Posts tagged Gift selector


THE VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR — THE PERFECT BOOKS FOR BOOK-LOVERS
If you're not sure what to give this season, choose from our 100 recommendations! If the perfect gift isn't there, browse the rest of our website (we have thousands of interesting titles) — or just e-mail us or phone us and we will help you choose. Let us know if you'd like the books gift-wrapped (and choose a card!). We'll send them anywhere. 
>>Or consider giving a Volume Reading Subscription!
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector



Welcome to our SUMMER BOOK SELECTOR
We recommend these books for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, or e-mail us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
List #1:  FICTION
List #3:  SOCIETY

VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

 

 List #1: FICTION

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, or e-mail us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam           $33
"Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of the devastation of Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province to attend a family funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, and an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war, this procession to a pyre ‘at the end of the earth’ lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek." —Judges' commendation on short-listing the book for the 2021 Booker Prize. 
The Women of Troy by Pat Barker          $37
Troy has fallen and the Greek victors are primed to return home, loaded with spoils. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind does not come. The gods are offended — the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied — and so the victors remain in uneasy limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed. The coalition that held them together begins to fray, as old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester. Largely unnoticed by her squabbling captors, erstwhile queen Briseis remains in the Greek encampment. She forges alliances where she can — with young, rebellious Amina, with defiant, aged Hecuba, with Calchus, the disgraced priest — and she begins to see the path to revenge. The sequel to the acclaimed The Silence of the Girls. 
Bug Week by Airini Beautrais           $30
Winner of the Jann Meddlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. On awarding the prize, the judges said, "Casting a devastating and witty eye on humanity at its most fallible and wonky, this is a tightly wound and remarkably assured collection. Atmospheric and refined, these stories evoke a strong sense of quiet unease, slow burning rage and the absurdly comic." We agree!
The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir (translated by Lauren Elkin)          $30
Written in 1954, five years after The Second Sex, the novel of the intense relationship between two girls who grow up together and then grow apart was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. This first English edition includes an afterword by her adopted daughter, who discovered the manuscript hidden in a drawer, and photographs of the real-life friendship which inspired and tormented the author.

The Coming Bad Days by Sarah Bernstein               $23
"Bernstein’s precise, cool, devastating prose takes on a Cuskian quality in highly memorable passages balancing dismissal, sympathy and unsparing humour. Her prose prickles." —Thomas
After leaving the man with whom she'd been living, an unnamed protagonist in an unnamed university city is working unspectacularly on the poet Paul Celan. The abiding feeling in the city is one of paranoia; the weather has been deteriorating and outside her office window she can hear police helicopters circling, looking for the women who have been disappearing. She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. But when she meets Clara — a woman who is exactly her opposite — her plans begin to unravel.
"Bernstein’s pessimism evokes the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer and Thomas Bernhard, chiming all too well with the current discourse around issues of male privilege." –Spectator
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne           $37
"Enjoy this novel for the satire it is and the sheer hilarity of watching this highly unlikable family turn tighter and tighter circles to patch up their wrongs—until it all comes crashing down." —Stella 
The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter-skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a 'national treasure' (his words), his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like), and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen. Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. 
Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle        $25
An unnamed woman in her late twenties navigates unemployment, boredom, chronic illness and online dating. Her activities are banal — applying for jobs, looking up horoscopes, managing depression, going on Tinder dates. ‘I want to tell someone I love them but there is no one to tell,’ she says. ‘Except my sister maybe. I want to pick blackberries on a farm and then die.’ She observes the ambiguities of social interactions, the absurd intimacies of sex and the indignity of everyday events, with a skepticism about the possibility of genuine emotion, or enlightenment. Like life, things are just unfolding, and sometimes, like life, they don’t actually get better.
>>Read Thomas's review. 
Second Place by Rachel Cusk              $33
"The writing is compelling, the prose poised and the content both farcical and unsettling. It will make you squirm." —Stella
From the author of the 'Outline' trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships. A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds. With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Second Place is both deeply affirming and deeply scathing of humanity. 
>>Read our reviews. 
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez          $33
Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighbourhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. 
"The stories walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror, but with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear and in limbo. As terrifying as they are socially conscious, the stories press into the unspoken - fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history - with bracing urgency." —Judges' citation on the book's short-listing for the 2021 International Booker Prize
A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster              $37
When Olga's friend Lara becomes a grandmother, Olga helps out whenever she can. After all, it's a big imposition on Lara, looking after her bereaved daughter and the baby. And the new mother is not exactly considerate. But smoldering beneath Olga's sensible support and loving generosity is a deep jealous need to be the centre of Lara's attention and affection-a need that soon becomes a consuming, dangerous and ultimately tragic obsession. Winner of the 2020 Michael Gifkins Prize. 

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen            $35
Franzen's acute and often hilarious observations on the dynamics and dysfunctions of family life reach a sort of apogee in this unsparing but strangely warm and nuanced novel, set in 1971 as the family of American suburban pastor Russ Hildebrandt feels the pressure of change and starts to lose its acceptable veneer. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
"Warm, expansive and funny – a pure pleasure to read." —Guardian
"Crossroads is Franzen's finest novel yet. He has arrived at last as an artist whose first language, faced with the society of greed, is not ideological but emotional, and whose emotions, fused with his characters, tend more toward sorrow and compassion than rage and self-contempt. —BookForum

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller            $37
Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see.
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen               $33
1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch. Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets. Drawing on actual historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear. It is a tale for our time. 
The Promise by Damon Galgut              $37
Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize.

Galgut won the 2021 Booker Prize for this superb novel exploring the relationships between members of a decaying Afrikaans family in South Africa’s transition from Apartheid. Distilled into accounts of four funerals, each a decade apart, Galgut provides deep insights into the complexities of ethical and personal failings, and the unfortunate resilience of injustice notwithstanding social change and notwithstanding stated intentions — in this case a promise of land owed to a former servant, a promise that is always deferred and never fulfilled. 

"The Promise is fully rooted in contemporary South Africa, but the novel's weather moves into the elemental while attending also to the daily, the detailed and the personal. The book is close to a folktale or the retelling of a myth about fate and loss, about three siblings and land, a promise made and broken. The story has an astonishing sense of depth, as though the characters were imagined over time, with slow tender care." —Colm Toibin
Middle Distance: Long stories of Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Craig Gamble          $35
Longer than a traditional short story and shorter than a novella, the long story is a form that both compresses and sprawls, expands and contracts, and which allows us to inhabit a world in one sitting. The emerging and established writers in this anthology break new territory in character, setting and storytelling. 
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa          $38
"Endlessly curious and achingly beautiful." —Stella
This remarkably fluid combination of essay and autofiction splices together the stories of an Irish noblewoman who wrote a remarkable poem on finding her husband murdered by English soldiers in 1773, and a young mother today who narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life and feels spoken to directly across the centuries through the poem. 
"An extraordinary book that braids the past and present, self and other into a new kind of poetry. Doireann Ní Gríofa writes with a magical kind of knowledge of herself and the world, and of the remembered and imagined, Eibhlín Dubh. This is a book about life, its wonder and its pain, written with hunger and grace, every line a charm." —Emilie Pine
>>Read Stella's review. 
Mr Beethoven by Paul Griffiths          $38
"What would Beethoven have done with another seven years of life, and where, in the 1830s, might he have gone? The answer, in this audacious but exacting extension of the composer’s late period, is America, where an oratorio, Job, is completed (and performed) in Boston. Suffering and revelation are the subject-matter, but in Paul Griffiths’ hands, the Biblical sorrow undergoes a lasting modulation into a new key of delight in friendship, communication, and creativity." —Judges' citation shortlisting the novel for the Goldsmiths Prize

Matrix by Lauren Groff             $35
Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. A historical novel from the author of the outstanding (and very contemporary) Fates and Furies. 

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah        $23   
From the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. 
Restless, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari, the German colonial troops in East Africa. After years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Hamza was not stolen, but was sold; he has come of age in the army, at the right hand of an officer whose control has ensured his protection but marked him for life. Hamza does not have words for how the war ended for him. Returning to the town of his childhood, all he wants is work, however humble, and security and the beautiful Afiya. 
"A remarkable novel, by a wondrous writer, deeply compelling, a thread that links our humanity with the colonial legacy that lies beneath, in ways that cut deep." —Philippe Sands
"To read Afterlives is to be returned to the joy of storytelling. The story of Hamza and Afiya is one of simple lives buffeted by colonial ambitions, of the courage it takes to endure, to hold oneself with dignity, and to live with hope in the heart." —Aminatta Forna
The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris             $35
In the dying days of the American Civil War, newly freed brothers Landry and Prentiss find themselves cast into the world without a penny to their names. Forced to hide out in the woods near their former Georgia plantation, they're soon discovered by the land's owner, George Walker, a man still reeling from the loss of his son in the war. When the brothers begin to live and work on George's farm, the tentative bonds of trust and union begin to blossom between the strangers. But this sanctuary survives on a knife's edge, and it isn't long before the inhabitants of the nearby town of Old Ox react with fury at the alliances being formed only a few miles away.
"Better than any debut novel has a right to be." —Richard Russo

Butcherbird by Cassie Hart          $25
Something is drawing Jena Benedict's family to darkness. Her mother, father, brother and baby sister are killed in a barn fire, and Grandmother Rose banishes Jena from the farm. Now, twenty years on Rose is dying, and Jena returns home with her boyfriend Cade in tow. Jena wants answers about why she was sent away and about what really happened the night of the fire. Will, Rose's live-in caregiver, has similar questions. He hunts for the supernatural, and he knows something sinister lurks in the Benedict homestead. Like Rose, Will has experienced childhood tragedy. Soon, Jena and Will unearth mysteries: a skull, a pocket-watch, a tale of the Dark Man and a tiding of magpies. The duo learn Rose's secrets and confront an evil entity that has been set loose.
Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka           $35
Kurangaituku is the story of Hatupatu told from the perspective of the traditional ‘monster’, Kurangaituku, the bird woman. In the traditional story, told from the view of Hatupatu, he is out hunting and is captured by a creature that is part bird and part woman. The bird woman imprisons him in her cave in the mountains. Hatupatu eventually escapes and is pursued by Kurangaituku. He evades her when he leaps over hot springs, but Kurangaituku goes into them and dies. In this version of the story, Kurangaituku takes us on the journey of her extraordinary life – from the birds who sang her into being, to the arrival of the Song Makers and the change they brought to her world, and her life with Hatupatu and her death. Through the eyes of Kurangaituku, we come to see how being with Hatupatu changed Kurangaituku, emotionally and in her thoughts and actions, and how devastating his betrayal of her was.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro           $37
"Wonderfully narrated, compelling and stimulating." —Stella
A hugely empathic AI, Klara is bought as an Artificial Friend for a girl suffering from an undefined illness. As the full extent of the girl's predicament becomes apparent, Klara, with her wonderful mixture of naivety and capacity, does all she can for the girl, and makes us question what it is to be human. Ishiguro's first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. 
 "People will absolutely love this book, in part because it enacts the way we learn how to love." —Anne Enright
>>Read Stella's review. 
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones            $35
Short-listed for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, this well written multi-generational novel coils its way through issues of race, class and gender in a Barbados where poverty and misogyny lurk under the surface and where a cautionary folk tale takes on multiple meanings for three very different women.

