NEW RELEASES (4.12.25)

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.

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş $29
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love. [Paperback]
>>Building a bespoke culture.
>>The melancholic textures of feeling alive.

John Reynolds: The Lost Hours by Laurence Simmonds $85
The book frames and documents a series of paintings and collected associated writings from John Reynolds’s Lost Hours project. This idiosyncratic investigation delves into the mysterious 28-hour disappearance of Colin McCahon, a renowned New Zealand artist, in autumn 1984. The event occurred on the eve of McCahon’s major retrospective launch at the Sydney Biennale. The project not only pays homage to McCahon but also explores themes of time, memory, and the impact of dislocation on artistic consciousness. The book can be started either at the dark end or the bright end, with McCahon caught somehow in the pincers between the two. Impressive, beguiling, and nicely produced. [Wrappered paperback]
>>Look inside!

Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry $40
”There was relief, and there was loss — it was the saddest thing we'd ever seen, and the best thing we had ever done.” This is the story of the last days of Sarah Perry's father-in-law David's life, and also in its way the story of all our lives, and what we have in common. David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man — he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was. Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses — but his disease progressed so quickly that often they were alone with him. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives. Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief — it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love. [Paperback]
”What a luminously beautiful book, an instant classic. Every page is suffused with such honesty, tenderness and love. Few people have written about dying with such clear-eyed accuracy and immense humanity. Never flinching, never sugar-coating, Sarah has captured brilliantly how caring for someone you love in their final days can upend everything you thought you knew about living. Please read this book. It may very well change how you live.” —Rachel Clarke
”I have just sat and read Sarah's wonderful book, nodding and agreeing with so many tiny details that she has noticed and reflected on with a writer's eye and a loving daughter-in-law's heart. Just beautiful. I hope her luminous writing will console and encourage her readers, all of whom are mortals. This book is a slice of reality that comforts even as it confronts us. It is a book filled with love and human frailty, and I was spellbound.” —Kathryn Mannix

Fatherhood by Caleb Klaces $39
Following the birth of their first child, a couple move out of the capital to the northern countryside, where they believe the narrator's great-grandfather, a Russian emigrant, was laid to rest. The father dedicates himself to parenting, writing and conversation with his dead ancestor, newly conscious of the ties that bind the present to the past. It is a time of startling intimacies, baby-group small talk, unexpected relationships and tender rhythms, when every clock seems to tell a different time, and the solidity of language is broken. As his daughter begins to speak, the father's gentleness turns to unexplainable rage. He begins to question who he must protect his child from - the outside world or himself. Their new house, the family discover, is built on a floodplain. Moving between history, memory and autobiography, its shifting form captures a life and language split open by fatherhood. An experiment in rewriting masculinity, it asks how bodies can share both a house and a planet. [Paperback]
>>Life and language split open.
>>Cascading generations.
>>Great expectations.
>>Metaphorical breakdown.
>>Caleb Klaces’s latest book, Mr Outside, is also remarkable.

Loren Ipsum by Andrew Gallix $38
Writers are being murdered. Heads are rolling; ponytails are chopped off; victims tarred and feathered. The French literary world lives in fear of the next attack. A nihilistic terrorist group takes responsibility, but their objective remains obscure. Loren Ipsum is an English journalist, who moves to Paris to research a monograph on an underground writer called Adam Wandle. The terrorists' slogans are all culled from his works. Has Adam been co-opted as their guru, or is he actually their eminence grise? And what of Loren Ipsum herself? Will they ever be able to leave the 21st century and make it to the mythical Blue Island? Set on the Riviera and in Paris, Loren Ipsum is a darkly comic satirical novel. [Paperback]
>>Gleeful scorn on the pretensions of contemporary literary life.

