Three ways to get all your seasonal gift shopping done painlessly (pleasurably!) at VOLUME:

1. Ask our advice. We’ve had decades’ worth of experience helping all sorts of people to choose just the right book to give as a gift (or to keep for themselves). Just send us your gift-recipient list and we will send you some suggestions from our shelves (or we can arrange a Zoom consultation, if you like!). We can gift-wrap the books and dispatch them to you or to the recipients, or have them ready to collect from our door. >>Ask our advice now.

2. Ask us for something particular. Is there a particular book that you would like to give, or that someone has requested as a gift? If we don’t have the book on our shelves already, we will tell you how long it will take to arrive and find the best option for you. >>Tell us what you are looking for.

3. Browse our website and choose. Our shelves are full of interesting, well-written and beautiful books — all selected by us for their excellence — and our shop website is arranged to help you choose just the right thing. Find the authors or titles you love with the quick-search bar — or make discoveries! Click on our website’s categories and sub-categories bring you to ‘virtual shelves’ of books of similar interest (where relevant, you will find page-views of the insides of the books, to help you choose).
   Here are a few shortcuts to some really good books:

• Fiction (for adults):
  If you are wanting a well-written, vital novel, anything on the Booker Prize short list would be ideal.
  Or choose from the Goldsmiths Prize short list for something more innovative.
  Our curated selection of Translated fiction includes the books listed for this year’s International Booker Prize.
  It has been a strong year for Aotearoa fiction!
  We have many interesting books published by Small Presses in Aotearoa and overseas.
  And we have interesting books for those who like Historical Fiction, Crime, and Speculative or Dystopian Fiction.
  And Poetry always make a good gift!

• Books for children:
  We have excellent choices in everything from Board Books to Picture Books, to Junior Fiction, to Senior (or ‘Middle Grade’) Fiction, to Novels for Young Adults.
  Choose from our selection of children’s books from Aotearoa, or from our books in te reo Māori.
  And we have beautiful and informative books of Non-Fiction, and Graphic Novels for Children, too!

• This is the time of year in which a Cook Book, an Art Book, or a Book about Gardening would make a perfect gift!
  And we have interesting Graphic Novels, too…

• Our Culture section has books about creative and lifestyle pursuits.

• Our Society section includes books on History and Politics for those interested in how people interact — in the past or in the present. It is more important than ever to understand the history and present of Aotearoa.

• As the title suggests, our section on the Mind includes books on Philosophy and Psychology.

• And our Science section brings you fine writing and the latest information and thinking in many fields.

• We now have a Biography and Memoir section!

• For a really special gift, why not give a Volume Reading Subscription! We have a subscription menu for adults, and a subscription menu for children — but, really, we can tailor a subscription in any way to suit both the reader and the giver (just ask!).

We can gift-wrap the books* and dispatch them to you or to the recipients — or have them ready to collect from our door.
(*we do not charge for gift-wrapping)

Three ways to get all your seasonal gift shopping done painlessly (pleasurably!) at VOLUME:

1. Ask our advice. We’ve had decades’ worth of experience helping all sorts of people to choose just the right book to give as a gift (or to keep for themselves). Just send us your gift-recipient list and we will send you some suggestions from our shelves (or we can arrange a Zoom consultation, if you like!). We can gift-wrap the books and dispatch them to you or to the recipients, or have them ready to collect from our door. >>Ask our advice now.

2. Ask us for something particular. Is there a particular book that you would like to give, or that someone has requested as a gift? If we don’t have the book on our shelves already, we will tell you how long it will take to arrive and find the best option for you. >>Tell us what you are looking for.

3. Browse our website and choose. Our shelves are full of interesting, well-written and beautiful books — all selected by us for their excellence — and our shop website is arranged to help you choose just the right thing. Find the authors or titles you love with the quick-search bar — or make discoveries! Click on our website’s categories and sub-categories bring you to ‘virtual shelves’ of books of similar interest (where relevant, you will find page-views of the insides of the books, to help you choose).
   Here are a few shortcuts to some really good books:

• Fiction (for adults):
  If you are wanting a well-written, vital novel, anything on the Booker Prize short list would be ideal.
  Or choose from the Goldsmiths Prize short list for something more innovative.
  Our curated selection of Translated fiction includes the books listed for this year’s International Booker Prize.
  It has been a strong year for Aotearoa fiction!
  We have many interesting books published by Small Presses in Aotearoa and overseas.
  And we have interesting books for those who like Historical Fiction, Crime, and Speculative or Dystopian Fiction.
  And Poetry always makes a good gift!

• Books for children:
  We have excellent choices in everything from Board Books to Picture Books, to Junior Fiction, to Senior (or ‘Middle Grade’) Fiction, to Novels for Young Adults.
  Choose from our selection of children’s books from Aotearoa, or from our books in te reo Māori.
  And we have beautiful and informative books of Non-Fiction, and Graphic Novels for Children, too!

• This is the time of year in which a Cook Book, an Art Book, or a Book about Gardening would make a perfect gift!
  And we have interesting Graphic Novels, too…

• Our Culture section has books about creative and lifestyle pursuits.

• Our Society section includes books on History and Politics for those interested in how people interact — in the past or in the present. It is more important than ever to understand the history and present of Aotearoa.

• As the title suggests, our section on the Mind includes books on Philosophy and Psychology.

• And our Science section brings you fine writing and the latest information and thinking in many fields.

• We now have a Biography and Memoir section!

• For a really special gift, why not give a Volume Reading Subscription! We have a subscription menu for adults, and a subscription menu for children — but, really, we can tailor a subscription in any way to suit both the reader and the giver (just ask!).

We can gift-wrap the books* and dispatch them to you or to the recipients — or have them ready to collect from our door.
(*we do not charge for gift-wrapping)

The GOLDSMITHS PRIZE celebrates fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. This year, all six (excellent!) shortlisted titles “ask uncomfortable questions while nonetheless finding exuberance and joy in a form that makes such questioning both possible and pleasurable: the novel at its most novel.” —judging chair

Click through to our website to get your copies of these enjoyable and interesting books. We can dispatch to anywhere in Aotearoa by overnight courier, or have the books ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

THE WINNER

PARADE by Rachel Cusk

Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. A mother dies. A man falls to his death. Couples seek escape in distant lands. The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade  sets loose a carousel of lives. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a true story — about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves.

What the judges say: "Every sentence in Parade  seems to grapple with an idea. People die, perspective shifts, scenery changes, and yet there remains a clear, sharp line of thought that holds the reader. In effortlessly beautiful prose Cusk challenges the conventions of the novel form as well as addressing the relationship between literature and visual art, and of how each can exist alongside the ordinariness of life.  Parade is a ferociously illuminating novel that embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment."

“Examining the life of the artist and the composition of the self, Rachel Cusk’s Parade exposes the power and limitations of our alternate selves.  Probing the limits of the novel form and pushing back against convention, this is a work that resets our understanding of what the long form makes possible.” —Abigail Shinn, Chair of Judges

"Every sentence in Parade seems to grapple with an idea. People die, perspective shifts, scenery changes, and yet there remains a clear, sharp line of thought that holds the reader. In effortlessly beautiful prose Cusk challenges the conventions of the novel form as well as addressing the relationship between literature and visual art, and of how each can exist alongside the ordinariness of life. Parade is a ferociously illuminating novel that embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment." —Sara Baume, judge

• Read Thomas’s review.

• Find out more.

THE OTHER SHORT-LISTED BOOKS

ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS by Mark Bowles

All My Precious Madness is a story of a man at odds with the world. A man who wants to escape his violent past but who — most emphatically — repeats it. Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can't escape his anger. As the world — and men in particular — continues to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum, until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal. A savagely funny novel that disdains moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of deep empathy — even when that empathy means understanding the darkest parts of humanity. It is, as Terry Eagleton says, “a wonderfully stylish, intelligent piece of work” — and one of the most electric debuts in recent years.