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai (translated by John Batki), illustrated by Max Neumann, with music by Szilveszter Miklós           $45
A hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, the protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death—the past did not exist, only what was current existed—a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that has no continuation. Krasznahorkai's mesmeric prose is accompanied by unsettling paintings by Neumann, and Miklós's percussive accompaniment is accessed via QR codes in each section. Remarkable. 
"Allusive and acerbic: a brilliant work that proves the adage that even paranoiacs have enemies." —Kirkus

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut         $23  
The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck tunnels so deeply into abstraction that he tries to cut all ties with the world, terrified of the horror his discoveries might cause. Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg battle over the soul of physics after creating two equivalent yet opposed versions of quantum mechanics. Their fight will tear the very fabric of reality, revealing a world stranger than they could have ever imagined. Using extraordinary, epoch-defining moments from the history of science, Benjamin Labatut plunges us into exhilarating territory between fact and fiction, progress and destruction, genius and madness.
"A monstrous and brilliant book." —Philip Pullman
"Wholly mesmerising and revelatory. Completely fascinating." —William Boyd

Silverview by John le Carré          $35
Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise. When a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea... What happens when public duty and private morals are irreconcilable? This is the last novel from this master of intrigue, whose insider knowledge of the secret service gave his novels a powerful veracity. 

No-One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood           $33
"Both clever and moving, both piercingly funny and reassuringly sad, the book is is both about the bodilessness of the internet and about bodies in the world, about both isolation and intimacy, and about the burden that language bears—and the possibilities language offers—connecting or attempting to connect all these." —Thomas 
Lockwood's remarkable novel is both clever and moving, both painfully funny and deeply sad, it is about the bodilessness of the internet and about bodies in the world, about both isolation and intimacy, and about the burden that language bears connecting all these. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 
She's a Killer by Kirsten McDougall          $30
The world’s climate is in crisis and New Zealand is being divided and reshaped by privileged immigrant wealthugees. Thirty-something Alice has a near-genius IQ and lives at home with her mother with whom she communicates by Morse code. Alice’s imaginary friend, Simp, has shown up, with a running commentary on her failings. The last time Simp was here was when Alice was seven, on the night a fire burned down the family home. Now Simp seems to be plotting something. When Alice meets a wealthugee named Pablo, she thinks she’s found a way out of her dull existence. But then she meets Pablo’s teenage daughter, Erika – an actual genius full of terrifying ambition.
"A claustrophobic eco-thriller with a gloriously unreliable narrator, She’s a Killer is tense and sharp, and feels unnervingly prescient." –Brannavan Gnanalingam
"Equipped with an exhilaratingly badly-behaved protagonist, She’s a Killer builds from a slice of very strange life into a thriller by way of a succession of stunning comic set pieces. You’ll laugh—a lot. And then you’ll cry and be really surprised about it since you were laughing so much." —Elizabeth Knox

The Author's Cut: Short stories by Owen Marshall         $36
Marshall's own selection from the many collections of short stories that have established him as a master of the portrayal of the complexities of small lives, the workings of small minds, and the insularity of small towns (no matter how large). 
"I very much envy Marshall's ability to lay things down in such a way that each one has its natural weight and place, without any straining and heaving." —Maurice Gee

Colouring My Soul by Kat Maxwell           $25
Maxwell's remarkably raw and direct stories and spare, effective style evoke a childhood in a whānau marked by deprivation, misfortune and strength. 
"I write because my stories bruise my brain until they’re written. They fell out of my fingers one day after I had been nostalgic remembering my childhood and my aunties, my nanny and my koro, and all my cousins."
“Kat Maxwell writes vividly and with raw emotion. She’s inside her world, she knows how it works, her stories are brave and bare.”—Maurice Gee
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed          $37
Mahmood Mattan is a father, a chancer, a petty thief. Many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer. So when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him, Mahmood isn’t too worried — secure in his innocence in a country where justice is served. But as the trial nears, it starts to dawn on him that he is in a fight for his life — against conspiracy, prejudice and the ultimate punishment. In the shadow of the hangman’s noose, he realises that the truth may not be enough to save him. Short-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize. 

A Clear Dawn: New Asian voices from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Paula Morris and Alison Wong               $50
This collection of poetry, fiction and essays by emerging writers is the first-ever anthology of Asian New Zealand creative writing. A Clear Dawn presents a new wave of creative talent. With roots stretching from Indonesia to Japan, from China to the Philippines to the Indian subcontinent, the authors in this anthology range from high school students to retirees, from recent immigrants to writers whose families have lived in New Zealand for generations. Some of the writers – including Gregory Kan, Sharon Lam, Rose Lu and Chris Tse – have published books; some, like Mustaq Missouri, Aiwa Pooamorn and Gemishka Chetty, are better known for their work in theatre and performance. The introduction outlines New Zealand's long yet under-recognised history of immigration from Asia. 
The Fell by Sarah Moss         $35
Desperate for some respite from her teenage son during a period of quarantine in England's Peak District, a woman goes for a short walk on the moors. When she falls and injures herself, this triggers a mountain rescue effort and a recalibration of the participants' relationships with nature and with each other, during which the myriad anxieties of contemporary life are brought to the fore. A document of the inner life of our times from the author of Summerwater. 

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami            $45
"Memoir-ish pieces maybe, but more another realm to explore writing, where it takes us and how far, and how it happens. Simple and complex in equal measure." —Stella
The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself.
>>Read Stella's review. 

Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima            $23
"If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination—imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes." Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are—by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.
"These impressive stories bridge past and present, the familiar and the otherworldly, the lost and the found." —David Mitchell
"A perfect introduction to the quiet, subtle brilliance of Kyoko Nakajima." —David Peace

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa        $20
"A magical book — a charming fable about the pleasures of literature and books." —Stella
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookshop he inherited from his beloved grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The cat needs Rintaro’s help to save books that have been imprisoned, destroyed and unloved. Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different labyrinths to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who locks up his books, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publisher who only wants to sell books like disposable products. Then, finally, there is a mission that Rintaro must complete alone...
>>Read Stella's review. 
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler         $33
A woman in a post-election tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this provocative and subversive novel that examines social media, sex, feminism, and fiction, the connection they've all promised, and the lies they help us tell. 
"Fake Accounts is a novel about the enigmatical spectacle of our extremely online world that is itself both enigmatic and spectacular – a dark comedy about a dark time, and a prismatically intelligent work of art. Brilliant." —Guardian
Mordew by Alex Pheby            $40
In this strange, darkly playful and hugely inventive fantasy, the patriarchal Master draws his magical power from the body of God, buried beneath the city. When Nathan Treeves's mother sells him to the Master it becomes apparent that Nathan has a power of his own, one that could destroy all that the Master has wrought—if only Nathan can find out how to use it. 
"Mordew is a darkly brilliant novel, extraordinary, absorbing and dream-haunting. That it succeeds as well as it does speaks to Pheby’s determination not to passively inhabit his Gormenghastly idiom but instead to lead it to its most extreme iteration, to force inventiveness and grotesqueness into every crevice of his work." —Guardian 
The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter            $17
"Porter is obsessed, splicing himself into the mind of the painter as he lies on his death-bed, the words worked wet on the page." —Thomas
Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed. Max Porter (author of Lanny and Grief is the Thing With Feathers) translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind. 
"Reads like a private communion with the painter." —Guardian
Bewilderment by Richard Powers               $35
Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. Robin is loving, funny and full of plans to save the world. He is also about to be expelled, for smashing his friend’s face in with a metal thermos. What can a father do, when the only solution offered is to put his boy on psychoactive drugs? What can he say, when his boy asks why we are destroying the world? The only thing to do is to take the boy to other planets, while helping him to save this one.

The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn        $38
"My favourite book of the year." —Thomas
The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made; those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have dies, shopping and child-rearing; our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before — and what it means to be truly living. Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn's crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly             $30
Valdin is still in love with his ex-boyfriend Xabi, who used to drive around Auckland in a ute but now drives around Buenos Aires in one. Greta is in love with her fellow English tutor Holly, who doesn’t know how to pronounce Greta’s surname, Vladisavljevic, properly. From their Auckland apartment, brother and sister must navigate the intricate paths of modern romance as well as weather the small storms of their eccentric Māori–Russian–Catalonian family. This novel by Adam Foundation Prize winner Rebecca K Reilly owes as much to Shakespeare as it does to Tinder. Greta and Valdin will speak to anyone who has had their heart broken, or has decided that they don’t want to be a physicist anymore, or has wondered about all of the things they don’t know about their family.

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere              $38
"Riviere has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a keen sense of how closely the ridiculous lies to the ordinary, a keen sense that in fact the ridiculous is only the ordinary logically extended." —Thomas
A glorious and hilarious rant against the pretensions of the 'poetry scene', so to call it, and against pretty much everything else that falls under the author's notice, Dead Souls is also a metaphysical mystery and an exploration of the dual pitfalls of plagiarism and invention — a novel with a similar palette of barbs and pleasures to those of Thomas Bernhard. 
>>Read an extract. 
Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney          $33
A hugely successful young novelist is having trouble writing her third book. She meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Can these people find or remember or create what is supposed to be good about being alive in this world? The eagerly awaited third novel from the author of the hugely successful Conversations with Friends and Normal People. 

