Posts tagged Book of the week
Book of the Week — DELIRIOUS by Damien Wilkins

Featuring on many ‘best books’ lists around the motu, Damien Wilkins’s Delirious is an outstanding book, variously described by reviewers as ‘a marvel’, ‘a masterpiece’, and ‘a beautifully powerful, wonderful novel’. Wilkins is a subtle and perceptive writer and a crafter of exquisite prose, and has deep empathy for the uncertainties and hidden strengths of his characters.

It’s time. Mary, an ex-cop, and her husband, a retired librarian, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren’t falling apart, but they’re watching each other — Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee. Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it’s as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them.
This is an emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing. Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face, if we’re lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet the new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways second chances come around.

“A charged book. Delirious is an accurate and sympathetic study of change, age and growth. Set on the very edge of land, the novel is poised between rational assessment and the mysteries of the deep.” —David Herkt, NZ Listener
”A New Zealand novel of grace and humanity. How does Wilkins do it? These are flawed and immensely satisfying characters – you close your eyes at the faulty, circuitous routes they take. Delirious is a marvel of a book.” —Witi Ihimaera

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Book of the Week: UNFINISHED AND FAR FAR AWAY — The Architecture of Irving Smith Architects

Unfinished and Far Far Away: The Architecture of Irving Smith Architects, recently published by Altrim Publishers, has taken out runner-up at the international Architecture Book of the Year Awards (World Architecture Festival). The judges praised the publication for its freshness and avoidance of solipsism.

“What an engaging monograph. Two Kiwi architects persuaded US academic Aaron Betsky to visit them in their small town in New Zealand’s South Island. Jeremy Smith and Andrew Irving, live ‘far, far away’ where an unusual landscape dominates. But they point out, in our collective global warming crisis, all our ‘far, far aways are not so far apart’. And, they ask, ‘Will you continue to mow a lawn around architecture and hope you don’t need to change your buildings or, will you look to participate with the landscapes and environments that we share?’”

The Whakatū-based architectural practice built by Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith has created numerous remarkable buildings locally, throughout Aotearoa, and around the world, from private dwellings to public and institutional buildings. Their practice, research and teaching examines and rethinks architectural approaches, seeking to build with the land, not on it. Their projects open up, condense, focus, and interpret both natural and human-made settings. Unfinished and Far Far Away traces their internationally-awarded approach of participating with existing landscapes before generating new contexts. Ten projects across a range of scales, typologies and landscapes show how these architects articulate wood and other local materials to create beautiful homes, places to work, and sites to play. Irving Smith see their work as never finished, but always opening itself up to new ways to question how we can continue to live and thrive in these sites.

Ten essays by architects, critics and educators then further a discussion on global peripheries and to how architecture benefits from the continued study and interpretation of multiple contexts. Editor Aaron Betsky, Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith, Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, Neelkanth Chhaya, Shane O’Toole, Peter Rich, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Julie Stout, Chris Barton, Andrew Barrie and Julia Gatley add their contributions, offering perspectives from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The projects are shown in multiple photographs by Patrick Reynolds, which are accompanied by drawings, process models, and other material that exhibit Irving Smith’s particular ability to work with their communities and surroundings. 

A thoughtfully produced book, with excellent essays, this is a must for anyone interested in architecture in Aotearoa, its connection to international practice, and the role that architecture plays in addressing the way we live and interact with our environment, now and into the future.


VOLUME BooksBook of the week
Book of the week: THE ROYAL FREE by Carl Shuker

If this isn’t on your summer reading pile, it should be! The sixth novel from Aotearoa novelist Carl Shuker is equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller and literary conundrum.
In The Royal Free James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the 'third oldest medical journal in the world', the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices — the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?).
Managing his boring, but ‘essential’ job, office politics and eccentric colleagues, alongside his grief, and the disintegration of society — London is literally on fire — Ballard is the central (but not the only) voice of The Royal Free, steering us through the dilemmas at hand: civilisation crumbling, a health system keeling, and a crisis, both political and personal, crashing in.
The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing — by the author of the acclaimed A Mistake (now a film by Christine Jeffs*).

