Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

ALL HER LIVES by Ingrid Horrocks $35
”Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations and constraints of womanhood. … Emotionally intelligent and historically alert, this book is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf of New Zealand fiction.” —Ockham New Zealand Book Awards judges’ citation on awarding All Her Lives the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

THE ORIGINAL by Nell Stevens $35
Nell Stevens’s enjoyable novel queers our usual understandings of authenticity and fakery, with all the dramatic vicissitudes and complexities of plot of the type of Victorian novel that it both imitates and remakes. Grace shows a prodigious talent at copying and forging paintings, presented here as a virtue because “the value of the copy is in the copyist’s powers of empathy”. But are our social interactions enabled by just the same species of empathy? Isn’t it by copying others that we gain fulfillment and love, and become ourselves?

BORROWED LAND: A Highland story by Kapka Kassabova $55
In the Scottish Highlands, centuries-old connections between the land, nature and people have been, and continue to be, shaken by the forces of colonialism, industry, depopulation, and private property speculation.
”Combines the detail and intimacy of boots on the ground reportage with the universality of a dark fable. This is a Highland story, but also a global story — a poetic and haunting anatomy of what happens when a world is addicted to extraction.” —James Crawford

CAPTAIN COOK AND THE UNSETTLED AFTERLIVES OF EMPIRE by Tony Ballantyne $60
James Cook is one of the most contested figures in Aotearoa New Zealand’s past. His name evokes not only exploration and scientific endeavour but also the violence of first encounters and the enduring legacies of colonisation. Ballantyne examines how stories about Cook have changed over time — and what these shifting narratives reveal about the making of national identity. From Cook’s death through to Tuia 250, Ballantyne traces three major phases in collective understandings of Cook.

SAID THE DEAD by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
Blending detailed research with the sensitvities of a novelist and poet, Said the Dead breaches the boundaries that contain the past to resuscitate the voices of women who were inmates in a now-derelict Victorian mental hospital in the city of Cork. As the narrator follows their traces through the archives and through the corridors, she finds in the murmurings of these women much that resonate with her own life and experiences.

Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

ALL HER LIVES by Ingrid Horrocks $35
”Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations and constraints of womanhood. … Emotionally intelligent and historically alert, this book is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf of New Zealand fiction.” —Ockham New Zealand Book Awards judges’ citation on awarding All Her Lives the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

WHISTLER by Ann Paychett $39
When Daphne notices an older gentleman following her around the Met museum in New York, she doesn't expect it to be Eddie — her former stepfather. While their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both. Reflecting on the short time they spent with each other, they begin to piece together the moments that have shaped who they have become.

THE FINEST HOTEL IN KABUL: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet $40
The Winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction ”plays to all Lyse Doucet's strengths: clarity, empathy, depth of knowledge and innate grasp of fine detail. Her subject is not just a hotel, but a hotel that tells the story of four decades of Afghanistan's proud and sometimes unbelievably painful history. This is a most readable account of joy, despair and resilience in one of the world's most fascinating countries.” —Michael Palin

TALKING CLASSICS: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard $40
What's exciting about a piece of bread 4,000 years old? Or some pots of paint abandoned in the eruption Pompeii? Why should we be bothered with the distant past anyway? What's the point? The life, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome have something to offer everyone. They are not the property of wealthy white men only.

SAID THE DEAD by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
Blending detailed research with the sensitvities of a novelist and poet, Said the Dead breaches the boundaries that contain the past to resuscitate the voices of women who were inmates in a now-derelict Victorian mental hospital in the city of Cork. As the narrator follows their traces through the archives and through the corridors, she finds in the murmurings of these women much that resonate with her own life and experiences.

Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

MY YEAR IN PARIS WITH GERTRUDE STEIN: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
As Paris sweeps the narrator of Levy’s latest fiction along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks about what we have to lose to become modern, about navigating anxiety, about living with uncertainty, about angry fathers, about making a new life in another country, about art and language — and how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century.

THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris 

NGĀTI KUIA: He pūtake, hei pakiaka ora; A history by Madi Williams $60
Drawing on hundreds of whakapapa, pūrākau, waiata and karakia recorded in nineteenth-century tribal manuscripts and court records, Madi Williams presents Ngāti Kuia history in Ngāti Kuia voices. A vital contribution to the understanding of the history of Te Tauihu-o-Te-Waka-a-Māui (the northern South Island).

TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner $33
Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex.

LAND by Maggie O’Farrell $38
Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. From the author of Hamnet.

Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout $38
”One of the most profoundly moving books I have read - I envy anyone reading it for the first time. Elizabeth Strout is one of those rare novelists whose books leave you a little wiser, open and more compassionate than you were when you began reading. Her best novel yet.” —Rachel Joyce

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy $30
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to her mother, Mary Roy.

THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris 

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel $40
“A brilliant novel of ideas; a powerful meditation on life, death, and the vanity of human wishes, all illustrated by a poem that would do Homer proud. A stunningly imagined revisitation of an ancient past that is every bit as awful as the present.” —Kirkus

TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner $33
Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex.

Catch these five books!

Let this week’s flyers land on the top of your reading pile.

TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (Translated by Lin King) $38
”With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” —judges’ citation on awarding the book the 2026 International Booker

NIGHT, MA: A memoir by Elizabeth Knox $40
'Absolutely brilliant. This radiant, radically honest memoir pulls the pin on a sequence of domestic grenades, from the perils of semi-feral childhood to a cruelly compacted series of family crises that, like shock waves, sweep all before. Armed with inimitable wit, the consolation of cats and a forensic gaze that spares no one, least of all herself, Knox interrogates the act of caring; the ties that burn and bind, that we somehow survive.' —Diana Wichtel

THE VALLEY: Crime and punichment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
‘This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.’ —Max Harris 

LAND by Maggie O’Farrell $38
Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. From the author of Hamnet.

LIGHT AND THREAD by Han Kang $35
Kang recalls a poem she wrote at eight years old in which she imagined a ‘gold thread’ of connection: language. Here she uses that thread to tie together essays and poems, her life and her work, beginning with her Nobel lecture in which she discusses her writing process and the myriad questions that drive her work.