What the judges say: "Mark Bowles’s All My Precious Madness is an exhilaratingly intelligent, hilariously foul-mouthed monologue: partly a crankish rant, railing violently — and digressively — against the crushing idiocies of contemporary life, partly an affecting Bildungsroman, centred on the narrator’s relationship with their father. At once crackling with spontaneity and beautifully controlled, alternating between a curmudgeon’s uproarious disgust and a child’s poignant wonder, Bowles’s novel is a wonderful piece of writing which you will be sorry to finish."

TELL by Jonathan Buckley

Curtis Doyle, a self-made businessman and art collector, has vanished from his palatial home in the Scottish Highlands. In the wake of his disappearance, the woman who worked as his gardener is interviewed for a possible film about her employer. A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s. 

What the judges say: "For the reader, it is as if we have our ear pressed against a keyhole, listening, or are flies on a wall, witnessing events that seem to portend some momentous revelation about a man.  Tell is a relentlessly truthful and absorbing tale about the human condition and a searing account of the complexity of life in the modern world. Employing the simplest of narrative devices but used in the most innovative ways, Jonathan Buckley has produced a profound work of fiction."

CHOICE by Neel Mukherjee

How have we come to live this way? At what cost? Who pays the price? A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift. These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee’s novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life. Choice  is  a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them. 

What the judges say: "A truly ambitious and compelling fiction from an author at the height of his powers. Choice lays out three narratives exploring 21st-century ethical and political dilemmas. The novel is not only intellectually impressive, it is also immensely moving, and shot through with heart-breaking moments."

SPENT LIGHT by Lara Pawson

A woman contemplates her hand-me-down toaster and suddenly the whole world erupts into her kitchen, in all its brutality and loveliness: global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care. Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss — because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. In the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.

What the judges say: "It is impossible to predict, at the beginning of almost every paragraph of Spent Light, where it will have taken the reader by the end. With a remorseless attention to detail Pawson encounters familiar objects and excavates from each a portal to the past, or to a distant corner of the world, or to the shadows of the narrator’s complex mind. Spent Light is an evisceration of solemn reality, a novel that somehow manages to balance horror, humour and incredible tenderness."

• Read Thomas’s review.

PORTRAITS AT THE PALACE OF CREATIVITY AND WRECKING by Han Smith

The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know. She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows — almost — about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape. Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all. Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past.  

What the judges say: "Composed as a series of portraits, some fragmentary, all multi-faceted and allusory, Smith’s novel is a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure. At once a poignant coming of age story and an exploration of how language is shaped by ideology, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is tender and merciless in its slanting look at the history of state violence and its unacknowledged but profound effects on individuals and communities. An important reminder that the stories we tell can serve as propaganda and as powerful works of resistance, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking demonstrates how the novel can reflect and resist the double speak of our own time."

BUYING INTERESTING BOOKS MAKES INTERESTING BOOKS POSSIBLE

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.

• Read Stella’s review.

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!

Which of these six excellent books will be awarded the Booker Prize this year?

Read them all, and let us know what you think!

JAMES by Percival Everett

What the judges said: “A masterful, revisionist work that immerses the reader in the brutality of slavery, juxtaposed with a movingly persistent humanity. Through lyrical, richly textured prose, Everett crafts a captivating response to Mark Twain’s classic, Huckleberry Finn, that is both a bold exploration of a dark chapter in history and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. With its virtuosic command of language and moral urgency, James stands as a towering achievement that confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett’s deserved reputation as a literary sensation.

ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

What the judges said: “Samantha Harvey’s compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.”

CREATION LAKE by Rachel Kushner

What the judges said: “Sadie Smith – not her real name – is an FBI agent turned spy-for-hire, whose latest mission is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in rural France. She’s an extraordinary creation: sharp-minded, iron-willed, accustomed to moving fast and breaking things. As she investigates the group, she hacks into emails from their guru, a shadowy eccentric who has withdrawn from modernity into the ancient caves that dot the landscape; he has some beguiling ideas about the role of Neanderthals through history. What’s so electrifying about this novel is the way it knits contemporary politics and power with a deep counter-history of human civilisation. We found the prose thrilling, the ideas exciting, the book as a whole a profound and irresistible page-turner.”

HELD by Anne Michaels

What the judges said: “The first few pages of this brief kaleidoscopic novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces may seem forbidding, yet every member of the judging panel was transported by this book. Michaels, a poet, is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind. Reading it is a unique experience.

THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden

What the judges said: “Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, The Safekeep draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. Every piece of crockery or silverware is accounted for here. Isa is the protagonist – a withdrawn figure who is safeguarding this inheritance. When her brother brings his new girlfriend Eva into this household the energy field changes as we sense boundaries of possession being crossed, other histories coming into the light. We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.”

STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood

What 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.”

These wonderful books have just won their categories at the 2024 NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS.
Read what the judges had to say, and then click through to our website to grab your copies (or to get us to send them to the children or young adults of your choice). These books are selling fast, but more stock of all of them is on its way!

MARGARET MAHY BOOK OF THE YEAR

Nine Girls — Written by Stacy Gregg (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Maru Hauraki) (Published by Penguin Books)

In Nine Girls Stacy Gregg masterfully weaves comedy, fantasy and history together in a profound exploration of the complexity of identity in Aotearoa New Zealand through the experiences of a young Māori girl finding her place in the world. Historical events are woven into the fabric of the story, grounding her personal journey in a broader socio-political context. Vivid characters animate a fast-paced, eventful narrative with plot twists and emotional highs and lows.
This book celebrates Māori identity, pays tribute to Aotearoa’s rich history, and testifies to the power of storytelling. Nine Girls is a taonga for readers of all ages, resonating long after the final page is turned.

CATEGORY WINNERS

PICTURE BOOK AWARD

Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai — Written by Michaela Keeble with Kerehi Grace (Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Ngāti Porou), and illustrated by Tokerau Brown (Published by: Gecko Press)

Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai is groundbreaking, deeply creative, and completely original. The story comes from the mouth of a child, and the illustrations are a direct window to the imagination, or maybe to the reality of a child’s mind as they make sense of their identity, whānau, culture, and other big questions.
This is a sophisticated picture book that can be enjoyed by all ages. An inspirational read that will encourage our tamariki and mokopuna to tell their own stories, with their own voices, it deserves to become an Aotearoa bookshelf classic.

• Look inside!

WRIGHT FAMILY FOUNDATION ESTHER GLEN AWARD FOR JUNIOR FICTION

Nine Girls — Written by Stacy Gregg (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Maru Hauraki) (Published by: Penguin, Penguin Random House)

Using the thread of storytelling, Nine Girls weaves together an exploration of the complexity of identity, the resonance of history, and the transformative power of friendship. Comic action, magical realism, and social history are skilfully combined in this captivating coming-of-age story. Vivid and well-developed characters populate a fast-paced, eventful narrative as we follow the young protagonist’s journey to discovering her Māori identity. Te ao Pākehā and te ao Māori are equally uplifted as the text explores our bicultural history.
Poignant and profound, affirming and authentic, this book is rich with themes of identity, friendship, and cultural heritage – a taonga from a masterful storyteller.

YOUNG ADULT FICTION AWARD

Catch a Falling Star — Written by Eileen Merriman (Published by: Penguin Books)

Catch a Falling Star is a masterclass in writing that bravely tells the story of Jamie Orange, a complicated and endearing young man who struggles with mental health issues while juggling school work, relationships, and performing in the local musical.
Eileen Merriman has skilfully and sensitively captured Jamie’s journey, allowing readers to step in and experience it alongside him. The result is a remarkably authentic portrayal of his escalating problems, fraught with frenetic energy and leading to a horrifying climax. This book is significant for teens today who may relate to the issues Jamie faces, and better understand them through reading his story.

ELSIE LOCKE AWARD FOR NON-FICTION

Ultrawild: An Audacious Plan to Rewild Every City on Earth — Written and illustrated by Steve Mushin (Published by: Allen & Unwin)

In Ultrawild, Steve Mushin leads us on a deadly serious quest to design our way out of climate change. He presents out-there concepts that are ingenious, technically plausible and often humorous – but it’s the way they are communicated that gives this book the wow factor. Pages are filled to the brim with detailed illustrations of his designs, speech bubbles, arrows, calculations, and full-page spreads that show what these rewilded cities could look like. This book about futuristic design is itself an object of outstanding design.
Ultrawild encourages readers to see the explicit connection between creativity and science, and as Steve Mushin puts it, to think ludicrous thoughts and have revolutionary ideas.