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead      $37
In 1920s Montana, wild-hearted orphan Marian Graves spends her days roaming the rugged forests and mountains of her home. When she witnesses the roll, loop and dive of two barnstorming pilots, she promises herself that one day she too will take to the skies. Years later, after a series of reckless romances and a spell flying to aid the British war effort, Marian embarks on a treacherous flight around the globe in search of the freedom she has always craved. She is never seen again. More than half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a troubled Hollywood starlet beset by scandal, is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves in her biopic, a role that will lead her to probe the deepest mysteries of the vanished pilot's life. Short-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize. 
"Thoroughly clever." —Guardian
Devil's Trumpet by Tracey Slaughter          $30
When the stars were rhinestones. When your car was a blue Holden god. When kisses spread to your back teeth, marathons of sucking. When we pashed through jokes, through tunes, through homework, through the leftovers we shovelled out our schoolbags. When you let me tattoo you with talk. Thirty-one new stories from the author of Deleted Scenes for Lovers.
"If Slaughter is writing from the black block in her chest, she is also speaking directly into yours." —Charlotte Graham-McLay
It's Not What You Thought It Would Be by Lizzy Stewart            $48
A remarkable graphic novel, 
"This brilliant debut collection explores the intensity of teenage ennui and female friendship, with a deft feel for its slights and tensions. Almost without exception, the gorgeous, clever short stories in Lizzy Stewart’s It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be are preoccupied with girlhood, as seen through the eyes of women who are now old enough and wise enough to understand all the stuff that was once beyond their comprehension. Several touch on place and the idea of escape, and at least one explores, quite brilliantly, how women are both seen, and not seen, out in the world. The very best of them, however, encompass both teenage boredom, the fretful ennui that we tend to mourn as adults even as we recall how we longed to escape it, and the special intensity of female friendships, particularly those that go all the way back to the awkward, geeky years before we reinvented ourselves." —Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki            $25
The first English-language publication of a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon. In a future where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia—until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interrupted. The last family in a desolate city struggles to approximate twentieth- century life on Earth, lifting what notions they can from 1960s popular culture. But beneath these badly learned behaviours lies an atavistic appetite for destruction. Two new friends enjoy drinks on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems, and the air itself seems to carry a treacherously potent nostalgia. Back on Earth, Emma’s not certain if her emotionally abusive, green-haired boyfriend is in fact an intergalactic alien spy, or if she’s been hitting the bottles and baggies too hard. And in the title story, the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanisation of labour foster a cold-hearted and ultimately tragic disaffection among the youth of Tokyo. Nonchalantly hip and full of deranged prescience, Suzuki’s singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Neuromancer to The Handmaid’s Tale. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always grounded in the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
Aljce in Therapy Land by Alice Tawhai               $29
Workplace bullying, online relationships and stoned friendships — with a good dose of Wonderland added in.
“Aljce in Therapy Land is both hilarious and distressing. It captures workplace relationships and power imbalances like few novels from Aotearoa do. Tawhai was already one of the best short story writers around, but she has written a one-of-a-kind novel.” —Brannavan Gnanalingam
“This book will sneak up on you. Aljce in Therapy Land is as much about the way small towns wax and wane as it is about how workplaces can take what ought to be good practice into some very bad places. Tawhai’s skill is in ignoring the three-act structure but still making the reader ultimately side with the titular character.” —Murdoch Stephens
The Magician by Colm Tóibín            $38
Tóibín brings his immense sympathies and verbal prowess to bear upon the life of Thomas Mann, a writer forced to cope with the turmoil of both public and private life because of war, exile and suicide. Mann's re-evaluation of his relationship to his homeland and his family underlies his novels, and Tóibín reveals the many layers and contradictions of a complex genius. 
"This is not just a whole life in a novel, it's a whole world." —Katharina Volckmer
"The Magician is a remarkable achievement. Mann himself, one feels certain, would approve." —John Banville

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft)          $48
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumours of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The Nobel Prize in Literature laureate writes the story of Frank through the perspectives of his contemporaries, capturing Enlightenment Europe on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
"A visionary novel. Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry. With its formidable insistence on rendering an alien world with as much detail as possible, the novel reminded me at times of Paradise Lost. The vividness with which it’s done is amazing. At a micro-level, she sees things with a poetic freshness. The Books of Jacob, which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it." —Marcel Theroux, Guardian
Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes           $50
Aotearoa is a land of extraordinary queer writers, many of whom have contributed to our rich literary history. But you wouldn’t know it. Decades of erasure and homophobia have rendered some of our most powerful writing invisible. Out Here will change that. This landmark book brings together and celebrates queer New Zealand writers from across the gender and LGBTQIA+ spectrum with a generous selection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and much much more.
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimora            $37
How can you save your friend's life if she doesn't want to be rescued? In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining. At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives to a wondrous castle filled with winding stairways, watchful portraits and twinkling chandeliers. In this new sanctuary, they are confronted with a set of clues leading to a hidden room where one of them will be granted a wish. But there's a catch—if they don't leave the castle by five o'clock, they will be punished. As time passes, a devastating truth emerges—only those brave enough to share their stories will be saved.

Unquiet by Linn Ullman            $26
He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, by the actress he directed and once loved. Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Now that she's grown up — a writer, with children of her own — and he's in his eighties, they envision writing a book together, about old age, language, memory and loss. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record. But it's winter now and old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the father is gone, only memories, images and words — both remembered and recorded — remain. And from these the daughter begins to write her own story, in the pages which become this book.
"Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters." —Rachel Cusk
We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida              $33
"Compulsively attractive writing. A vivid portrayal of growing up in the 1980s." —Stella
The beautifully written new novel from the author of The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. Teenage Eulabee and her alluring best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy, oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. They know the ins and outs of the homes and beaches, Sea Cliff's hidden corners and eccentric characters-as well as the swanky all-girls' school they attend. Their lives move along uneventfully, with afternoon walks by the ocean and weekend sleepovers. Then everything changes. Eulabee and Maria Fabiola have a disagreement about what they did or didn't witness on the way to school one morning, and this creates a schism in their friendship. The rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola's sudden disappearance—a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths.
Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner             $38
Winner of the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize ("for fiction at its most novel").
Aspiring writer Sterling is arrested one morning, without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling — with the help of their three best friends — must defy bullfighters, football legends, spaceships, and Google Earth tourists in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account. Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka's The Trial written for the era of gaslighting, a surreal inquiry into the very real effects of state violence and coercion on gender-nonconforming, working-class, and Black bodies.
"A sublime, mesmerising feat. The world feels all the better for it." —Irenosen Okojie
"Sterling Karat Gold reminds me of nothing else. With atypical inventiveness Waidner steers us thorugh a marvellous spinning parade of matadors, red cards, time travel and cataclysm. A beautifully elegant miracle of a book." —Guy Gunaratne
little scratch by Rebecca Watson           $35
Watson's remarkable project evokes, to often hilarious effect, the thought processes of its character through the course of a day. Beneath the world of demarcated fridge shelves, office politics, clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications emerges a instance of sexual violence that has shaken and disordered the character's existence. 
"little scratch reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion. The silent and enraged inner testimony of a character trying to maintain 'normalcy', little scratch is daring and completely readable." —Colin Barrett
"Playful precise and insightful, Rebecca Watson's writing bursts with enormous energy." —Nicole Flattery
>>Read Thomas's review. 
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder          $35
"Wallow in its humour but watch out for the bite that comes with this joyous bark!" —Stella
A sharp, intelligent, playfully transgressive novel-of-ideas that explores the way power, gender and tradition shape modern motherhood. Nightbitch's protagonist, an artist-turned-fulltime-parent, is home with her two-year-old son, struggling with solitude, exhaustion and monotony, even while she feels profound love for her child. Then, over the course of the summer, she experiences a strange metamorphosis (the clue is in the title) which complicates her situation in outrageous ways, whilst also setting her free.
"Graceful, funny and unnerving as hell." —Jenny Offill
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector


 

List #2: CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULTS

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, or e-mail us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

New Zealand's Backyard Birds by Ned Barraud          $30
The domestic outdoors of Aotearoa is filled with birds, both resident and visiting, both native and introduced. This pleasing book, with its clear illustrations and succinct text, is the perfect companion for every child. 


Atua: Māori gods and heroes by Gavin Bishop          $40
Beautifully presented and endlessly fascinating, Bishop's new book belongs on every child's and every adult's bookshelf. Lively illustrations and text tell the unique stories of Aotearoa's gods, demigods and heroes.  
>>Other books by Gavin Bishop. 

Koro by Gavin Bishop              $18
The child and their koro explore the day – they go for a walk, collect food from the garden, eat, tell stories, and snuggle up for a rest to finish. A beautiful, simple board book in te reo Māori.
>>Also available in English as Pops. 


Truthmaker ('The Severed Land' #2) by Tony Chapelle         $20
"This sequel captures the essence of my novel and takes my characters on a tense and dangerous journey through the world of The Severed Land." —Maurice Gee. Picking up where The Severed Land left off, this suspense-filled novel continues the story of the brave ex-slave Fliss. Despite her idyllic life behind the safety of the wall, she can't help longing for someone special to fill the vague sense of loneliness that nags at her. That is until a young man appears, preaching peace and unity. His arrival, however, is about to send Fliss and her friend Minnie back through the wall on a hazardous mission. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
The Tiny Woman's Coat by Joy Cowley and Giselle Clarkson         $25

The tiny woman really needs a coat to keep warm, but how will she get one? The trees give her some leaves, the porcupine gives her a needle, the horse gives her its hair for the thread—everyone contributes something and the tiny woman can make herself a coat. This delightful book will be an instant favourite.