“His understanding of how texts are formed and how they can be abused, his awareness of a decaying city and a decaying health system, and his ability to produce terror all add up to a kind of genius. Shuker in top form.” —NZ Listener
”Few writers have such a feel for the rhythm of a sentence. Tremendously enjoyable. The novel packs a powerful punch.” —John McCrystal, Newsroom

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Book of the Week: CREATION LAKE by Rachel Kushner

Sharp, brainy, and hugely enjoyable — Rachel Kushner’s new novel exceeds even our anticipatory dreams. A thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of a mysterious elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation tout court. Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and at first finds Bruno's idealism laughable — he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. But just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Beneath this parodic spy novel about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history.

Short-listed for the Booker Prize, long-listed for the National Book Award, this is another Kushner standout. Perfect for your summer reading pile!

“Creation Lake reinvents the spy novel in one cool, erudite gesture. Only Rachel Kushner could weave environmental activism, paranoia, and nihilism into a gripping philosophical thriller. Enthralling and sleekly devious, this book is also a lyrical reflection on both the origin and the fate of our species. A novel this brilliant and profound shouldn't be this much fun.” — Hernan Diaz

“Wild and brilliantly.. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carre: smart, funny and compulsively readable.” —Observer

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Book of the Week: PORTRAITS AT THE PALACE OF CREATIVITY AND WRECKING by Han Smith

A Goldsmiths Prize finalist this year, this novel — from its unusual title to its intriguing structure and exploration of memory — is a knockout debut. Written in 77 ‘portraits’, set across an icy post-Soviet landscape, it is immersed in the manipulation and exploitations of history, both political and personal. It’s a coming-of-age story set in a town that is reckoning with its brutal past; a story of silence and speaking, of hidden desire and fragile freedom. The author explains, “Portraits is about vicious manipulations of memory, about histories that are distorted and suppressed, about people caught in the half-light of both seeing and not seeing this, but also about how art and poetry have a vital role to play in an eventual awakening.”

Experimental and daring, this is literature that pushes at the edges of the novel, illustrating fiction’s role in excavating the past, emotionally and physically.

The Goldsmith Prize judges commented: “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."

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey — Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize

Samantha Harvey’s beautiful and hypnotic novel, Orbital, has just been awarded the Booker Prize 2024!

Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, describes the winner as ‘a book about a wounded world’, adding that the panel’s ‘unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition’ .

Harvey said of writing Orbital: ‘I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space’. 

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
PARADE by Rachel Cusk — Winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize

 Rachel Cusk's remarkable novel has just been awarded the 2024 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE (for works that expand the horizons of the novel form). In this book, Cusk  continues her project of kicking away traditional novelistic crutches to force herself and her readers to engage differently with fiction and to the ‘real world’ to which it relates. Forensic in approach and coolly crystalline in style, Parade splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distill, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations, the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the personal and societal scales. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels — and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction — Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. {Thomas}

“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, Goldsmiths Prize

"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, Goldsmiths Prize

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Book of the Week: STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood

On short-listing Charlotte Wood’s STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL for the 2024 Booker Prize, the judges said: “Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional — a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges — it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.”

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Book of the Week: EPISODES by Alex Scott

Episodes by Alex Scott $40

This astoundingly good Aotearoa graphic novel subtly and devastatingly investigates the crushing disjunctions between media-mediated popular culture (as distilled especially in product advertising) and an actual world comprised of ‘atypical’ individuals yearning for authentic contact and acknowledgement. A smart-mouthed kid provokes the wrong flatmate, a misguided teen gets schooled by her crush, and a former child star struggles to escape his past. Seductive advertising fantasies collide headfirst with everyday life in this delicately interwoven tale of identity, desire and coming of age even in adulthood. Episodes is a thrillingly observed and well-drawn critique of our media-obsessed society.
”Episodes is funny, sad and strange in the way that so much of the ordinary and familiar is strange. Like a word you say over and over until its oddness is revealed.” —Sharon Murdoch

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HAN KANG — NOBEL LAUREATE IN LITERATURE, 2024
 

The 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE has been awarded to the subtle and fearless Korean writer, HAN KANG.