• Look inside!

RUSSELL CLARK AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATION

Patu: The New Zealand Wars — Illustrated and written by Gavin Bishop (Tainui, Ngāti Awa) (Published by: Puffin Books)

In Patu: The New Zealand Wars, Gavin Bishop has brought everything in his considerable artistic arsenal to bear on this most difficult and fundamental part of our colonial history, with the ambition and control of an illustrator at the height of their mastery.
A complex and wide-ranging story is told clearly and accessibly at least as much through the illustrations as it is through the words, and most importantly it is told with power. In what is not just a historical recounting, the stark compositions and limited colour palette speak to a deeply personal tale; one of mamae discovered, mamae long felt, and mamae yet to be healed.

• Look inside!

WRIGHT FAMILY FOUNDATION TE KURA POUNAMU AWARD FOR TE REO MĀORI

Nani Jo me ngā Mokopuna Porohīanga — Written by Moira Wairama and illustrated by Margaret Tolland (Published by: Baggage Books)

Nani Jo me ngā Mokopuna Porohīanga is a beautifully written story about the special memories and bonds that are made when we are intentional in our relationships. Opening with childlike bubbly energy and using repetitive language to capture younger audiences, Nani Jo and her mokopuna guide us through the spiritual and emotional experiences of life.
This taonga uses inclusive language to convey the significance of stories, their role in helping us make sense of our world, and the importance of poroporoaki to the grieving process. It is in itself a journey of creating and sharing stories that will live on in generations to come.

N.Z.S.A. BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD

Tsunami — Written and illustrated by Ned Wenlock (Published by: Earth’s End Publishing)

As a graphic novel Tsunami is exemplary, with the language of comics intrinsic to its understanding and impact. The toy-like characters with their clean simple lines invite readers to identify with them, even as their diagrammatic performance of the story's central tragedy distances readers from them – thus seamlessly reflecting the book's themes of alienation and the need for connection.
Tsunami respects the ability of its audience to handle ambiguity, to rise to meet its challenges and to find its rewards, however unsettling the journey may be. This is a book that lingers after the reading, and seems destined to be studied and discussed for a long time to come.

• Look inside!

Some superb books have been recognised in this year’s awards, from a strong year of Aotearoa publishing. Read the judges’ comments below, and click through to our website for your copies.

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Publishing) $25

A searing and urgent novel crackling with tension and intelligence, Lioness starts with a hiss and ends with a roar as protagonist Therese’s dawning awareness and growing rage reveals itself. At first glance this is a psychological thriller about a privileged wealthy family and its unravelling. Look closer and it is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage, and the search for authenticity. Emily Perkins deftly wrangles a large cast of characters in vivid technicolour, giving each their moment in the sun, while dexterously weaving together multiple plotlines. Her acute observations and razor-sharp wit decimate the tropes of mid-life in moments of pure prose brilliance, leaving the reader gasping for more. Disturbing, deep, smart, and funny as hell, Lioness is unforgettable.

• Read Stella’s review.

• Find out more about the book.

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing) $30

Grace Yee’s is a striking aesthetic – it blurs genres, it dances around the page, it crosses languages by fusing Cantonese-Taishanese and English, both official and unofficial. Her craft is remarkable. She moves between old newspaper cuttings, advertisements, letters, recipes, cultural theory, and dialogue. Creating a new archival poetics for the Chinese trans-Tasman diaspora, the sequence narrates a Hong Kong family’s assimilation into New Zealand life from the 1960s to the 1980s, interrogating ideas of citizenship and national identity. It displaces the reader, evoking the unsettledness of migration. In Chinese Fish, Yee cooks up a rich variety of poetic material into a book that is special and strange; this is poetry at its urgent and thrilling best.

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Don Binney — Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University press) $90

Even as an experienced biographer, Gregory O’Brien has achieved a near impossible task in Don Binney: Flight Path. He has encapsulated the artist’s full life, honestly portraying his often contrary personality, and carefully interrogating a formidably large body of work and its place in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. O’Brien’s respect for Binney includes acknowledging that he could be both charming and curmudgeonly, and as a result he offers a complete picture of this complex and creative man. Equally compelling are the book’s faithfully reproduced artworks, exemplifying the best in design, layout and reproduction. From the cover onwards, the images of the paintings take us to the place where Binney observed the land and the birds, capturing the qualities of whenua that meant so much to him.

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific essays by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books) $50

In An Indigenous Ocean, Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa weaves together academic rigour, captivating stories and engaging prose to reframe our understanding of New Zealand’s colonial history in the South Pacific. This scholarly but highly accessible collection of essays carves out space for indigenous voices to tell their own narratives. Grounded in a deep understanding of Pacific history and cultures, Salesa addresses the contemporary social, political, economic, regional and international issues faced by Pacific nations. This seminal work asserts the Pacific’s ongoing impact worldwide, despite marginalisation by New Zealand and others, and will maintain its relevance for generations.

MŪRAU O TE TUHI – MĀORI LANGUAGE AWARD

Te Rautakitahi o Tūhoe ki Ōrākau by Tā Pou Temara (Ngāi Tūhoe) (Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, Auckland University Press) $40

He motuhenga marika tēnei pukapuka inā hoki ko tāu e pānui ana ko ngā kupu tuku iho a ngā tūpuna ake o te kaituhi i rongo rā i ngā kōrero a ētehi o te rautakitahi a Tūhoe i haere rā ki te tinei i te ahi ki tawhiti, koia te pakanga rongonui o Ōrākau. Hihiri ana a Hinengaro i a Tā Pou Temara e taki ana i ngā kōrero tuku iho, me te aha he mea kōrero ki te reo o Tūhoe koinei te reo i tupu ai ia. Tuituia ana e ia ōna ake whakaaro puta noa i te pukapuka kia noho mai ko tētehi pukapuka kounga nei mā te hunga e pīkoko ki te reo me te kaihītori ā-kāinga e kai ngākau ana i ngā kōrero o Ngā Riri Whenua o Aotearoa.
This book is truly unique, in that what you read are the narratives which have been handed down to the author through his grandparents, who heard the accounts from that very brave band of Te Urewera and Ngāi Tūhoe who travelled to extinguish the fires from afar at the famous Battle of Ōrākau. Tā Pou Temara enriches us with not only their stories but also a retelling of their narratives in the language of Tūhoe, the language he grew up in. He weaves his own thoughts through the book, which makes it a valuable read for both lovers of the Māori language and at-home-historians interested in the New Zealand Land Wars.

MĀTĀTUHI FUNDATION BEST FIRST BOOK AWARDS

HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION

Ruin, And other stories by Emma Hislop (Te Herenga Waka University Press) $35

Each story in this powerful collection exhibits an artful control of situation, character, and language to examine the fallout of painful events which largely occur offstage. Emma Hislop’s portrayals are perceptive, providing the women in her stories the space to grapple with disquieting questions that lack easy answers, while the insistent humanity of her characterisations suggests cause for hope. There is not a spare word in these refined and compelling stories, which introduce a striking new voice to our literature.

E.H. MCCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION

There’s a Cure for This by Emma Wehipeihana (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) (Penguin Books) $35

Emma Wehipeihana’s engaging, eloquent, witty and sometimes confronting memoir is an extremely impressive first book. It is structured as a series of powerful essays about her journey as a wahine Māori through both her early life and her time in medical school. Emerging as a doctor, she recounts with candour and wry humour the racism she and other Māori experience, and she highlights, in an infinitely readable way, the structural inequalities in the health system.

JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY

At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press) $25

At the Point of Seeing is one of the most accomplished debuts readers are likely to encounter. The collection uses structure to amplify meaning, and its luxuriant lexicon and sometimes knotty syntax are always invigorating rather than confusing. But this book is never a mere exercise in building poems mechanically. Megan Kitching’s poems are warm-blooded, compassionate, and inquiring. They take the reader into an Aotearoa landscape and a moral universe that they will want to explore over and over again.

JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Rugby League in New Zealand: A people’s history by Ryan Bodman (Bridget Williams Books) $60

You don’t have to have seen a rugby league game, or even like sport, to be enchanted by Ryan Bodman’s debut book. This is a meticulously researched and engagingly written social history, packed full of stories about what rugby league has meant not just to the players and their supporters, but also to entire communities. The photographs – showing crowd support, action shots, smiling children, and female players – give us a fascinating insight into the story of the sport, whether on the margins or in the mainstream.

• The other short-listed books.

• The other long-listed books.

16 excellent books have been short-listed for this year’s OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS.

Find out what the judges have to say, and click through to secure your copies:

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley (Text Publishing) $38

The tragedies of war and prevailing social attitudes are viewed with an unflinching but contemporary eye as Stephen Daisley’s lean, agile prose depicts faceted perspectives on masculinity, fraternity, violence, art, nationhood and queer love in this story about twin brothers fighting in WW2. With its brisk and uncompromising accounts of military action, and deep sensitivity to the plights of its characters, A Better Place is by turns savage and tender, absurd and wry.

Audition by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka Univeristy Press) $35

Three giants hurtle through the cosmos in a spacecraft called Audition powered by the sound of their speech. If they are silent, their bodies continue to grow. Often confronting and claustrophobic, but always compelling, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much space and what role stories play in mediating truth. A mind-melting, brutalist novel, skillfully told in a collage of science fiction, social realism, and romantic comedy.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press) $38

When Mira Bunting, the force behind guerilla gardening collective Birnam Wood, meets her match in American tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, the stage is set for a tightly plotted and richly imagined psychological thriller. Eleanor Catton’s page-turner gleams with intelligence, hitting the sweet spot between smart and accessible. And like an adrenalised blockbuster grafted on to Shakespearian rootstock, it accelerates towards an epic conclusion that leaves readers’ heads spinning.

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury) $25

After marrying the older, wealthier Trevor, Teresa Holder has transformed herself into upper-class Therese Thorn, complete with her own homeware business. But when rumours of corruption gather around one of Trevor’s property developments, the fallout is swift, and Therese begins to reevaluate her privileged world. Emily Perkins weaves multiple plotlines and characters with impressive dexterity. Punchy, sophisticated and frequently funny, Lioness is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage, and the search for authenticity.

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press) $25

With a polymath’s ear and a photographer’s eye, Megan Kitching creates sharp, complex pictures of the landscapes and lifescapes of Aotearoa. Many of her best poems focus on unruly coastal zones as points of contact, where history is always being made and remade, but she doesn’t ignore the human domain with its ‘petty hungers or awkward flutters’. Importantly, her work insists on the fact that difficult social and political questions cannot be separated from aesthetic ones.

Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing) $30

Grace Yee’s sequence narrates a family’s assimilation into New Zealand life from the 1960s to the 1980s with a striking aesthetic. We navigate swerves in personae, extratextuality, illustrations, Cantonese-Taishanese phrases and English translations provided on the back pages. Yee skillfully bends genres and displaces the reader, evoking the unsettledness of migration. An invigorating read with its tapestry of scenes, characters, food, and language, Chinese Fish contributes a new archival poetics to the Chinese trans-Tasman diaspora.

Root Leaf Flower Fruit by Bill Nelson (Te Herenga Waka University Press) $30

This intriguing verse novel leads us at a walking pace – sometimes tumbling and scraping – across country and suburb, and volatile seasons. There are pivots in perspective and a rich sense of deep time as we encounter nature, injury and recovery, and a settler farming legacy. Bill Nelson’s writing has a sonic quality, protean line breaks, and surprise story threads. The final section with its hint of the New Zealand gothic, is gripping.

Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) (Dead Bird Books)

These poems buzz with energy: intellectual, linguistic, literary. Sharply conceived, engaged in conversation and debate across poetry, place, history, and language, Isla Huia’s work brings unexpected material into productive collision. English and te reo Māori meet this way, as do lines and echoes from older poets with present concerns. Huia has an inspired ear and engaged eye, and her poems’ sonic range and sense of adventure combine with a crafter’s care on the page.

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Don Binney: Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press) $90

In this wonderfully rich and honest portrait of the artist Don Binney, Gregory O’Brien is never an unquestioning cheerleader for his subject. So while readers see and appreciate his famous works and learn about his interest in both geology and royalty, they also discover his sometimes prickly and sardonic personality. Binney neither liked nor identified with the description ‘bird man’, but hear the name Don Binney and his soaring solo birds come instantly to mind.

• Look inside!

Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide by Liv Sisson (Penguin Random House) $45

Liv Sisson’s fungi field guide is a joyous combination of information and advice that is totally practical, potentially lifesaving and deliciously quirky. If you don’t know a black landscaping morel from a death cap or a stinky squid from a dog vomit, look no further. Fungi might not move but they are notoriously hard to photograph, so full credit to Paula Vigus and the other photographers for making the mostly tiny subject matter look enticing, and even monumental.

• Look inside!

Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) $70

From its irresistibly tactile cover to the end note from the Webb estate that the humble Marilynn would have been honoured by the book, this is a magnificent publication. Creating a book from an exhibition has many fishhooks, but the writers, contributors and designer have produced a book that shines. Webb’s life story and her artistic practice are told in both te reo Māori and English, and her art is lovingly and accurately reproduced on the page.

• Look inside!

Rugby League in New Zeaqland: A People’s History by Ryan Bodman (Bridget Williams Books) $60

One of Ryan Bodman’s many achievements with this, his first book, is the fact that you don’t have to know or even be interested in rugby league to enjoy it. He presents us with a genuinely fascinating social history which includes identity, women in sport, gangs, politics and community pride in their teams. The photographs taken on and off the field are an absolute treasure-trove of a record of the sport.

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books) $50

Damon Salesa’s collection of essays re-frames our understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history in the South Pacific. A seminal work, An Indigenous Ocean asserts Pacific agency and therefore its ongoing impact worldwide, despite marginalisation by New Zealand and others. Salesa brings together academic rigour, captivating stories and engaging prose, resulting in a masterful book that will endure for generations.

Laughing in the Dark: A Memoir by Barbara Else (Penguin Random House) $40

In this beautifully crafted memoir, Barbara Else reflects on her writing career and its impact on her life. Else’s narrative is both resolute and nuanced, artful and authentic. A story that perhaps could only be told decades after the death of her first husband, Jim Neale – the archetypal patriarchal man in the 1960s and 1970s – Else also explores how toxic masculinity took its toll on him while examining when she herself needed to be held to account.

Ngātokimatawhaorua: Biography of a Waka by Jeff Evans (Massey University Press) $50

Beginning with an expedition into the Puketi forest alongside master waka builder Rānui Maupakanga, Jeff Evans takes us on a vivid journey of discovery as he tells tell the story of the majestic waka taua Ngātokimatawhaorua, a vessel that is both a source of pride and a symbol of wayfaring prowess. Evans’ biography showcases both the whakapapa of the waka, including the influence of Te Puea Hērangi, and its role in the renaissance of voyaging and whakairo (carving) traditions.

There’s a Cure for This: A Memoir by Emma Wehipeihana (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) (Penguin Random House) $35

Engaging, eloquent and occasionally confronting, Emma Wehipeihana’s [Emma Espiner’s] memoir is comprised of a series of powerful essays about her journey as a Māori woman through both her early life and her time in medical school. Emerging as a doctor, she recounts the racism she and others experience and highlights the structural inequalities in New Zealand’s health system. This book brims with candour, pathos, and wry humour.

16 excellent books have been short-listed for this year’s OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS.

Find out what the judges have to say, and click through to secure your copies:

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley (Text Publishing) $38

The tragedies of war and prevailing social attitudes are viewed with an unflinching but contemporary eye as Stephen Daisley’s lean, agile prose depicts faceted perspectives on masculinity, fraternity, violence, art, nationhood and queer love in this story about twin brothers fighting in WW2. With its brisk and uncompromising accounts of military action, and deep sensitivity to the plights of its characters, A Better Place is by turns savage and tender, absurd and wry.