A Winter's Promise ('The Mirror Visitor' #1) by Christelle Dabos            $26
"This is an excellent fantasy epic with compelling characters. Ophelia and Thorn are both intriguingly complex, the clans and their gifts fascinating, and the interpersonal relationships between the main characters complex and ever revealing. There is amazing world-building and the plot is tight and tense, with plenty of twists and turns, political games, and machinations of seduction, threat and trickery as the story and its characters feed on the desire for power and status. You will be craving the next instalment." —Stella
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Read the whole series!
The Sky by Hélène Druvert                         $45
This gorgeous, large-format book is filled with astounding laser cutouts that take readers away through the clouds, through the atmosphere and to the planets, the stars and beyond. On the way they'll learn about birds, insects and pollination, witness a tornado and an eclipse, and see all kinds of flying machines. 
>>Other books by Druvert.

The Sun is a Star: A voyage through the universe with Dick Frizzell           $45
Dick Frizzell fills his spaceship with his artist friends (including John Pule, Greg O'Brien, John Reynolds, Judy Darragh, Reuben Patterson, Grahame Sydney, Karl Maughan, Ani O'Neill, Reg Mombassa and Wayne Youle) and sets off into Space to explain the wonders of the universe. 
Te Tuna Wātakirihi me ngā Tamariki o Te Tiriti o Toa / Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street by Patricia Grace and Robyn Kahukiwa (translated by Hirini Melbourne)            $20
What special gifts does the magical Tuna bring the children of Cannon's Creek? Since its publication in 1984, this wonderful, joyous story about a magical eel that presents cultural treasures to a group of Maori, Pasifika and Pakeha children, who then use their gifts to enrich their neighbourhood, has been essential to any child's library.
The Uprising: The Mapmakers in Cruxcia by Eirlys Hunter        $23
Having triumphed in The Mapmakers' Race, Sal, Joe, Francie and Humphrey Santander are back, looking for their father, a famous explorer who disappeared on his last expedition. Their search takes them to Cruxcia, where the people are fighting to protect their land from the all-powerful Grania Trading Company. The Santanders’ mapping skills may just help Cruxcians save their ancient valley—and perhaps provide the key to reuniting their family.
>>Read Stella's review of the phenomenal first book.
There's a Ghost in this House by Oliver Jeffers           $38
A young girl looks everywhere in the haunted house but cannot find the ghosts that are supposed to live here. The glassine overlays show the reader just where they are hiding (and playing), however. A large amount of lightly spooky fun. 
White Fox by Chen Jiatong             $22
Cana Dilah the white fox find the treasure that will enable him to turn into a human? Or will the wicked blue fox get there first? A story steeped in Chinese folklore, and followed by White Fox in the Forest. 


The Pōrangi Boy by Shilo Kino              $25
"In The Pōrangi Boy, Shilo Kino has crafted, through hard edges and deftness of touch, a story that will endure. Niko’s intensely personal journey is woven through with threads of issues that permeate the lives of young people in Aotearoa – environmental damage, neocolonialism, bullying, poverty – but never slips into didacticism or preachiness. Where the story shines the brightest is in Shilo Kino’s uncontestable genius for crafting believable, authentic voices that are thoroughly rooted in this place, these times. You feel the shapes of the words in your mouth, hear the resonance they leave in your ears – and the resonance of these words and this book is clear and long-lasting." —Judges' citation on the book winning the Young Adults section of the 2021 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. 
Lit: Stories from home edited by Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod      $29
A collection of vital New Zealand short stories for young adults exploring ideas about identity, activism awareness, coming-of-age, society, and family. Stories by Gina Cole, Lani Wendt Young, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Witi Ihimaera, Anahera Gildea, Elsie Locke, Owen Marshall, David Hill, Katherine Mansfield, Patricia Grace, Frank Sargeson, J.P. Pomare, Tracey Slaughter, Russell Boey, Nithya Narayanan, and Ting J. Yiu. 

Learning to Love Blue by Saradha Koirala              $25
The sequel to the excellent YA novel Lonesome When You Go.  With Vox Pop and high school behind her, 18-year-old Paige arrives in Melbourne with her suitcase and bass guitar; a copy of Bob Dylan's Chronicles and Joni Mitchell's Blue - a gift from her estranged mother that she's still learning to love. Following in the footsteps of her musical heroes, all of whom left home to make it in 1960s New York, Paige knows Melbourne's the new rock and roll capital of the world: if she can't make it here, she can't make it anywhere. Besides, her high school crush Spike lives here... Paige has always had music, but realises she still has a lot to learn about relationships: how to be vulnerable and how to be blue.
Fossils from Lost Worlds by Benjamin Laverdunt and Helene Rajcak           $40
Clues to prehistoric life lie hidden under the ground, and paleontologists are forever modifying our ideas of the deep past on the basis of new evidence. This lively, gloriously illustrated large-format volume for children is a wonderful introduction not only to the sheer variety and strangeness of creatures that preceded us, but also to the ways in which science is always improving the model it builds of reality and of the past. 
Falling into Rarohenga by Steph Matuku            $30
It seems like an ordinary day when Tui and Kae, sixteen-year-old twins, get home from school - until they find their mother, Maia, has disappeared and a swirling vortex has opened up in her room. They are sucked into this portal and dragged down to Rarohenga, the Maori Underworld, a shadowy place of infinite dark levels, changing landscapes and untrustworthy characters. Maia has been kidnapped by their estranged father, Tema, enchanted to forget who she really is and hidden somewhere here. Tui and Kae have to find a way through this maze, outwit the shady characters they meet, break the spell on their mother, and escape to the World of Light before the Goddess of Shadows or Tema holds them in Rarohenga forever.
Baby Meets Bird by Kate Muir         $20
A beautiful high-contrast board book introducing various native birds of Aotearoa. 
The Boy Who Made Things Up by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Lily Emo            $25
"Shall we just walk along, Dad, or shall we make some of it up?"  Join Michael and his over-worked father as they journey home one fun-filled afternoon. Nelson illustrator won the Margaret Mahy Illustration Award for this book. 
"Voila: an actual Mahy, republished with wildly beautiful artwork by Nelson illustrator Lily Emo. The press release about this one called Emo’s work 'breathtaking' and usually that’s hyperbole but in this case my breath actually did catch, more than a few times, as I turned to a fresh page. The seascapes are dreamy, they’re what you notice first, but after many re-reads my very favourite thing about the art here is Emo’s gentle skewering of adults’ terrible awful screen-induced posture." —Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff
Stop the Tour! by Bill Nagelkerke           $20
The Springbok Tour held in New Zealand over 3 months in 1981 remains one of the most divisive periods in New Zealandâs recent history. Through his (fictional) diary entries, we learn about 13-year-old Martin Daly's experiences during the tour and his thoughts and feelings about the escalating conflict. His sister, Sarah, is out to stop the tour in protest against South Africa's racist apartheid system. His rugby-mad dad is equally determined that the tour should go ahead. Martin wishes the whole thing would simply go away. But a growing understanding of the issues helps him to stop sitting on the fence and choose a side.
Ngake me Whātaitai by Ben Ngaia and Laya Mutton-Rogers              $20
This strikingly illustrated book in te reo Māori tells the legend of how the two taniwha, Ngake and Whātaitai, formed the harbour and hills of Te Whanganui-a-Tara.


Hattie and Olaf by Frida Nilsson and Stina Wirsén             $20
Hattie wants a horse more than anything. Her friend Ellen has three ponies. When Hattie’s father finally comes home with a horse float, Hattie is ecstatic. But instead of a horse, out stomps Olaf—a donkey. Now Hattie not only has horse fever, she suddenly catches lying sickness as well... The audacious and captivating Hattie and her best friend Linda navigate the social politics of their first school years in this funny illustrated chapter book.
The Loop by Ben Oliver         $22
"A fast-paced sci-fi thriller for teens. Not only is the unwinding story compelling, and the mysterious experiments on the populace mind-bending, but there is also plenty of emotional heft too, with its diverse characters, developing relationships and consequential situations." —Stella
It's Luka Kane's sixteenth birthday and he's been inside The Loop for over two years. Every inmate is serving a death sentence with the option to push back their execution date by six months if they opt into "Delays", scientific and medical experiments for the benefit of the elite in the outside world. But rumours of a war on the outside are spreading amongst the inmates, and before they know it, their tortuous routine becomes disrupted. The government issued rain stops falling. Strange things are happening to the guards. And it's not long until the inmates are left alone inside the prison. Were the chains that shackled Luka to his cell the only instruments left to keep him safe? In a thrilling shift, he must overcome fellow prisoners hell-bent on killing him, the warden losing her mind, the rabid rats in the train tunnels, and a population turned into murderous monsters to try and break out of The Loop, save his family, and discover who is responsible for the chaos that has been inflicted upon the world. 
Inside the Suitcase by Clotilde Perrin            $33
Another wonderfully inventive lift-the-flap book from the creator of Inside the Villains and The House of Madam M. Once upon a time, in a little house behind the hills, a boy packs his suitcase for a long journey. Lift the flaps to see what he takes, and travel with him over oceans and mountains, under water and into the forest. With every step on this voyage of obstacles, the boy faces a decision that will lead to a new adventure and help him get home. Delve deeper into each page and always remember what's in the suitcase.
>>Peek inside the suitcase. 
>>Read Stella's review. 

Rhyme Hungry by Antonia Pesenti          $23
Some things sound like other things, and those things could be very silly indeed. Pesenti continues the madness of the very popular Rhyme Cordial in this bold and inventive board book. Each page also opens backwards to reveal an illustrated silly sound-alike. Would you fancy instant poodles or a cheese ghostie for lunch? A large amount of fun. 
A Mother is a House by Aurore Petit               $30
A mother is a nest, a mirror, a moon. The baby sees their mother in every aspect of their day. As the pages go by, the child grows. The mother who was a refuge becomes a road, a story, and a show. On the final page, the child is ready to take their first steps. This beautifully illustrated story looks through the baby's eyes for an unexpected and affecting picture of parents and home. 



