On short-listing Charlotte Wood’s STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL for the 2024 Booker Prize, the judges said: “Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional — a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges — it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.”
Episodes by Alex Scott $40
This astoundingly good Aotearoa graphic novel subtly and devastatingly investigates the crushing disjunctions between media-mediated popular culture (as distilled especially in product advertising) and an actual world comprised of ‘atypical’ individuals yearning for authentic contact and acknowledgement. A smart-mouthed kid provokes the wrong flatmate, a misguided teen gets schooled by her crush, and a former child star struggles to escape his past. Seductive advertising fantasies collide headfirst with everyday life in this delicately interwoven tale of identity, desire and coming of age even in adulthood. Episodes is a thrillingly observed and well-drawn critique of our media-obsessed society.
”Episodes is funny, sad and strange in the way that so much of the ordinary and familiar is strange. Like a word you say over and over until its oddness is revealed.” —Sharon Murdoch
The 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE has been awarded to the subtle and fearless Korean writer, HAN KANG.
“Han Kang’s intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Her empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” —Nobel judges’ citation
“Han Kang is one of the greatest living writers. She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be.” —Eimear McBride
THE VEGETARIAN (translated by Deborah Smith)
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams — invasive images of blood and brutality — torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
HUMAN ACTS (translated by Deborah Smith)
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless.
THE WHITE BOOK (translated by Deborah Smith, with photographs by Choi Jinhyuk)
While on a writer's residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. The White Book becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white — breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin — and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes. As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister's death, Han Kang's trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. The White Book — ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister — offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.
GREEK LESSONS (translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon)
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish — the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.
WE DO NOT PART (translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris)
One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird — or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting.
Publishing in February 2025 — order now!
Patrik, who sometimes calls himself ‘the patient’, is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can’t manage to get past the first question on the registration form: “What is your nationality?” Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man’s name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik…
In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Yoko Tawada’s mesmerizing novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.
* The New Directions title is Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel , the Dialogue Books edition is titled Spontaneous Acts (same book, different titles, different jackets… buy the one you prefer!)
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In this propulsive satire of the misogyny deeply embedded in the Western canon, Tokarczuk playfully pulls the tails of intellectual tropes found in Thomas Mann’s great novel of ideas, The Magic Mountain, published 100 years before. In both novels a young man finds himself subsumed by an alpine sanitorium and subject to the conversations, foibles and opinions of his fellow refugees from ‘ordinary’ time. In both novels, the outside world (so to call it) changes in threatening ways as the characters are isolated from it, but Tokarczuk manages to splice into hers additional strands of horror and the macabre, and a sustained sense of the ludicrous that makes The Empusium simultaneously both light and deep, both intellectual and indulgent, angry, spooky, and very funny. Recommended!
WINNER: Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024
WINNER: The Stella Prize 2024
WINNER: The James Tait Black Prize – Fiction 2024
WINNER: University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
WINNER: ALS Gold Medal 2024
SHORTLISTED: The Dublin Literary Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – People’s Choice Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Indigenous Writers’ Prize 2024
SHORTLISTED: Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
SHORTLISTED: Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award 2024
LONGLISTED: Voss Literary Prize 2024
‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of [Alexis Wright’s] work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her “collective memoir” of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.’ — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
This multi-award winning novel has been described as ambitious, accomplished, astonishing, a wonder of twenty-first century fiction, fiercely political, fiercely and gloriously funny, uncompromising, a genre-defiant epic, monumental, urgent, dazzling, exhilarating, polyphonic, and a formidable act of imaginative synthesis.
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
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The recently published Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa is an outstanding publication. Beautifully produced and thought-provoking, Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists. From ancient whatu kakahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa.
How have tangata whenua and tangata tiriti artists negotiated their relationships to each other, and to this place? How have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land and water, family and community, politics and the nation? With more than 150 striking images, and essays by Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith, Megan Tamati-Quennell, alongside Kirsty Baker, Sight Lines is waiting for a place on your art library shelf.
“An exceptional book. Thoughtfully conceived, well written, timely and significant. It manages to be both scholarly – informed by the state of art writing in the present – and accessible to a general readership interested in art, women and feminism in Aotearoa.” — Peter Brunt, Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka
Scaffolding is the story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London, so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clementine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood. Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Eric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we've known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who've lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
”Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly — a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideas. The prose is as well crafted as Elkin's nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed. Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did.” —Guardian
The 2024 Winner of the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year is Stacy Gregg (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Maru Hauraki) with her latest book, Nine Girls. Gregg is a household name in New Zealand, and in the UK, with over 30 pony books to her name, numerous awards, along with commercial success. Nine Girls is a departure from the pony stories. Gone is the pony, but in its place is a talking eel. Titch and her whanua have moved to Ngāruawāhia. Adjusting to a small town where she feels out of place is no easy feat, but with a best friend, Tania, the lure of hidden treasure and the unexpected encounter with her eel connecting Titch to her past, adventure is never far away.
In Nine Girls Stacy Gregg draws on her own childhood, and being an outsider; she explores issues of colonisation, racism and striving to find yourself and connect with your heritage. With Gregg’s expert story-telling this coming-of-age story balances humour, adventure, and emotion — the perfect ingredients for a standout book that embraces important themes and history for both Māori and Pākehā readers.
WINNER: Victorian Prize for Literature 2024
WINNER: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2024
WINNER: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2024
SHORTLISTED: Mary Gilmore Award 2024
HIGHLY COMMENDED: Anne Elder Award 2023
Grace Yee’s debut book Chinese Fish took out the top poetry prizes in Aotearoa and Australia this year, and the Premier Literary Award in Australia. It’s sharp, provocative and laced with humour. It confronts racism, explores expectation and the complexities of migration. And it does so, brilliantly, shaking its poetic form with verve and intelligence to reward the reader with a deeply layered and thought-provoking experience.
