep into the contradictions of power and status with a brutally steady gaze. It's rare to find a book so thrillingly unafraid to offend, so willing to forgo niceties, so full of verve and bristling with insight.” —Alexandra Kleeman
>>Say the thing that you’re not supposed to say.
>>Sheena Patel wants to make you feel sick.

As the Trees Have Grown by Stephanie de Montalk $25
The poems in Stephanie de Montalk's new collection engage with the world as if through a window - cloaked, distanced, guided by the movements of the seasons, the weather, and always, trees. As de Montalk seeks a cure to the life-changing limitations of her physical self, she finds something close to solace in dreaming. These poems are always evocative, mysterious, reaching towards the possibility and hope of healing.

Tangi by Witi Ihimaera $30
First released 50 years ago, Tangi was Witi Ihimaera's debut novel and the first to be published by a Māori. A landmark literary event, it went on to win the James Wattie Book of the Year Award. He was 29 years old at the time. At the centre of the novel is the story of a father and son set within a three-day tangihanga. Revisiting the text for this anniversary edition, Ihimaera has added more details and developed the nascent themes that have continued to preoccupy him over a lifetime of writing.

The Selected Poems by James K. Baxter (selected and edited by John Weir) $40
James K. Baxter (1926–72) was, as he once described Louis MacNeice, “the most human of poets”: a flawed, passionate, complex, haunted man, a ‘lively sinner’ who revealed himself fully and unapologetically in his poems. As editor John Weir has written in his introduction, “from his various quarrels with God, self, society and death emerged a body of work which reveals him to be not merely the most accessible and complete poet to have lived in New Zealand, but also one of the great English-language poets of the twentieth century.” Weir’s selection of James K. Baxter’s best poems has been made from the more than three thousand poems that comprise his literary legacy.
>>The Complete Poems.
>>The Complete Prose.
>>Letters of a Poet.
>>Uncancelled.

The Last Paper Crane by Kerry Drewery $23
A Japanese teenager, Mizuki, is worried about her grandfather who is clearly desperately upset about something. He says that he has never got over something that happened in his past and gently Mizuki persuades him to tell her what it is. We are taken to 1945, Hiroshima, and Mizuki's grandfather as a teenage boy chatting at home with his friend Hiro. Moments later the horrific nuclear bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. What follows is a searing account of the blinding flash, the harrowing search for family and the devastation both human and physical. There is also the very moving and human story as the two teenage boys with great bravery search for and find Keiko, Hiro's five-year-old sister. But then Keiko is lost when Mizuki's grandfather has no option but to leave her in a safe place while he goes for help... Despite a desperate search in the aftermath of the bomb, where he leaves origami folded paper cranes for Keiko with his address on everywhere a survivor could be, he cannot find her.

The First Move by Jenny Ireland $24
Juliet believes girls like her — girls with arthritis — don't get their own love stories. She exists at the edges of her friends' social lives, skipping parties to play online chess under a pseudonym with strangers around the world. There, she isn't just 'the girl with crutches'. Ronan is the new kid — good looking, smart, a bad boy plagued by guilt over what happened to his brother Ciaran. Chesslife is his escape; there, he's not just 'the boy with the brother'. Juliet thinks Ronan thinks someone like Ronan could never be interested in someone like her — and she wouldn't want him to be anyway — he always acts like he's cooler than everyone else. Little do they know they've already discovered each other online, and have more in common than they think.
>>Advance your pawn.