Skinny Dip: Poetry edited by Susan Price and Kate De Goldi             $30
Thirty-six poems for young readers from Sam Duckor-Jones, essa may ranapiri, Bill Manhire, Anahera Gildea, Amy McDaid, Kōtuku Nuttall, Ben Brown, Ashleigh Young, Rata Gordon, Dinah Hawken, Oscar Upperton, James Brown, Victor Rodger, Tim Upperton, Lynley Edmeades, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Nina Mingya Powles, Renee Liang and Nick Ascroft. Illustrations by Amy van Luijk.
"Bold and timely. A magnificent range of form from some of our best contemporary voices." —Hera Lindsay Bird

Take Me Home: An activity journal for young explorers by Mary Richards          $20
Mary Richards has created an excellent series of activity books to help children become more aware of their surroundings in fun and creative ways. Look at familiar places — or approach unfamiliar ones — in new ways to engage learning and develop self-expression. 
Also available: 
Charlie Tangaroa and the Creature from the Sea by T.K. Roxborogh            $25
On a beach clean-up, thirteen-year-old one-legged Charlie and his half-brother, Robbie, find a ponaturi - a mermaid - washed up on a beach. An ancient grudge between the Maori gods Tane and Tangaroa has flared up because a port being built in the bay is degrading the ocean and creatures are fleeing the sea. This has reignited anger between the gods, which breaks out in storms, earthquakes and huge seas. The human world and realm of the gods are thrown into chaos. The ponaturi believes Charlie is the only one who can stop the destruction because his stump is a sign that he straddles both worlds. 
"This is a uniquely New Zealand story, and one in which so many of us can see ourselves." —judges' citation when naming this book the 2021 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year. 
Kia Kaha: A storybook of Māori who changed the world by Jeremy Sherlock and Stacey Morrison        $45
Featuring people and groups both historic and contemporary, who have achieved great things from land marches and language revival to hip hop and contemporary Maori fashion design, this book will fill readers of all ages, and from all walks of life, with aroha, whanaungatanga and hope for our future. Illustrations by Akoni Pakinga, Haylee Ngaroma, Isobel Joy Te Aho-White, Jess Thompson aka Maori Mermaid, Josh Morgan, Kurawaka Productions, Miriama Grace-Smith, Ngaumutane Jones aka Ms Meemo, Reweti Arapete, Taupuruariki Whakataka-Brightwell, Xoe Hall, and Zak Waipara.
The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, Being an account of their daring exploits and audacious crimes by Jonathan Stroud          $22
New from the author of the wonderful 'Lockwood & Co' and 'Bartimaeus' series. England has been radically changed by a series of catastrophes – large cities have disappeared and London has been replaced by a lagoon. The surviving population exists in fortified towns where they cling to traditional ways, while strangely evolved beasts prowl the wilderness beyond. Conformity is rigidly enforced and those who fall foul of the rules are persecuted: some are killed, others are driven out into the wilds. Only a few fight back – and two of these outlaws, Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne, display an audacity and talent that makes them legends.
"Stroud doesn’t miss a beat in laying down some great challenges: climate change, species mutation, psychological manipulation, and power struggles — as well as more endearing qualities of humanity in bravery, loyalty and friendship." —Stella
No-One Is Angry Today by Toon Tellegen and Marc Boutavant        $35
Ten thoughtful, philosophical, absurd tales about forest animals—from squirrel to scarab beetle—spending their days as friends do, with birthday parties, writing letters, visiting, dancing, or sometimes all alone. Each day brings emotions that are always worth exploring, although not always easy...

Egg Marks the Spot ('Skunk and Badger' #2) by Amy Timberlake and Jon Klassen        $25
Odd companions Skunk and Badger became firm favourites for many (young and old) with their first book, and now they're back, setting off on a rock-finding expedition that is just bound to be very different from what they were expecting!

Oceanarium by Loveday Trinick and Teagan White        $50
Step inside the pages of Oceanarium to enjoy the experience of a museum from the comfort of your own home. This stunning  large-format offering from the 'Welcome to the Museum' series guides readers around the world's oceans, from sandy shorelines to the deepest depths. Get up close and personal with giant whale sharks, tiny tropical fish, majestic manatees and so much more, travel the world from frozen Arctic seas to shimmering coral reefs, and learn why it is so important that we protect our oceans.
When We Got Lost in Dreamland by Ross Welford              $18
When 12 year-old Malky and his younger brother Seb become the owners of a "Dreaminator", they are thrust into worlds beyond their wildest imagination. From tree-top flights and Spanish galleons, to thrilling battles and sporting greatness - it seems like nothing is out of reach when you can share a dream with someone else. But impossible dreams come with incredible risks, and when Seb won't wake up and is taken to hospital in a coma, Malky is forced to leave reality behind and undertake a final, terrifying journey to the stone-age to wake his brother.
The Big Book of Belonging by Yuval Zommer           $35
A celebration of all the ways that humans are connected to life on planet Earth. With children at the heart of every beautifully illustrated spread, this book draws parallels between the way humans, plants, and animals live and behave. We all breathe the same air and take warmth from the same sun, we grow, we adapt to the seasons, and we live together in family groups.
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector



List #4: CULTURE

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, or e-mail us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton            $38
Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of Sado at the age of twenty-one and on her journey to becoming a literary translator. Written in fifty semi-discrete entries, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language that draws together a variety of cultural reflections — from conformity and being an outsider, to the gendering of Japanese society, and attitudes towards food and the cult of 'deliciousness' — alongside insights into the transformative powers of language-learning. 


Enough Horizon: The life and work of Blanche Baughan by Carol Markwell           $40
One of the first writers to speak with an authentic New Zealand voice, Blanche Edith Baughan (1870-1958) was known as a poet and local travel writer. Enough Horizon tells of Baughan's troubled upbringing with a mentally ill mother in London, and her emigration to New Zealand in 1900, where she embraced the freedom it gave her to write and think and enjoy the wilderness she grew to love. It was here, particularly in her beloved Akaroa, that Blanche's writing and interests in the environment and her advocacy for the vulnerable in society flourished. She was a botanist, conservationist, humanitarian and prison reformer, who strove for the effective and humane treatment of prisoners. Blanche met and corresponded with leading writers, thinkers and scientists of her day, including John Ruskin, and poets Jessie Mackay and Ursula Bethell.

The Other Jack by Charles Boyle           $32
A book about books, mostly, and bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas. Writer and reader meet in cafés to talk about books – that’s the plot. There are arguments, spilt coffee, deaths both in life and in fiction, and rain and laughter. Wonderful. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 
Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell            $17
Shaun Bythell, proprietor of The Bookshop, Wigtown, follows his (cuttingly accurate) Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller, with a hilarious 'useful' handbook to the types of customers booksellers are faced with every day. Which type are you? 

Essays: Two by Lydia Davis              $55
"A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust." —Ali Smith
Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays: One. Now, she continues the project with Essays Two, focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles.
>>Read Thomas's review of the first volume. 

Things I Learned at Art School by Megan Dunn               $35
A hilarious and personal collection of essays from a distinctive and resonant voice. Things I Learned at Art School tells the story of Dunn's early life and coming-of-age in New Zealand in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. From her parents’ split-up to her Smurf collection, from the mean girls at school to the mermaid movie Splash!, from her work in strip clubs and massage parlours (and one steak restaurant) to the art school of the title, this book has been eagerly anticipated—and very much worth waiting for. Chapters include: The Ballad of Western Barbie; A Comprehensive List of All the Girls Who Teased Me at Western Heights High School, What They Looked Like and Why They Did It; On Being a Redhead; Life Begins at Forty: That Time My Uncle Killed Himself; Good Girls Write Memoirs, Bad Girls Don’t Have Time; Videos I Watched with My Father; Things I Learned at Art School; CV of a Fat Waitress; Nine Months in a Massage Parlour Called Belle de Jour; Various Uses for a Low Self-esteem; Art in the Waiting Room; and Submerging Artist. 
No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian commute by Lauren Elkin           $33
Commuting between English and French, Lauren Elkin chronicles a life in transit in this book written on her cellphone during her daily commute. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to the discovery of her ectopic pregnancy, her diary sketches a portrait of the author, not as an artist, but as a pregnant woman on a Parisian bus. In the troubling intimacy of public transport, Elkin queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, registering the ordinary makings of a city and its people.
"Paris in intense, dramatic closeup — an insider's entrancing view. Lauren Elkin turns her phone outwards, like a camera to see with, she writes about the outside world while inside a glass container (the bus), she maps the inner world of self and indeed of the bus onto the outer world she is travelling through. She allows herself to catch moments most writers would think don't belong in a text. The book's form perfectly embodies its content. It is disarmingly modest and that is part of its charm. She is thinking about self / community. Re-making it." — Michèle Roberts
Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann          $32
Bold, angry, despairing and very funny, these essays cover everything from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie to Agatha Christie. Ellmann calls for a moratorium on air travel, rails against bras, and pleads for sanity in a world that hardly recognises sanity when it (occasionally) appears.
"Joyously electric." —Guardian

Not a Novel: Collected writings and recollections by Jenny Erpenbeck          $33
Following astonishing, insightful, and pellucidly written novels, including Visitation and Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck turns her pen on herself and reveals aspects of her life, her literary and musical influences and preoccupations, and thoughts on society. Her essays are as astonishing, insightful and pellucidly written as her fiction. 
"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating. Ferocious as well as virtuosic." —Deborah Eisenberg
"Her restrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming." —Nicole Krauss
"Erpenbeck's writing writing is a lure that leads us — off-centre as into a vortex — into the most haunted and haunting territory." —Anne Michaels
Excavate! The wonderful and frightening world of The Fall by Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley       $55
Over the course of their prolific forty-year career The Fall were consistently one of the most influential and idiosyncratic groups in Britain, with frontman Mark E. Smith hailed as one of the sharpest lyricists. Following Smith's death in January 2018, there was an outpouring of tributes from a surprising spectrum of admirers. With contributions from Adelle Stripe, Dan Fox, Elain Harwood, Mark Fisher, Ian Penman and others, alongside never-before seen artwork, photographs, and hand-written material from Smith and the band, Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton book unpack and make sense of the strangely fascinating landscape of The Fall.
For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing on writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick’s work: that the painful process of understanding one’s self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, Taking a Long Look brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
“We all talk the talk about public intellectuals nowadays. Vivian Gornick walks the walk. The essays in Taking a Long Look could not be more direct, more authoritative, more alive with the pleasures of discovery or alert to the ambiguities of argument. Whether writing literary or political criticism, memoir, or feminist polemic, her mastery is assured.” —George Scialabba
From the Centre, A writer's life by Patricia Grace             $40
Patricia Grace begins her remarkable memoir beside Hongoeka Bay. It is the place she has returned to throughout her life, and fought for, one of many battles she has faced. This book provides special insight into the life of this important author. "It was when I first went to school that I found out that I was a Maori girl. I found that being different meant that I could be blamed." 