Audition by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka Univeristy Press) $35

Three giants hurtle through the cosmos in a spacecraft called Audition powered by the sound of their speech. If they are silent, their bodies continue to grow. Often confronting and claustrophobic, but always compelling, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much space and what role stories play in mediating truth. A mind-melting, brutalist novel, skillfully told in a collage of science fiction, social realism, and romantic comedy.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press) $38

When Mira Bunting, the force behind guerilla gardening collective Birnam Wood, meets her match in American tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, the stage is set for a tightly plotted and richly imagined psychological thriller. Eleanor Catton’s page-turner gleams with intelligence, hitting the sweet spot between smart and accessible. And like an adrenalised blockbuster grafted on to Shakespearian rootstock, it accelerates towards an epic conclusion that leaves readers’ heads spinning.

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury) $25

After marrying the older, wealthier Trevor, Teresa Holder has transformed herself into upper-class Therese Thorn, complete with her own homeware business. But when rumours of corruption gather around one of Trevor’s property developments, the fallout is swift, and Therese begins to reevaluate her privileged world. Emily Perkins weaves multiple plotlines and characters with impressive dexterity. Punchy, sophisticated and frequently funny, Lioness is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage, and the search for authenticity.

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press) $25

With a polymath’s ear and a photographer’s eye, Megan Kitching creates sharp, complex pictures of the landscapes and lifescapes of Aotearoa. Many of her best poems focus on unruly coastal zones as points of contact, where history is always being made and remade, but she doesn’t ignore the human domain with its ‘petty hungers or awkward flutters’. Importantly, her work insists on the fact that difficult social and political questions cannot be separated from aesthetic ones.

Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing) $30

Grace Yee’s sequence narrates a family’s assimilation into New Zealand life from the 1960s to the 1980s with a striking aesthetic. We navigate swerves in personae, extratextuality, illustrations, Cantonese-Taishanese phrases and English translations provided on the back pages. Yee skillfully bends genres and displaces the reader, evoking the unsettledness of migration. An invigorating read with its tapestry of scenes, characters, food, and language, Chinese Fish contributes a new archival poetics to the Chinese trans-Tasman diaspora.

Root Leaf Flower Fruit by Bill Nelson (Te Herenga Waka University Press) $30

This intriguing verse novel leads us at a walking pace – sometimes tumbling and scraping – across country and suburb, and volatile seasons. There are pivots in perspective and a rich sense of deep time as we encounter nature, injury and recovery, and a settler farming legacy. Bill Nelson’s writing has a sonic quality, protean line breaks, and surprise story threads. The final section with its hint of the New Zealand gothic, is gripping.

Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) (Dead Bird Books)

These poems buzz with energy: intellectual, linguistic, literary. Sharply conceived, engaged in conversation and debate across poetry, place, history, and language, Isla Huia’s work brings unexpected material into productive collision. English and te reo Māori meet this way, as do lines and echoes from older poets with present concerns. Huia has an inspired ear and engaged eye, and her poems’ sonic range and sense of adventure combine with a crafter’s care on the page.

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Don Binney: Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press) $90

In this wonderfully rich and honest portrait of the artist Don Binney, Gregory O’Brien is never an unquestioning cheerleader for his subject. So while readers see and appreciate his famous works and learn about his interest in both geology and royalty, they also discover his sometimes prickly and sardonic personality. Binney neither liked nor identified with the description ‘bird man’, but hear the name Don Binney and his soaring solo birds come instantly to mind.

• Look inside!

Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide by Liv Sisson (Penguin Random House) $45

Liv Sisson’s fungi field guide is a joyous combination of information and advice that is totally practical, potentially lifesaving and deliciously quirky. If you don’t know a black landscaping morel from a death cap or a stinky squid from a dog vomit, look no further. Fungi might not move but they are notoriously hard to photograph, so full credit to Paula Vigus and the other photographers for making the mostly tiny subject matter look enticing, and even monumental.

• Look inside!

Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) $70

From its irresistibly tactile cover to the end note from the Webb estate that the humble Marilynn would have been honoured by the book, this is a magnificent publication. Creating a book from an exhibition has many fishhooks, but the writers, contributors and designer have produced a book that shines. Webb’s life story and her artistic practice are told in both te reo Māori and English, and her art is lovingly and accurately reproduced on the page.

• Look inside!

Rugby League in New Zeaqland: A People’s History by Ryan Bodman (Bridget Williams Books) $60

One of Ryan Bodman’s many achievements with this, his first book, is the fact that you don’t have to know or even be interested in rugby league to enjoy it. He presents us with a genuinely fascinating social history which includes identity, women in sport, gangs, politics and community pride in their teams. The photographs taken on and off the field are an absolute treasure-trove of a record of the sport.

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books) $50

Damon Salesa’s collection of essays re-frames our understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history in the South Pacific. A seminal work, An Indigenous Ocean asserts Pacific agency and therefore its ongoing impact worldwide, despite marginalisation by New Zealand and others. Salesa brings together academic rigour, captivating stories and engaging prose, resulting in a masterful book that will endure for generations.

Laughing in the Dark: A Memoir by Barbara Else (Penguin Random House) $40

In this beautifully crafted memoir, Barbara Else reflects on her writing career and its impact on her life. Else’s narrative is both resolute and nuanced, artful and authentic. A story that perhaps could only be told decades after the death of her first husband, Jim Neale – the archetypal patriarchal man in the 1960s and 1970s – Else also explores how toxic masculinity took its toll on him while examining when she herself needed to be held to account.

Ngātokimatawhaorua: Biography of a Waka by Jeff Evans (Massey University Press) $50

Beginning with an expedition into the Puketi forest alongside master waka builder Rānui Maupakanga, Jeff Evans takes us on a vivid journey of discovery as he tells tell the story of the majestic waka taua Ngātokimatawhaorua, a vessel that is both a source of pride and a symbol of wayfaring prowess. Evans’ biography showcases both the whakapapa of the waka, including the influence of Te Puea Hērangi, and its role in the renaissance of voyaging and whakairo (carving) traditions.

There’s a Cure for This: A Memoir by Emma Wehipeihana (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) (Penguin Random House) $35

Engaging, eloquent and occasionally confronting, Emma Wehipeihana’s [Emma Espiner’s] memoir is comprised of a series of powerful essays about her journey as a Māori woman through both her early life and her time in medical school. Emerging as a doctor, she recounts the racism she and others experience and highlights the structural inequalities in New Zealand’s health system. This book brims with candour, pathos, and wry humour.

This summer, discover new art, be inspired, add to your reference shelves; get your imagination fired up for your next building project or craft pursuit; or simply enjoy the sheer pleasure of leafing through a beautiful book filled with intriguing images and ideas.
This is your opportunity to pile up a selection of superb books on art, architecture, photography, craft, and design, from both Aotearoa and overseas — all at satisfyingly reduced prices.
Judging from previous years, our advice is: be quick — there are single copies only of most titles and many of them cannot be reordered (even at full price). 
Build your art library or get someone a little inspiration for the coming year!

This summer discover new art, be inspired, and add to your reference shelves; get your imagination fired up for your next building project or craft pursuit; or simply enjoy the sheer pleasure of leafing through a beautiful book filled with intriguing images and ideas.

This is your opportunity to pile up a selection of superb books on art, architecture, photography, craft, and design, from both Aotearoa and overseas — all at satisfyingly reduced prices. Judging from previous years, our advice is: be quick — there are single copies only of most titles and many of them cannot be reordered (even at full price).

Build your art library or get someone a little inspiration for the coming year.

Use our website to choose your seasonal gifts (and books for yourself as well)!

Read the winner of the 2023 BOOKER PRIZE! Read the other excellent books on the short list! Although full of hope, humour and humanity, the books address many of 2023’s most pressing concerns: climate change, immigration, financial hardship, the persecution of minorities, political extremism and the erosion of personal freedoms. They feature characters in search of peace and belonging or lamenting lost loves. There are books that are grounded in modern reality, that shed light on shameful episodes in history and which imagine a terrifying future.

Click through to buy your copies! Read the books! Tell us what you think!