Lost Evangeline (A ‘Norendy’ tale) by Kaye DiCamillo, illustrated by Sophie Blackall $28
When a shoemaker discovers a tiny girl (as small as a mouse!) in his shop, he takes her in, names her Evangeline, and raises her as his own. The shoemaker’s wife, however, fears that Evangeline has bewitched her husband, so when an opportunity arises to rid herself of the girl, she takes it. Evangeline finds herself far from her adopted father and her home, a tiny girl lost in the wide world. But she is brave, and she is resourceful, and with the help of those she meets on her journey—including a disdainful and self-satisfied cat—she may just find her way again. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>The other Norendy tales (they are not a sequence; they can be read in any order!).
>>Read Stella’s review of The Puppets of Spelhorst.
>>Read Stella’s review of The Hotel Balzaar.

All Consuming: Why we eat the way we eat now by Ruby Tandoh $45
Being into food — following and making it, queuing for it and discussing it — is no longer a subculture. It's become mass culture. The food landscape is more expansive and dizzying by the day. Recipes, once passed from hand to hand, now flood newspaper supplements and social media. Our tastes are engineered in food factories, hacked by supermarkets and influenced by Instagram reels. Ruby Tandoh's startlingly original analysis traces this extraordinary transformation over the past seventy-five years, making sense of this electrifying new era by examining the social, economic, and technological forces shaping the foods we hunger for today. Exploring the evolution of the cookbook and light-speed growth of bubble tea, the advent of TikTok critics and absurdities of the perfect dinner party, Tandoh's laser-sharp investigation leaves her questioning: how much are our tastes, in fact, our own? [Hardback]
”A fascinating, sometimes shocking, eye-opener that is also brilliantly funny.” —Claudia Roden
”Endlessly inspirational.” —Nigel Slater
>>Endless hype queues.
>>Too many recipes already.
>>Digested food culture.

Building People by Craig Moller $48
Building People is a playful collection of Ngāti Haua architect Craig Moller's lockdown-era drawings, where buildings come to life with human and animal traits. Blending humour, warmth, and charm, Moller turns architecture into a personal, expressive art form — reminding us that buildings, like drawings, are ultimately about people. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
>>Cheese scones.

This Way Up: When maps go wrong (and why it matters) by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Forman $40
Packed with humour and fascinating facts, This Way Up takes a deep dive into the world’s most intriguing and baffling map blunders. From ancient miscalculations to modern mishaps, each chapter uncovers a unique tale of cartographic chaos and the people responsible for it. These aren’t just ordinary mistakes – they are spectacularly wrong maps that tell a story of adventure, error and unexpected humour, with each one offering a new piece to the puzzle of ‘What on earth happened there?’ [Paperback]
”The funniest book on geography ever written.” —Rufus Hound
>>Meet the Map Men.

Japan: An autobiography, II by Peter Shaw $48
Following the success of his first volume, Peter Shaw continues his entertaining musings in answer to the question why he goes to Japan so often. Both novice and seasoned travelers to Japan will find invaluable insights and information to guide them on their next journey. The author takes the reader into rural Japan in the footsteps of the much-travelled poet Basho (1644-1694). Ranging far beyond the usual tourist traps, he explores easily accessible temples and shrines, delights in Japan's unique regional cuisine and engages with interesting people. The nicely presented and illustrated book also considers topics such as the place of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japanese life and unexpected connections between Japanese and Māori culture all from a uniquely New Zealand perspective. It is punctuated with anecdotes, tips, and recipes. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>Get the first volume, too!

Behind the Hill by Robin Robilliard $40
Behind The Hill is a social history, recording people’s lives from interviews, from one end of Golden Bay to the other. Every portrayal has something to say about the values and norms of the time. The book follows the revolutionary changes that affected one of New Zealand’s most isolated areas over succeeding decades — with the arrival of hippies, worldly foreigners, IT specialists, retired professionals and bearded environmentalists. Robilliard identifies the advantage to children brought up in the pre-digital age, with little money, but with the freedom to run wild and take risks, to develop character and survival skills. Equally important, life behind the physical and psychological barrier of the Tākaka Hill, has forced residents to become resilient and develop leadership ability, that might not, in easier circumstances, and larger populations, have been discovered. From the author of Hard Country. [Paperback]