Some Answers Without Questions by Lavinia Greenlaw          $28
Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is a rigorous and lyrical work of self-investigation. Lavinia Greenlaw sets out to explore the impulse to say something, to write or sing, and finds herself confronting matters of presence and absence, anger and speechlessness, authority and permission. The result is important and timely, a spirited and vital exploration of what enables anyone — but a woman and an artist in particular — to create and record even when not invited to do so. Some Answers Without Questions is the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter - and not being asked the ones that do.

The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw           $38
Brave, explosive, and thought-provoking, this is a powerful memoir. 'It's material, make a story out of it,' was the mantra Charlotte Grimshaw grew up with in her literary family. But when her life suddenly turned upside-down, she needed to re-examine the reality of that material. The more she delved into her memories, the more the real characters in her life seemed to object. So what was the truth of 'a whole life lived in fiction'? This is a vivid account of a New Zealand upbringing, where rebellion was encouraged, where trouble and tragedy lay ahead. It looks beyond the public face to the 'messy reality of family life — and much more'.


A nicel presented book about the remarkable collaboration between the modernist architect James Hackshaw (a member, for a time, of the famous Group Architects), the painter Colin McCahon, and the then young sculptor Paul Dibble on 12 New Zealand buildings — from churches to school halls. Drawing on interviews with James Hackshaw before his death and on the McCahon archive, this book brings into the light a body of work and a collaboration that has hitherto been little known or examined. Illustrated with Hackshaw's plans, McCahon's drawings, letters and journal entries, and contemporary images of the surviving buildings and artworks, the book includes essays by Peter Simpson, Julia Gatley, Peter Shaw and Alexa Johnston.
Bill Hammond: Across the Evening Sky             $70
A beautifully presented book of this outstanding artist. Includes an interview between the Bill Hammond and fellow artist Tony de Lautour; Texts by Rachael King, Nic Low, Paul Scofield, Ariana Tikao and Peter Vangioni: Images and details of some of Hammond’s finest paintings; Responses to Hammond’s practice by other artists, including Fiona Pardington, Marlon Williams and Shane Cotton. 


The Homely II by Gavin Hipkins             $30
In 2001, Gavin Hipkins unveiled his photo frieze, 'The Homely', at City Gallery Wellington. Consisting of eighty photos taken between 1997 and 2000 on travels in New Zealand and Australia, neighbouring antipodean colonies, it became his best-known and most celebrated work. In 2018, he unveiled its sequel in the exhibition This is New Zealand, also at City Gallery. 'The Homely II' also comprises eighty photos, shot in the same manner, arranged in the same frieze format. Hipkins took the images between 2001 and 2017 on excursions through New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the former colony and the colonial homeland. Contributions by Megan Tamati-Quennell, Robert Leonard, Felicity Barnes, Andrew Clifford, Blair French, Terrence Handscomb, Emil McAvoy, Emma Ng, and Lara Strongman.
>>A few images. 
Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks                $35
"I’d wanted to remember why it was we swam in the first place – to remember the pleasure of immersing in an element other than air." Ingrid Horrocks had few aspirations to swimming mastery, but she had always loved being in the water. She set out on a solo swimming journey, then abandoned it for a different kind of swimming altogether – one which led her to more deeply examine relationships, our ecological crisis, and responsibilities to collective care. Why do people swim, and where, how, with whom? Where We Swim ranges from solitary swims in polluted lakes and rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, to swims in pools in Medellín, Phoenix and the Peruvian Amazon. Near Brighton, Horrocks is joined by an imagined community of early women swimmers; back home she takes her first tentative swim after lockdown. Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, this book is about being a daughter, sister, partner, mother, and above all a human animal living among other animals. 
The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere, A biographical portrait by Vincent O'Sullivan           $45
Hotere invited O'Sullivan to write his life in 2005, and this nuanced and insightful portrait of one of Aotearoa's most important and interesting artists is the long-awaited and supremely fulfilling result. 
.....and then there were none by Lloyd Jones, Harvey Benge, Jon Carapiet, Haru Sameshima, and Stu Sontier          $40
An outstanding collaborative book by four New Zealand-based photographers and one writer, breaking out of conventional story-telling to play out their anxieties and doubts about the world they see. Developed over the last two years, . . . . . and then there were none grew from conversations and arguments about mortality, our technologically mired existence and the degradation of the environment. The project triggered its own version of flygskam for the collaborators, conflicted by the international travel that made many of the photographs and the writing possible and tainted by knowing the greater price to be paid. Images included from such travels are drenched in sordid human histories that recall the myriad pathways that have led us to now, and to what comes next.
"When I explained to the collectors that I hoped to find at least fifty fine examples to showcase an industry that once thrived in every New Zealand city, their eyes lit up. We disappeared together into a world that no longer exists, of forges and lugs and pinstriping. A time when the humble bicycle was not so humble, and everyone knew the name of the craftsman that built the machine they rode." Includes much to recognise and much to discover with surprise. 

The Hard Crowd: Essays, 2000—2020 by Rachel Kushner            $37
In nineteen razor-sharp essays Kushner explores friendship, loss, social justice, art and more, taking us into the world of truckers, a Palestinian refugee camp, the American prison system and the San Francisco music scene, via the work of Jeff Koons, Marguerite Duras and the Rolling Stones. The book also details how, in her twenties, Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love — motorbikes — to compete in the notorious and deadly race, Cabo 1000, and how, following a crash at 200km/h, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life.

Everybody: A book about freedom by Olivia Laing              $50
The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, she grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Everybody is an examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

Real Estate by Deborah Levy            $26
The final volume of Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is a meditation on home, the spectres that haunt it and the possibilities it offers. Reconfiguring her life after her children leave home, how can Levy create a balance between her creative, political and personal lives and the demands of the world she lives in?
>>Read an extract.
>>Things I Don't Want to Know.
>>The Cost of Living. 


Tranquillity and Ruin by Danyl McLauchlan            $30
In these essays McLauchlan explores ideas and paths that he hopes will make him freer and happier – or, at least, less trapped, less medicated and less depressed. He stays at a monastery and meditates for eight hours a day. He spends time with members of a new global movement who try to figure out how to do the most possible good in the world. He reads forbiddingly complex papers on neuroscience and continental philosophy and shovels clay with a Buddhist monk until his hands bleed. He tries to catch a bus. Tranquillity and Ruin is a light-hearted contemplation of madness, uncertainty and doom. It’s about how, despite everything we think we know about who we are, we can still be surprised by ourselves.
"McLauchlan is likely the most intelligent essayist in New Zealand and this is likely to be the most thought-provoking book of non-fiction published in New Zealand in 2021." —Steve Braunias
>>Writing in his head. 
The Look of the Book: Jackets, covers and art at the edges of literature by Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth        $100
As the outward face of the text, the book cover makes an all-important first impression. The Look of the Book examines the interface of art and literature through notable covers and the stories behind them, galleries of the many different jackets of bestselling books, an overview of book cover trends throughout history, and insights from dozens of literary and design luminaries.
A Sound Mind: How I fell in love with classical music (and decided to rewrite its entire history) by Paul Morley        $40
Paul Morley had stopped being surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating into the sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music journalist in the 70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in to dreary nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote about in the past, he went searching for something new, rare and wondrous – and found it in classical music. A soaring polemic, a grumpy reflection on modern rock, and a fan's love note, A Sound Mind rejects the idea that classical music is establishment; old; a drag. Instead, the book reveals this genre to be the most exciting and varied in music. A Sound Mind is a multi-layered memoir of Morley's shifting musical tastes, but it is also a compelling history of classical music that reveals the genre's rich and often deviant past – and, hopefully, future.
Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles             $33
Nina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo - where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London. This collection of essays explores the bodies of water that separate and connect us, as well as everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes and the ancient lunisolar calendar to butterflies. 
>>The safe zone. 
The Lobster's Tale by Chris Price and Bruce Foster        $45
"What's the lobster's tune when he is boiling?" Exploring the lobster's biology and its history in language, literature and gastronomy, The Lobster's Tale navigates the perils of a life driven by overreaching ambition and the appetite for knowledge, conquest and commerce. In conversation with Chris Price's text, Bruce Foster's photographs navigate a parallel course of shadows and light, in which the extraordinary textures and colours of the natural world tell a darker story. The Lobster's Tale is a meditation on the quest for immortality on which both artists and scientists have embarked, and the unhappy consequences of the attempt to both conquer nature and create masterpieces. Meanwhile, below the waterline of text and images, a modest voice can be overheard whispering an alternative to these narratives of heroic and doomed exploration.
>>Other books in the Kōrero series: High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod; Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima.
Dressed: Fashionable dress in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1840—1910 by Claire Regnault           $70
A beautifully presented look at colonial-era fashionable dress, based on the collections at Te Papa (of which Regnault is curator), and exploring the social context of the garments and of the women who wore or made them. How does clothing give us an insight into Women's historical experiences that might otherwise not be available to us? 
For the last twenty years, George Saunders (whose Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize) has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
>>Read our reviews of Lincoln in the Bardo. 
Speak, Silence: In search of W.G. Sebald by Carole Angier              $65
Through books such as The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, Sebald pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile. The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the 'true' Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and through the work he left behind. 