THE WINNER OF THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE:

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink. On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband. Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society — assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together. 
”Prophet Song follows one woman’s attempts to save her family in a dystopic Ireland sliding further and further into authoritarian rule. It is a shocking, at times tender novel that is not soon forgotten.  It is propulsive and unsparing, and it flinches away from nothing. This is an utterly brave performance by an author at the peak of his powers, and it is terribly moving. Prophet Song has one of the most haunting endings you will ever read. The book lives long in the mind after you’ve set it down.” —Booker judges’ citation
”I haven't read a book that has shaken me so intensely in many years. The comparisons are inevitable — Saramago, Orwell, McCarthy — but this novel will stand entirely on its own.” —Colum McCann
”It was gripping and chilling, and terribly prescient — a novel with a darkly important message about this particular moment in time.” —Sara Baume
>>Radical empathy.
>>Read an extract.

THE OTHER SHORT-LISTED BOOKS

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator. A woman moves from the place of her birth to a ‘remote northern country’ to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs: collective bovine hysteria; the death of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the community’s suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. She feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill.
”Study for Obedience is an absurdist tale about how a stranger’s arrival in an unnamed town slowly unearths deep undercurrents of xenophobia, and it feels very like an allegory for the rise of ideological radicalism today. It is also a stirring meditation on survival. It has the uncanny charm of feeling like both a historical work – with its pastoral settings, petty superstitions, and suspicious villagers – and something bracingly modern. In this way it very cleverly, and with great irony, draws a link between a past we’d like to believe is behind us and our very charged present. The humour here is dry as a bone, very Bernhard-esque; it is obliquely and surprisingly funny.” —Booker judges’ citation
”Bernstein paints from a palette of dread. This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the dangers of absorbing the narratives of the powerful, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed often comes back to bite.” —Observer
>>The question of innocence is a complicated one.
>>Read an extract.
>>Read Thomas’s review of The Coming Bad Days.

This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference. Inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where castaways — in flight from society and its judgment — have landed and built a home.  In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey arrives on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, to make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain, alongside an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of ‘civilization’: officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island. A missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities’ institutions — or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark.
”It’s rare to encounter a work of historical fiction that is at once so lyrical and so empathetic. While many readers will be struck by Harding’s inimitable voice, many more will also be drawn to his beautifully etched portraits of the inhabitants of Apple Island. Though set in the past, it’s impossible to ignore the novel’s contemporary resonance, especially in its exploration of how those in power, convinced of their righteousness, abuse others whose identities and way of life don’t conform to their own.” —Booker judges’ citation
”Masterful. This Other Eden is a story of good intentions, bad faith, worse science, but also a tribute to community and human dignity and the possibility of another world. In both, it has much to say to our times.” —The Guardian
>>Mostly written on post-it notes.
>>Read an extract.

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
Chetna Maroo's tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl's struggle to transcend herself — and squash. Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a 13-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe. 
”Western Lane is a mesmerising novel about how silence can reverberate within a family in the aftermath of grief. The story unfolds on a squash court; the reader quickly learns how sport can act as a balm for the living. It is also about sisterhood, and about the love that remains after a devastating loss. The language in this novel is truly something to be savoured. Western Lane contains crystalline prose that also feels warm and tender, which can be a difficult balance to strike. Bereavement is something which we will all experience one day in some shape or form, and the complexity of familial dynamics is another universal theme which Western Lane explores with great sincerity and depth of feeling.” —Booker judges’ citation
”The work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it.” —The Guardian
>>Focussed attention.
>>Read an extract.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil — can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under — but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker. His exasperated wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike. Meanwhile, teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And 12-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath ‘Ears’ Moran, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away. Yes, in Paul Murray’s brilliant tragicomic saga, the Barnes family is definitely in trouble. So where did it all go wrong? And if the story has already been written — is there still time to find a happy ending? 
”The Bee Sting is the very funny, sad and truthful story of the Barnes family, set in contemporary Ireland and written with considerable wit and compassion. The characters are unforgettable. They persist with hope and are capable of startling moments of love and generosity, despite their myriad flaws and problems. Imelda Barnes is a wonderful creation — initially we see her exterior waspishness and materialism but as the book progresses, Murray skilfully reveals the family secrets which have led them all to their present situation. Imelda’s response to the hardship of her childhood is at once courageous, self-deluding and entirely human.” —Booker judges’ citation
”It can't be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read. Murray's brilliant new novel, about a rural Irish clan, posits the author as Dublin's answer to Jonathan Franzen . A 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment, The Bee Sting oozes pathos while being very funny to boot. Murray's observational gifts and A-game phrase-making render almost every page — every line, it sometimes seems — abuzz with fresh and funny insights. At its core this is a novel concerned with the ties that bind, secrets and lies, love and loss. They're all here, brought to life with captivating vigour in a first-class performance to cherish.” —The Observer
>>A possible future.
>>Read an extract.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
In 1979, as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.  Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society that regards him with suspicion and confusion. Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equalled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it.  As both brothers navigate the obstacles littered in their path – an unreliable father, racism, a financial crisis and Hurricane Andrew — they find themselves pitted against one another. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart? 
”In Jonathan Escoffery’s vital, captivating debut novel, each chapter takes us deeper into a family album of stories, revealing the life and survival of a family, fleeing the violence of early Seventies’ Jamaica for the uncertain sanctuary of a new beginning in America. From the heartbreaking to the hilarious, Escoffery effortlessly conducts the various voices, contradictory in their perspectives, their dreams and desires, while wrestling with the age-old immigrant dilemma — who are my people and where do I belong? As with the best fiction, all of life is here in unflinching detail: the vagaries of capitalism, our yearning for a safety net, international migration, the American Dream, the fragility of existence, climate change, catastrophic misunderstandings and the road not taken." —Booker judges’ citation
>>”Humour is a coping mechanism used by people aware of their powerlessness.”
>>Read an extract.

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If you are looking for a perfect gift for the wine connoisseur or a book to add to your reference library, here is a tasting of new, forthcoming, and interesting titles.

Provocative and irreverent, A Vintner’s Tale is the story of change and innovation in one of New Zealand’s notable industries and an important record of the people who made the world take notice. Written by wine industry veteran Peter Hubscher.

From our southern clime neighbour, a look at the last two decades of Austalian wine making is articulated in Alternative Reality. Max Allen, lecturer in Wine Studies at Melbourne University, award-winning journalist and writer, long-time contributor to Gourmet Traveller Magazine, covers the ground with key people and key moments, along with comprehensive information about more than 150 alternative grape varieties currently grown in Australia and what the wines made from these grapes taste like.

Highly regarded writer Jon Bonné’s lastest book is a tempting and atttractive two volume pleasure. The comprehensive and authoritative The New French Wine takes readers on a tour through every wine region of France, featuring some 800 producers and more than 7,000 wines, plus evocative photography and maps, as well as the incisive narrative and compelling storytelling that has earned Jon Bonné accolades and legions of fans in the wine world.

In Adventures of Rose Wine in Provence discover the history of rosé — known for its gorgeous spectrum of pale pink colors, its aromatic and fruity flavor, and its growing success. Travel through Provence along the Rosé Road, from St. Tropez to St. Barts and beyond; enjoy stories and portraits alongside stunning photographs of Provence's magnificent shores and chateaus and to the places where rosé is celebrated from the luxurious Hotel Eden Rock to historic Club 55.

For something ecclectic and erudite, knowledgable wine writer Neal Martin has produced a singular book, The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide 1870-2020 . “..brillaint…addictively dip-in-able…already an indispensable classic reference book." - Victoria Moore, The Telegraph

Staying with bordeaux, this guide to 35 wineries is a must. Bordeaux 1855 is comprehensive and lavishly illustrated and includes detailed maps. Perfect for wine aficionados planning a trip to France as well as wine-loving armchair travelers.

Interested in history and cultural consideration vis-a-vis wine? Then these will appeal:

Rod Phillip’s French Wine is a history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. “It's a book to read for its unstoppable torrent of fascinating and often surprising details." —Andrew Jefford, Decanter

In Wine: A Cultural History  art historian John Varriano ranges across literature and art, religion and rituals, celebrations and social occassions, medicine and the wine industry, to explore the cultural impact of the both beloved and critiqued beverage.