“Han Kang’s intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. Her empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” —Nobel judges’ citation

“Han Kang is one of the greatest living writers. She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be.” —Eimear McBride

 

THE VEGETARIAN (translated by Deborah Smith)

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams — invasive images of blood and brutality — torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

 

HUMAN ACTS (translated by Deborah Smith)

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless.

 

THE WHITE BOOK (translated by Deborah Smith, with photographs by Choi Jinhyuk)

While on a writer's residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. The White Book becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white — breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin — and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes. As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister's death, Han Kang's trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. The White Book — ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister — offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

 

GREEK LESSONS (translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon)

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish — the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.

 

WE DO NOT PART (translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris)

One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird — or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting.
Publishing in February 2025 — order now!

 
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Book of the week
Book of the Week: PAUL CELAN AND THE TRANS-TIBETAN ANGEL* by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky

Patrik, who sometimes calls himself ‘the patient’, is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can’t manage to get past the first question on the registration form: “What is your nationality?” Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man’s name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik…

In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Yoko Tawada’s mesmerizing novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.

* The New Directions title is Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel , the Dialogue Books edition is titled Spontaneous Acts (same book, different titles, different jackets… buy the one you prefer!)

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Book of the Week: THE EMPUSIUM: A HEALTH RESORT HORROR STORY by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

In this propulsive satire of the misogyny deeply embedded in the Western canon, Tokarczuk playfully pulls the tails of intellectual tropes found in Thomas Mann’s great novel of ideas, The Magic Mountain, published 100 years before. In both novels a young man finds himself subsumed by an alpine sanitorium and subject to the conversations, foibles and opinions of his fellow refugees from ‘ordinary’ time. In both novels, the outside world (so to call it) changes in threatening ways as the characters are isolated from it, but Tokarczuk manages to splice into hers additional strands of horror and the macabre, and a sustained sense of the ludicrous that makes The Empusium simultaneously both light and deep, both intellectual and indulgent, angry, spooky, and very funny. Recommended!

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Book of the Week: PRAISEWORTHY by Alexis Wright

WINNER: Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024
WINNER: The Stella Prize 2024
WINNER: The James Tait Black Prize – Fiction 2024
WINNER: University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
WINNER: ALS Gold Medal 2024
SHORTLISTED: The Dublin Literary Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – People’s Choice Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Indigenous Writers’ Prize 2024
SHORTLISTED: Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
SHORTLISTED: Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award 2024
LONGLISTED: Voss Literary Prize 2024

‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of [Alexis Wright’s] work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her “collective memoir” of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.’ — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review

This multi-award winning novel has been described as ambitious, accomplished, astonishing, a wonder of twenty-first century fiction, fiercely political, fiercely and gloriously funny, uncompromising, a genre-defiant epic, monumental, urgent, dazzling, exhilarating, polyphonic, and a formidable act of imaginative synthesis.

Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.

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Book of the Week: SIGHT LINES by Kirsty Baker

The recently published Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa is an outstanding publication. Beautifully produced and thought-provoking, Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists. From ancient whatu kakahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa.

How have tangata whenua and tangata tiriti artists negotiated their relationships to each other, and to this place? How have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land and water, family and community, politics and the nation? With more than 150 striking images, and essays by Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith, Megan Tamati-Quennell, alongside Kirsty Baker, Sight Lines is waiting for a place on your art library shelf.