The Musical Human: A history of life on earth by Michael Spitzer          $33
165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm. 66 million years ago was the first melody. 40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument. Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on a journey across the ages, from Bach to BTS and back, to explore the relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a global history of music on the widest possible canvas, looking at music in our everyday lives; music in world history; and music in evolution, from insects to apes, humans to AI.
"Michael Spitzer has pulled off the impossible - a Guns, Germs and Steel for music." —Daniel Levitin
In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova           $45
After the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms – essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents – Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
"A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn’t put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia." —Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
African Artists, From 1882 > now edited by Joseph L. Underwood and Okeke-Agulu Chika      $110
The most substantial survey to date of modern and contemporary African-born or Africa-based artists. Long overdue. 
Hellzapoppin'! The art of Flying Nun edited by Peter Vangioni            $39
Does this look like your record collection? Published to mark the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Flying Nun Records in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Hellzapoppin’! brings together original artwork and design, film, record covers, posters and photography from the label’s early years. From rare collectible records and vintage posters to original artworks and paste-up designs, this book explores the art and artists behind some of New Zealand’s favourite bands. Essays from Peter Vangioni, Kath Webster, Russell Brown and Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd will be interspersed with brief interview-style contributions from some of the people responsible for creating the art of the label. Heavily illustrated with original artwork for the records and posters, photography from the archives, and rarely seen vinyl releases and posters.
Vitamin D3           $110
An astounding survey of contemporary drawing from over 100 artists, selected by over 70 international experts. 

Patch Work: A life amongst clothes by Claire Wilcox          $45
Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she steps into the archive of memory, deftly stitching together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's wedding outfit to her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in a series of intimate and compelling close-ups. Wilcox tugs on the threads that make up the fabric of our lives—a cardigan worn by a child, a mother's button box, the draping of a curtain, a pair of cycling shorts, a roll of lace, a pin hidden in a seam. Through the eye of a curator, we see how the stories and the secrets of clothes measure out the passage of time, our gains and losses, and the way we use them to unravel and write our histories.
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector



List #6: IN THE GARDEN & IN THE KITCHEN

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, or e-mail us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.



Bourdain in Stories  by Laurie Woolever        $33
Insight into the legendary chef's life, philosophy and exploits through the eyes of his colleagues, family and friends.  
A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That by Laxmi Ganda, Jayshri Ganda, and Deborah Asprey            $70
An excellent and attractive Gujarati Indian Cookbook transporting authentic Indian flavours to a relaxed family atmosphere in New Zealand. 

The Grater Good: Hearty, delicious recipes for plant-based living by Flip Grater         $50
Flip Grater is a renowned kiwi singer/songwriter, who boasts her own Indie record label and owns Grater Goods, a plant-based delicatessen based in central Christchurch. In her professional life she is a successful chef and recipe writer, developing her vegan recipes and Grater Goods products that are sold in retailers throughout Aotearoa. In her precious spare time you'll find her chilling with French husband Youssef and five-year-old daughter Anais. Flip and Youssef met in Paris in 2012 where she was recording her album Pigalle, and moved Back to Flips native New Zealand in 2018. Grater Goods is a little slice of Paris in industrial Sydenham. Over 60 European-inspired, adaptable dishes, ranging from Seitan sausages, cassoulets and breads to super easy spreadable cheeses, pates, crackers, delectable desserts and plant-based baking and cooking. These recipes are edible activism, ethical hedonism.
Whether you start your day with something sweet, finish it with something sweet, or make sure sweets are within reach all day long, you'll find serious inspiration in the pages of Salma Hage's latest cookbook for home cooks. The Middle East's wide range of cultures, ingredients, and influences informs the array of dishes she includes.
The Joy of Gardening by Lynda Hallinan          $45
In a celebration of the healing power of nature, New Zealand gardening guru Lynda Hallinan focuses on the gentle delights that bring joy to our backyards, from birdsong to seasonal beauty.


"Gardening, then, is a practice of sustained noticing." In this collection of essays, fourteen writers go beyond simply considering a plot of soil to explore how gardening is a shared language, an opportunity for connection, something that is always evolving. Penelope Lively trains her gardening eye on her gardens past and present; Paul Mendez reflects on the image of the paradisal garden; Jon Day asks whether an urban community garden can be a radical place; and Victoria Adukwei Bulley considers the power of herbs and why there is no such thing as a weed.

In the Kitchen: Essays on food and life                 $25
In these essays thirteen writers consider the subjects of cooking and eating and how they shape our lives, and the possibilities and limitations the kitchen poses. Rachel Roddy traces an alternative personal history through the cookers in her life; Rebecca May Johnson considers the radical potential of finger food; Ruby Tandoh discovers a new way of thinking about flavour through the work of writer Doreen Fernandez; Yemisi Aribisala remembers a love affair in which food failed as a language; and Julia Turshen considers food's ties to community, Nina Mingya Powles considers the various food traditions of her family. 
Irvine's hands-on, often humorous advice steps readers through everything they need to know to grow great produce at home, including garden design, tools and equipment, seasonal planting advice, soil fertility, seed-saving basics, managing pests and diseases, and how to incorporate organic and permaculture gardening methods into any home garden. While documenting a year on her own property, Irvine shows how you can successfully produce bountiful crops throughout the seasons to provide a steady, daily harvest with minimal wastage. The book is illustrated with hundreds of photographs and hand-drawn illustrations that share design concepts and planting plans for gardens of all shapes and sizes. 
One: Pot, pan, planet by Anna Jones             $55
You can travel the world weekly from your kitchen with dishes such as: Persian noodle soup; Korean carrot and sesame pancakes; African peanut stew; baked dahl with tamarind-glazed sweet potato; and halloumi, mint, lemon and caramelised onion pie. With recipes for every occasion from a weeknight tahini broccoli on toast to the puddings and feasts, these inventive and varied recipes will become kitchen staples. All delicious, whether made vegetarian or vegan, Anna Jones also helps you to reduce waste, use leftovers. and make your kitchen plastic free.
The Arabesque Table: Contemporary recipes from the Arab world by Reem Kassis             $60
The Arabesque Table takes inspiration from the traditional food of the Arab world, weaving Reem Kassis's cultural knowledge with her contemporary interpretations of an ancient, diverse cuisine. She opens up the world of Arabic cooking today, presenting 130 delicious, achievable home recipes. Organised by primary ingredient, her narratives formed by her experiences and influences bring the dishes to life, as does the book's vivid photography. From the author of The Palestinian Table. 
Niva and Yotam Kay of Pakaraka Permaculture on the Coromandel Peninsula share their long experience of organic gardening in this comprehensive book on how to create and maintain a productive and regenerative vegetable garden. Taking care of the soil life and fertility provides plants with what they need to thrive. The book reflects in the latest scientific research on soil health, ecological and regenerative practices. 
Knox's excellent book has been updated and is now fully illustrated in colour. 

The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the tart, tender, and unruly by Kate Lebo                $40
Inspired by twenty-six fruits, essayist, poet and 'pie lady' Kate Lebo expertly blends the culinary, medical and personal. A is for Aronia, berry member of the apple family, clothes-stainer, superfruit with reputed healing power. D is for Durian, endowed with a dramatic rind and a shifty odour – peaches, old garlic. M is for Medlar, name-checked by Shakespeare for its crude shape, beloved by gardeners for its flowers. Q is for Quince, which, fresh, gives off the scent of ‘roses and citrus and rich women’s perfume’ but if eaten raw is so astringent it wicks the juice from one’s mouth. In this work of unique invention, these and other difficult fruits serve as the central ingredients of twenty-six lyrical essays (and recipes!) that range from deeply personal to botanical, from culinary to medical, from humorous to philosophical. Delightful. 
"A beautiful, fascinating read full of surprises – a real pleasure." —Claudia Roden
The Latin American Cookbook by Virgilio Martínez            $70
Strong on regional cuisines and variations, this book brings together 600 remarkable recipes expressing the vibrancy of Latin America and its myriad influences — indigenous, European, Asian and beyond. 


Slippurinn: Recipes and stories from Iceland by Gísli Matt              $90
Matt's book reflects his extensive research into traditional Icelandic dishes to preserve local culinary knowledge while applying a modern approach for a cuisine to be enjoyed both by locals and international foodies.

The Way of the Cocktail: Japanese traditions, techniques and recipes by Julia Momosé and Emma Janzen       $50
With its studious devotion to tradition, craftsmanship, and hospitality, Japanese cocktail culture is an art form treated with the same kind of spiritual reverence as sushi-making. Julia Momose presents a journey into the realm of Japanese spirits and cocktails with eighty-five drink recipes. In this essential guide, she breaks down master techniques and provides in-depth information on cocktail culture, history, and heritage spirits that will both educate and inspire. The recipes, inspired by the twenty-four micro-seasons that define the ebb and flow of life in Japan, include classics like the Manhattan and Negroni, riffs on some of Japan's most beloved cocktails like the whisky highball, and even alcohol-free drinks inspired by traditional ingredients, such as yuzu, matcha, and ume.
Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love by Noor Murad and Yotam Ottolenghi            $55
Behind the wonderful cookbooks and the iconic restaurant that has made Ottolenghi a household name stands the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, a team of quirky gifted gastronomes who devise, tweak and perfect the recipes you love. In this new book, the team turn their attentions to the contents of your fridge and kitchen cupboards, showing you how to transform humble ingredients into delicious food. The approach is flexible and relaxed, but imbued with that mix of inventiveness and tradition that we have come to expect from anything Ottolenghi. Visit the kitchen that is Ottolenghi's creative hub and enrich your own. 
>>Visit the OTK. 
From regenerating native bush, through formal gardens and heritage fruit trees, to community gardens and a dry garden in Central Otago, there is a place here to inspire everyone. The stories of their founders and developers bring the gardens to life. Located from Butler Point, across the harbour from Mangonui in Aotearoa's far north, down to Central Otago and Southland, the varying terrains and climates affect which plants flourish, and the exchange of ideas between the gardeners keep things vibrant and ever-changing.