A recent addition to the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series is Meg Bernhard’s Wine. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Benhard meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage.

Click through on the links to find out more about these new and recent wine titles. Order via our website volumebooks.online or simply email us with your requests.

POETRY QUARTER

Celebrate National Poetry Day (August 25th) with a stack of new poetry books. 

Use the code STANZA when checking out for an inspiring 25% discount on all poetry books.
(Promotion ends on 27 August; applies to in-stock items only). 

Click here to start choosing!

The OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS recognise some of the outstanding books published in Aotearoa in the last year.

Read what the judges have to say about the winners of each section, and then click through to secure your copies.

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

“The Axeman’s Carnival is a novel that has been clasped to New Zealanders’ hearts. It is narrated by the unforgettable Tama, a fledgling magpie taken in and raised by Marnie on the Te Waipounamu high country farm she shares with champion axeman husband Rob. Without anthropomorphism, Tama is constantly entertaining with his take on the foibles and dramas of his human companions. An underlying sense of dread is shot through with humour and humanity. Chidgey’s masterful writing explores the diversifying of rural life, the predicament of childlessness, the ageing champ, and domestic violence. She provides a perspicacious take on the invidious nature of social media and a refreshingly complex demonstration of feminist principle. The Axeman’s Carnival is unique: poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish.”

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) (Auckland University Press)

“Alice Te Punga Somerville’s collection, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised, voyages out like a waka seeking new ground, visiting four areas of life: language in ‘Reo’, identity in ‘Invisible Ink’, work in ‘Mahi’ and love in ‘Aroha’. Readers are challenged but crucially invited in to accept that challenge and reach a new understanding of what it is to be a Māori woman scholar, mother and wife in 2022, encountering and navigating uncomfortable and hostile spaces. Always Italicise shines for its finely crafted, poetically fluent and witty explorations of racism, colonisation, class, language and relationships. A fine collection, establishing and marking a new place to stand.”

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press)

“With its homage to the look and feel of a countercultural tract, Jumping Sundays is a triumph of production and design. The cover alone is one of the best of the year and signals the visual excellence that follows: vibrant endpapers, distinctive typography and bountiful images on an appropriately uncoated stock. Yet Jumping Sundays is more than just a well-designed book. Drawing on archival research and rich personal narratives, Nick Bollinger has written a compelling account of an epoch-making period, linking international trends to the local context in a purposeful-yet-playful way. A joy to read and to hold, Jumping Sundays is a fantastic example of scholarship, creativity and craft.”

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (Bridget Williams Books)

“The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi is a meticulously constructed work of scholarship that provides surprising and essential analysis of Te Tiriti. It will shift and inform debates about the intentions of those who constructed and signed the Treaty and how we interpret it today. Though it is weighty, Ned Fletcher’s book leads readers through a series of clear and well-evidenced hypotheses. It provides colourful and necessary detail about the characters and context involved in the creation of the English text of Aotearoa’s founding document. Fletcher’s comprehensive examination sheds new light on the document's implications and contributes fresh thinking to what remains a very live conversation for all of us that call this country home.”

BEST FIRST BOOK AWARDS

HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION

Home Theatre by ​Anthony Lapwood (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Pākehā) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

“Home Theatre, a collection of interlinked short stories, is unfailingly inventive. Narratives move between the twentieth and twenty-first century, with strong characterisation and genuine voice. The stories are humane and warm at the same time as being cerebral and challenging. Anthony Lapwood writes skilfully in all genres, ranging smoothly from domestic stories to science fiction to love stories to historical fiction, and sometimes all four at once. He demonstrates a keen interest in technology, both contemporary and of the past. Lapwood’s writing is sophisticated and of great promise.”

JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY

We’re All Made of Lightning by Khadro Mohamed (We Are Babies Press, Tender Press)

“Khadro Mohamed’s We’re All Made of Lightning takes us to distant lands, Egypt and Somalia, in heightened sensory language as she grieves for her homeland. Heart-breaking vulnerability and anger are revealed after a man had taken a knife and sliced straight through the sky on the March 15 attacks. Time, memory, dreams and reality are fluid and woven into lyrical poems and prose poems that consider what she would take if she were to go back to where she came from.”

JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Kai: Food Stories & Recipes from my Family Table by Christall Lowe (Bateman Books)

“Kai has everything you’d expect from an internationally recognised food photographer: elegant and enticing images, topped with well-placed illustrations and the compelling use of colour. But it is the substance of the book that shines. Whānau stories and recipes provide the reader with a wider insight into te ao Māori, creating a homage to food that is both grounded in tradition yet modern. Kai is the Edmonds cookbook for our time.”

E.H. MCCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION

Grand: Becoming my Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin Random House)

“This exquisite debut masterfully weaves together the threads of Noelle McCarthy’s life, and her relationship with her mother, in a memoir that connects with truths that unite us all. Poignant and poetic language renders scenes with honesty and colour. Intimate, but highly accessible, the fragility and turbulence of the mother-daughter relationship is at times brutally detailed. Despite this, Grand is an uplifting memoir, delicate and self-aware, and a credit to McCarthy’s generosity and literary deftness.”

>>The other short-listed books are excellent, too!

The short list for the 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE contains some outstanding books. Read what the judges have to say, and then click through for your copies: 

Standing Heavy by GauZ' (translated from French by Frank Wynne): ”A sharp and satirical take on the legacies of French colonial history and life in Paris today. Told in a fast-paced, and fluently translated, style of shifting perspectives, Standing Heavy carries us through the decades.”

Time Shelter Georgi Gospodinov (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel): "A wide-ranging, thought-provoking, macabre and humorous novel about nationality, identity and ageing, and about the healing and destructive power of memory."

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey): “Two best friends share an aversion to ‘the human shackles’ of motherhood, only to discover that life has other plans. With a twisty, enveloping plot, the novel poses some of the knottiest questions about freedom, disability, and dependence – all in language so blunt it burns.”

Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches): “Boulder is a sensuous, sexy, intense book. Eva Baltasar condenses the sensations and experiences of a dozen more ordinary novels into just over 100 pages of exhilarating prose. An incisive story of queer love and motherhood that slices open the dilemmas of exchanging independence for intimacy.”

Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan (translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim): "A carnivalesque fairy tale that celebrates independence and enterprise, a picaresque quest through Korea’s landscapes and history, Whale is a riot of a book. Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s vivid characters are foolish but wise, awful but endearing, and always irrepressible. This is a hymn to restlessness and self-transformation."

The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé (translated from French by Richard Philcox): ”The book borrows from the tradition of magical realism and draws us into a world full of colour and life. This is a book that succeeds in mixing humour with poetry, and depth with lightness.”

>>Order your copies now.
>>The other long-listed books are also excellent. 
The winner will be announced on 23 May.

 The short lists for the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards highlight sixteen of the finest books published in Aotearoa in the last year.

The winners will be announced on 12 May.

Find out what the judges think of the books, and secure your copies now: 

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

• 

  Better the Blood

  Michael Bennett (Ngāti  Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) 
  (Simon & Schuster)

  Michael Bennett’s finely tuned thriller opens with an historical atrocity before moving to a contemporary series of murders. Detective Hana Westerman is caught between being a good cop or a kupapa collaborator, and the cases become frighteningly personal. Excellently paced and populated by complex characters, this intricate novel centres on conflict between utu and on the aroha, hūmarie and manaaki needed to move forward.
  >>Your copy. 

• 

  Kāwai: For Such a Time as This

  Monty Soutar (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, Ngāti Kahungunu)

  (Bateman Books)
  In senior Māori historian Monty Soutar’s powerful novel we learn histories that transport us across place, time, and generations. We become wrapped in the passion and honour of a mid-18th century ao Māori. Tikanga and mātauranga Māori, rangatiratanga, and love for the whenua and the iwi immerse us; butchery, enslavement, and spiritual curses smash. Mana foments the fires of war. Can later generations reassert balance?
  >>Your copy. 