In the words of our poet laurate, Chris Tse, it’s “an unflinchingly honest look at life behind closed doors, where resentment simmers, generations clash, and individual dreams are set aside for the interests of family.”
Chinese Fish is a family saga that spans the 1960s through to the 1980s. Narrated in multiple voices and laced with archival fragments and scholarly interjections, it offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women and girls in a community that has historically been characterised as both a ‘yellow peril’ menace and an exotic ‘model minority’.
This beautifully written short novel subtly explores themes of language, isolation, and connection. When the sole inhabitant of a remote island beyond Shetland gives shelter to a person who arrives there, little knowing that the injured visitor has come to evict him, a fragile bond begins to grow between the two, despite — or because of — their lack of a shared language. Davies’s crystalline prose captures every nuance of the characters’ vulnerabilities and strengths, and is movingly evocative of its remote setting and of the contexts of the Highland Clearances in the 1840s.
Talia Marshall’s memoir-journey is undertaken in old cars, pauses to doss on sofas throughout the motu, and moves through place and through time until the two blur and reconfigure into a single substance, the living and the dead pushing past each other in the urgency of their stories. Marshall has a rare gift to look straight at difficulties or embarrassments from which most of us look away, and the poignancy and humour of her observations and phrasing draw us to discover humanity in places of damage, tragedy, awkwardness or uncertainty. Whether clambering the uphill slopes of Aotearoa’s less-than-shiny nowadays, peeling the layers of history and experience that make the whenua of Te Tau Ihu, encountering Te Rauparaha through her tīpuna Tūtepourangi, or dealing with the unwanted attentions of troubled or troubling men, Marshall finds strength in the women who precede her, walk by her side, or karanga to her from the future.
Sarah Perry’s new novel explores conjunctions of love, faith, and science, as her characters are pulled together, apart, and together again, moved by forces as inexorable as those that underlie the bodies they observe astronomically. What constitutes freedom in this world, and what releases us into the wonder that is our own existence? “Extraordinary and ambitious. What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry's luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.” —Observer
“An expertly braided novel about the entanglement of personal and national transformations, set amid the tumult of 1980s Berlin. Kairos unfolds around a chaotic affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a 53-year-old writer in East Berlin. Erpenbeck’s narrative prowess lies in her ability to show how momentous personal and historical turning points intersect, presented through exquisite prose that marries depth with clarity. She masterfully refracts generation-defining political developments through the lens of a devastating relationship, thus questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Kairos is a bracing philosophical inquiry into time, choice, and the forces of history.” — International Booker Prize judges' citation [Now in paperback!]
Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Brotherless Night was described by the judges as ‘A powerful book that has the intimacy of memoir, the range and ambition of an epic, and tells a truly unforgettable story about the Sri Lankan civil war.’
It’s the story of sixteen-year-old Sashi who wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K's invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. She must ask herself — is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?
With accolades from authors and star reviews from critics, along with taking home the prize from a very strong shortlist (iwhich included Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren) this is one to add to your pile of excellent reading.
‘A blazingly brilliant novel . . . With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of a world full of turmoil, but one in which human connections and shared stories can teach us how-and as importantly, why-to survive.’ — Celeste Ng, New York Times
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A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
At once an intelligent discussion of urgent issues — from the ambivalent needs for independence and belonging that beset us individually, to our collective crises of politics, environment and climate — and an enjoyable, witty and often very funny novel that propels the reader deep into the hearts and lives of its characters, The Alternatives tells the story of four successful Irish sisters, three of whom come together to overcome their alienation from each other over the years since the deaths of the parents when they were teenagers — and decide to seek the fourth, who really doesn’t want to be found. Both deeply humane and a compelling novel of ideas.
Rachel Cusk continues her project of kicking away traditional novelistic crutches to force herself and her readers to engage differently with fiction and to the ‘real world’ to which it relates. Forensic in approach and coolly crystalline in style, Parade splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distill, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations, the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the personal and societal scales. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels — and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction — Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. {Thomas}
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the costs of making paradise on earth. But amidst larger patterns of privilege and exclusion, she also finds rebel outposts and communal dreams, including Derek Jarman's improbable queer utopia and William Morris's fertile vision of a common Eden. The Garden Against Time : In Search of a Common Paradise is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens — not as places to hide from the world but as sites of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
”I don't think I've ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind.” —Observer
”What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.” —Nigel Slater
”A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden's contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise.” —Neil Tennant
”Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read.” —Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well Gardened Mind
”No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained.” —Philip Hoare
David Coventry's new novel is informed and formed and de-formed by his experience suffering from ME, an illness of chronic systemic dysregulation that makes ‘normal’ life impossible, fractures the supposed link between the self and its biography, narrows and distorts the focus of awareness, and disestablishes comfortable conventional notions of the ongoingness of time. Dealing not much at all with the half-life of bed and sofa that is the main occupation of the chronically ill, the book is rather a multi-stranded literary performance of remembered travels, conversations, stories and encounters, seemingly Coventry’s own or those of persons close to him, burning with moments of great vividness and intensity yet also constrained by the blockages and blanks imposed on narrative by his illness, which reaches backwards through the medium of his memory to the whole of his life and beyond. Coventry’s illness is an unconsented catalyst to ways of writing freed from the performative conventions of literature and into territory where the urge to impart sense and form burns where both sense and form are impossible. The book contains much that I found compelling, thoughtful, memorable, suitably frustrating and disconcerting. It is a unique contribution to the literature of illness. —Thomas