“An exceptional book. Thoughtfully conceived, well written, timely and significant. It manages to be both scholarly – informed by the state of art writing in the present – and accessible to a general readership interested in art, women and feminism in Aotearoa.” — Peter Brunt, Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka

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Book of the Week: SCAFFOLDING by Lauren Elkin

Scaffolding is the story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London, so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clementine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood. Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Eric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we've known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who've lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
”Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly — a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideas. The prose is as well crafted as Elkin's nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed. Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did.” —Guardian

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Book of the Week: NINE GIRLS by Stacy Gregg

The 2024 Winner of the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year is Stacy Gregg (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Maru Hauraki) with her latest book, Nine Girls. Gregg is a household name in New Zealand, and in the UK, with over 30 pony books to her name, numerous awards, along with commercial success. Nine Girls is a departure from the pony stories. Gone is the pony, but in its place is a talking eel. Titch and her whanua have moved to Ngāruawāhia. Adjusting to a small town where she feels out of place is no easy feat, but with a best friend, Tania, the lure of hidden treasure and the unexpected encounter with her eel connecting Titch to her past, adventure is never far away.

In Nine Girls Stacy Gregg draws on her own childhood, and being an outsider; she explores issues of colonisation, racism and striving to find yourself and connect with your heritage. With Gregg’s expert story-telling this coming-of-age story balances humour, adventure, and emotion — the perfect ingredients for a standout book that embraces important themes and history for both Māori and Pākehā readers.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week, Children's books
Book of the Week: CHINESE FISH by Grace Yee — Aotearoa National Poetry Day

WINNER: Victorian Prize for Literature 2024
WINNER: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2024
WINNER: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2024
SHORTLISTED: Mary Gilmore Award 2024
HIGHLY COMMENDED: Anne Elder Award 2023

Grace Yee’s debut book Chinese Fish took out the top poetry prizes in Aotearoa and Australia this year, and the Premier Literary Award in Australia. It’s sharp, provocative and laced with humour. It confronts racism, explores expectation and the complexities of migration. And it does so, brilliantly, shaking its poetic form with verve and intelligence to reward the reader with a deeply layered and thought-provoking experience.

In the words of our poet laurate, Chris Tse, it’s “an unflinchingly honest look at life behind closed doors, where resentment simmers, generations clash, and individual dreams are set aside for the interests of family.”

Chinese Fish is a family saga that spans the 1960s through to the 1980s. Narrated in multiple voices and laced with archival fragments and scholarly interjections, it offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women and girls in a community that has historically been characterised as both a ‘yellow peril’ menace and an exotic ‘model minority’.

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Book of the Week: CLEAR by Carys Davies

This beautifully written short novel subtly explores themes of language, isolation, and connection. When the sole inhabitant of a remote island beyond Shetland gives shelter to a person who arrives there, little knowing that the injured visitor has come to evict him, a fragile bond begins to grow between the two, despite — or because of — their lack of a shared language. Davies’s crystalline prose captures every nuance of the characters’ vulnerabilities and strengths, and is movingly evocative of its remote setting and of the contexts of the Highland Clearances in the 1840s.

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Book of the Week: WHAEA BLUE by Talia Marshall

Talia Marshall’s memoir-journey is undertaken in old cars, pauses to doss on sofas throughout the motu, and moves through place and through time until the two blur and reconfigure into a single substance, the living and the dead pushing past each other in the urgency of their stories. Marshall has a rare gift to look straight at difficulties or embarrassments from which most of us look away, and the poignancy and humour of her observations and phrasing draw us to discover humanity in places of damage, tragedy, awkwardness or uncertainty. Whether clambering the uphill slopes of Aotearoa’s less-than-shiny nowadays, peeling the layers of history and experience that make the whenua of Te Tau Ihu, encountering Te Rauparaha through her tīpuna Tūtepourangi, or dealing with the unwanted attentions of troubled or troubling men, Marshall finds strength in the women who precede her, walk by her side, or karanga to her from the future.

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Book of the Week: ENLIGHTENMENT by Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry’s new novel explores conjunctions of love, faith, and science, as her characters are pulled together, apart, and together again, moved by forces as inexorable as those that underlie the bodies they observe astronomically. What constitutes freedom in this world, and what releases us into the wonder that is our own existence? “Extraordinary and ambitious. What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry's luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.” —Observer

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