• 

  Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant

  Cristina Sanders 
  The Cuba Press

  Based on the true story of an 1866 shipwreck, this re-telling of the endurance of the survivors on a sub-Antarctic island is impeccably researched and peopled by rounded, realistic and complex characters. Dramatic and well paced, it is rich with vivid descriptions of sea, land and weather, and Cristina Sanders offers insight into the physical and psychological effects of being stranded in an inhospitable environment. Historical fiction at its best.
  >>Your copy.

• 

  The Axeman’s Carnival

  Catherine Chidgey 
  Te Herenga Waka University Press
  Catherine Chidgey’s novel is a rich mix of humour and tragedy, suspenseful, insightful and compelling. It’s a contemporary down-on-the-failing-farm tale with a highly inventive and entertaining twist: the narrator is a sentient magpie, Tama, who flies from its pages fully formed and loveable. The story unfolds with many laugh-aloud moments coupled with an overriding sense of dread. Chidgey’s writing is masterful, abounding with poetic language and intensely descriptive settings.
  >>Your copy.

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

• 

  Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised

  Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki)
   Auckland University Press

  Alice Te Punga Somerville’s meticulously crafted collection resonates with aroha, wit, sadness and anger. Advice to “italicise all of the foreign words in her poems” becomes a catalyst to exploring the dynamics of racism, colonisation, and writing in English as a Māori writer. Poems float like gourds strung with musings and personal recounts. English words incline as foreign words, but te reo syllables evade linguistic ambushes, camouflaged soundscapes and erasure. They stand upright, mark Space-Time like pou.
  >>Your copy. 

• 

  People Person

  Joanna Cho 
  Te Herenga Waka University Press

  Joanna Cho explores relationships, identity and survival with an aching, ironic honesty. A people person may have a name bought from a fortune-teller, drive battered cars, light up rooms with their hearts, or miss the smell of kawakawa ointment. Cho navigates expectations and choices in imagined and recalled stories, skilfully connecting folklore with autobiographical snapshots from South Korea and Aotearoa. Whimsical, surreal, magical and mundane elements meld and clash in poetic vignettes.
  >>Your copy. 

• 

  Sedition

  Anahera Maire Gildea (Ngāti Tukorehe)  
  Taraheke | Bush Lawyer

  Sedition flows through generations of dis-ease, enlivens tongues stilled by loss and trauma, excavates a genealogy of resistance. It’s a contemplative, defiant collection that resists the commodification of culture and whenua, and the ongoing perversity of neo-colonialism. Poems float upon the notion that we walk into the future facing our past, which embodies and shapes us. Anahera Maire Gildea agitates, untangles and reweaves threads of outrage, dystopia and anguish as she resolutely redraws detrimental power.
  >>Your copy.

• 

  We’re All Made of Lightning

  Khadro Mohamed 
  We Are Babies Press, Tender Press

  Khadro Mohamed’s elegiac collection features a speaker torn between multiple worlds. Pendulating from prose to lyric, it is a ghostly work in which dreams and memory bleed into each other, as do its places: Egypt, Somalia, Newtown and Kilbirnie. Even time becomes concurrent, and for Mohamed, the past is right there in the present. In this collision of languages and worlds, the possibility and impossibility of home is both grieved and celebrated.
  >>Your copy. 

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

• 

  Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aoteroa New Zealand

  Nick Bollinger
  Auckland University Press

  With its distinctive cover, bold typography and risograph hues on uncoated stock, this book demands to be read from page one. Weaving original sources into an engaging narrative, Nick Bollinger has crafted a considered and fitting history. Photographs from private collections add to its rich production, balancing text and illustration in ways that belie its size. Like the period it surveys, Jumping Sundays is a game-changer.
  >>Your copy.

• 

  Robin White: Something is Happening Here
  Edited by Sarah Farrar, Jill Trevelyan and Nina Tonga 

  Te Papa Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

  This is more than an exhibition turned art book. Stunning reproductions, historical essays and the insights of two dozen contributors do justice to the institution that is Robin White. As iconic screenprints flow seamlessly into large format barkcloth, White’s border-crossing practice is temporally divided with the savvy use of typographic spreads. Space, too, is given to the voices of her Kiribati, Fijian and Tongan collaborators. Strikingly elegant yet comprehensive, excellence is what’s happening here.
  >>Your copy.

• 

  Secrets of the Sea: The Story of New Zealand’s Native Sea Creatures

  Robert Vennell 
  HarperCollins

  Secrets of the Sea is a treasury of interesting facts, beautiful photography and remarkable prose. Beyond the luscious illustrations is a perfect blend of science, history and mātauranga Māori that gives the text depth and relevance and reveals in fascinating (and urgent) ways the interconnectedness of the human and extra human world. Visually compelling and hugely accessible, this impactful book will delight the marine biologist, sea aficionado and general reader alike.
  >>Your copy. 

• 

  Te Motunui Epa

  Rachel Buchanan (Taranaki, Te Ātiawa) 
  Bridget Williams Books

  Innovative and immensely topical, Te Motunui Epa is a triumph of storytelling and a challenge to the confines of traditional historiography. Rachel Buchanan’s meticulous research and compelling writing is complemented by the very best in graphic design – from its light-catching cover to the black-bordered array of archival documents. Generous while unafraid to confront the colonial hurt at the heart of the story, this is a deceptively powerful and enduring work.
  >>Your copy. 

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

• 

  A Fire in the Belly of Hineāmaru: A Collection of Narratives about Te Tai Tokerau Tūpuna

  Melinda Webber (Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whakaue) and Te Kapua O’Connor (Ngāti Kurī, Pohūtiare)  
  Auckland University Press

  An exquisite and innovative book that uses a form of storytelling, pūrākau, to construct further stories that elucidate and challenge. It adds a layer of narrative truth to what we know about Te Tai Tokerau and, more importantly, shifts existing perceptions. It reveals the richness of knowledge in whakapapa which, especially for Te Tai Tokerau rangatahi, will spark significant personal and collective inspiration.
  >>Your copy. 

• 

  Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay

  Paul Diamond (Ngāti Hauā, Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi)  
  Massey University Press

  This beautifully produced and generous book is a fascinating account of an extraordinary moment in small-town colonial New Zealand with its vivid line-up of characters, a revenge plot, blackmail and local Pākehā political intrigue. Alongside gripping, skilled and elegant popular historical storytelling, readers will find well-researched and closely observed insights into aspects of our national character, and our struggles with social decency.
  >>Your copy. 

• 

  Grand: Becoming my Mother’s Daughter

  Noelle McCarthy 
  Penguin Random House

  This memoir presents both a woman confronting her own shame and the shame of generations with visceral honesty. It offers a treatise on forgiveness and a light of hope. Noelle McCarthy’s command of language imbues readers with sight, sound, smell and taste. It is complete as an individual narrative, while the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship and the weight that loads onto the process of knowing oneself offers much to our collective emotional intelligence.
  >>Your copy. 

• 

  The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi

  Ned Fletcher 
  Bridget Williams Books

  Ned Fletcher’s extensively researched and meticulously constructed book provides a valuable contribution to scholarship, history and law, and makes a timely and evolved interjection into the conversations of this country. Readers are led to evidenced conclusions via Fletcher’s clear hypotheses, structural commitment to reason and thorough examination of the characters and context involved in the creation of the English text of Aotearoa’s founding document.
  >>Your copy. 

Enjoy browsing our annual VISUAL CULTURE SALE. This is your opportunity to pile up a selection of superb books on art, architecture, photography, design, theory, illustration, film, textiles, craft, and graphic novels, from both Aotearoa and overseas — all at satisfyingly reduced prices. Judging from previous years, our advice is: be quick — there are single copies only of most titles and many of them cannot be reordered (even at full price). >>Click through to start choosing. 

We are pleased to announce the launch of our annual VISUAL CULTURE SALE

. This is your opportunity to pile up a selection of superb books on art, architecture, photography, design, theory, illustration, film, textiles, craft, and graphic novels, from both Aotearoa and overseas — all at satisfyingly reduced prices. Judging from previous years, our advice is: be quick — there are single copies only of most titles and many of them cannot be reordered (even at full price). >>

Click through to start choosing

.