A Cook's Book by Nigel Slater            $60
Nigel Slater is always superb company in the kitchen. In this substantial new book, he looks back over his life and presents his culinary experiences from childhood to the present alongside 200 of his ever-wonderful recipes. 
"A Cook's Book, all 500 pages and nearly one and a half kilos of it, enters the world as if from the kitchen of someone fresh to the world of food writing, a-brim with ideas, vital and enthusiastic." —Nigella Lawson
"This is a book for life. This, and it's high praise, is Slater's best book. —Diana Henry
Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit            $50
From 1936 to 1940, the newly-wed George Orwell lived in a small cottage in Hertfordshire, writing, and tending his garden. When Rebecca Solnit visited the cottage, she discovered the descendants of the roses that he had planted many decades previously. These survivors, as well as the diaries he kept of his planting and growing, provide a springboard for a fresh look at Orwell's motivations and drives — and the optimism that countered his dystopian vision — and open up a mediation on our relationship to plants, trees and the natural world. Tracking Orwell's impact on political thought over the last century, Solnit journeys to England and Russia, Mexico and Colombia, exploring the political and historical events that shaped Orwell's life and her own. From a history of roses to discussions of climate change and insights into structural inequalities in contemporary society, Orwell's Roses is a fresh reading of a towering figure of 20th century literary and political life, and finds optimism, solace and solutions to our 21st century world.
The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering nature in the modern world by Sue Stuart-Smith             $55
The garden has always been a place of peace and perseverance, of nurture and reward. A garden can provide a family's food, a child's playground, an adult's peaceful retreat. But around the world and throughout history, gardens have often meant something more profound. For Sue Stuart-Smith's grandfather, returning from the First World War weighing six stone, a year-long horticulture course became a life raft for recovering from the trauma. For prisoners in today's justice system, gardening can be a mental escape from captivity which offers, in a context when opportunity is scarce, the chance to take ownership of a project and build something positive up from seed. In The Well Gardened Mind, Stuart-Smith investigates the huge power of the garden and its little-acknowledged effects on health and wellbeing.
Private Gardens of Aotearoa by Suzanne Turley              $60
Suzanne Turley — one of New Zealand's most sought-after landscape designers — has created many of the country's most desirable private gardens, all set against the spectacular backdrop of the natural environment. 
In Kiltumper: A year in an Irish garden by Niall Williams and Christine Freen          $55
Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams (the author of This Is Happiness)and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth. In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world.
Amber and Rye: A Baltic food journey—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania by Zuza Zak            $55
In the Baltics, two worlds meet: the Baltic Sea joins Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, bringing culinary influences and cultural exchange. Food is author Zuza Zak's doorway to a deeper understanding of this region, its rich history, its culture and what makes it tick.


VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

 


List #3: SOCIETY

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, or e-mail us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.


The Forgotten Coast by Richard Alter-Shaw             $35
A short memoir whose main focus is unpacking a family story that was never told: that a farm in Taranaki on which the family's generations-long comfortable fortunes rested had been directly taken from the people of Parikaha and given to anancestor, a member of the Armed Constabulary following the invasion of the village during the New Zealand Wars.
a bathful of kawakawa and hot water by Hana Pera Aoake              $28
"Writing with radical tenderness, with beauty and pain and precision, Hana Pera Aoake envisions an anticapitalist, de-colonial, Indigenous way of living and being, transcending the borders of poetry and prose in a style similar to that of Claudia Rankine and Layli Long Soldier. A bath full of kawakawa and hot water is an essential poetic text in the literature of Aotearoa, and a call to action at the end of the world." —Nina Mingya Powles
"Part memoir, part myth, part rant, part dream, part chant. This is an exciting and poignant book from one of my favourite NZ writers." —Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
"Hybrid in form and theme, what cyborg melts hierarchies, what cyborg turns the gender binary to dust, what cyborg fights for our mana motuhake? This one! Read this book and then do something about it." —essa may ranapiri
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel            $48
A wonderful graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise— set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times.

Underground: Marsupial outlaws and other rebels of Australia's war in Vietnam by Mirranda Burton             $33
A superbly drawn graphic novel recalibrating the history of the entwined Australian and New Zealand involvement in the Vietnam War. Led by an unconscientiously objecting wombat registered for military service during Australia's war in Vietnam, Underground digs tunnels through a chapter of Australian history that many have attempted to bury. Why would a wombat be registered for war? It's 1965, and an old Tattersalls barrel starts rolling marbles to randomly conscript young Australian men to fight in the war in Vietnam. Melbourne housewife Jean McLean is outraged, as are her artist friends Clif and Marlene Pugh, who live in the country with their wombat, Hooper. Determined to wreck the system, Jean forms the Save Our Sons movement's Victorian branch, and she and her supporters take to the streets to protest. Meanwhile, in the small country town of Katunga, Bill Cantwell joins the Australian Army, and in Saigon, young Mai Ho is writing letters to South Vietnamese soldiers from her school desk. And when Hooper's call-up papers arrive, he mysteriously goes underground... As these stories intersect in unexpected ways and destinies entwine, a new world gradually emerges - a world in which bridges of understanding make more sense than war.
Long Peace Street: A walk in modern China by Jonathan Chatwin              $35
Through the centre of China's historic capital, Long Peace Street cuts a long, arrow-straight line. It divides the Forbidden City, home to generations of Chinese emperors, from Tiananmen Square, the vast granite square constructed to glorify a New China under Communist rule. To walk the street is to travel through the story of China's recent past, wandering among its physical relics and hearing echoes of its dramas. Long Peace Street recounts a journey in modern China, a walk of twenty miles across Beijing offering a very personal encounter with the life of the capital's streets. At the same time, it takes the reader on a journey through the city's recent history.

An important book, not only reassessing the achievements—and failures—of Churchill's life and leadership, but examining the legacies of the 'Churchill myth' on all that has come after, from Tony Blair's eagerness to follow the United States into war in Iraq to the belief in British exceptionalism that underpinned Brexit. 
"Provocative, clear-sighted, richly textured and wonderfully readable, this is the indispensable biography of Churchill for the post-Brexit 2020s." —David Kynaston
Black Paper: Writing in a dark time by Teju Cole             $45
"Darkness is not empty," writes Teju Cole in this book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity—and witness the humanity of others—in a time of darkness. Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognising how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole's writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the colour black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. "Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning."
Labour Saving by Michael Cullen            $50
Cullen describes his lengthy political career, including his major economic policies. Among the many highlights are the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, also known as the Cullen Fund; Kiwisaver; and the Working for Families package, which sought to reduce inequalities. Well written. 

The History of a Riot by Jared Davidson            $15
"Nelson in 1843 was a violent place." In 1843 the New Zealand Company settlement of Nelson was rocked by the revolt of its immigrant labourers. Over 70 gang-men and their wives collectively resisted their poor working conditions through petitions, strikes and, ultimately, violence. Yet this pivotal struggle went on to be obscured by stories of pioneering men and women 'made good'. The History of a Riot uncovers those at the heart of the revolt for the first time. Who were they? Where were they from? And how did their experience of protest before arriving in Nelson influence their struggle? By putting violence and class conflict at the centre, this fascinating microhistory upends the familiar image of colonial New Zealand.
The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing edited by Hannah Dawson          $55
Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, who imagined a City of Ladies that would serve as a refuge from the harassment of men, the book reaches around the whole earth and through history to us, now, splashing about in the fourth wave. It goes beyond the usual white, Western story, attentive also to class, capitalism and colonialism, and to the other axes of oppression that intersect with sexism. Alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who declared in Seneca Falls in 1848 the self-evident truth 'that all men and women are created equal', we find Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in New York in 1797, who asked 'and ain't I a woman?' Draws on poems, novels and memoirs, as well roaring manifestos.
Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal               $37
Count Moise de Camondo lived a few doors away from Edmund de Waal's forebears, the Ephrussi, first encountered in his bestselling memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes. Like the Ephrussi, the Camondos were part of belle epoque high society. They were also targets of anti-semitism. Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art for his son to inherit. But when Nissim was killed in the First World War, it became a memorial and, on the Count's death, was bequeathed to France. The Musee Nissim de Camondo has remained unchanged since 1936. Edmund de Waal explores the lavish rooms and detailed archives and uncovers new layers to the family story. In a haunting series of letters addressed to the Count, he tells us what happened next.  A beautifully presented illustrated hardback. 
>>Visit the Musee Nissim de Camondo. 
>>The Library of Exile. 
Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist by Diana Morrow           $40
In 1877, Kate Edger became the first woman to graduate from a New Zealand university. The New Zealand Herald enthusiastically hailed her achievement as 'the first rays of the rising sun of female intellectual advancement'. Edger went on to become a pioneer of women's education in New Zealand. In 1883, she was the founding principal of Nelson College for Girls. She also worked to mitigate violence against women and children and to fortify their rights through progressive legislation. She campaigned for women's suffrage and played a prominent role in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and in Wellington's Society for the Protection of Women and Children. Later in life she advocated international diplomacy and co-operation through her work for the League of Nations Union.
The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow         $75
This remarkable book challenges our received narratives of historical determinism, narratives that were devised in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to critiques of European culture inherent in the Indigenous cultures then entering European awareness. If we unshackle ourselves from thee preconceptions about human 'progress' and look more closely at the evidence, we find a wide array of ways in which humans have lived with each other, and with the natural world. Many of these can provide templates for new forms of social organisation, and lead us to rethink farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilisation itself.

Sapiens, A graphic history, 1: The birth of humankind by Noah Yuval Harari, David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave       $48
Noah Yuval Harari's remarkable set of thinking tools for looking at human history are now presented as a graphic novel. 

Sapiens: A graphic history, Volume 2: The Pillars of Civilisation by Yuval Noah Harari, David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave         $48
When nomadic Homo sapiens settled to live in one place, they started working harder and harder. But why didn't they get a better life in return? In The Pillars of Civilisation, Yuval Noah Harari and his companions including Prof. Saraswati and Dr. Fiction travel the length and breadth of human history to investigate how the Agricultural Revolution changed society forever. Discover how wheat took over the world, how war, famine, disease and inequality became a part of the human condition, and why we might only have ourselves to blame. Nicely drawn. Follows The Birth of Humankind. 
Using a bioarchaeological approach, Jarman follows evidence that suggests a Viking-dominated trade and slave route from Northern Europe to the Middle East, India and beyond, and reconfigures our thinking about the Vikings themselves.  
Parenting in the Anthropocene edited by Emma Johnson          $30
Humans are changing the world in extremely complex ways, creating a new geological age called the Anthropocene. How do we – as parents, caregivers and as a society – raise our children and dependents in this new world? This book explores ways to ensure the health and wellbeing of the next generations, with a view to encouraging inclusivity and critical discourse at a time of climate crisis, inequality and polarisation. From tikanga Māori and collective care in child-rearing through to new family forms, futures literacy, and shifting economic paradigms and societal structures, Parenting in the Anthropocene is a reflection of both the world we live in and the one we aspire to. Contents: 'Bountiful' — Emily Writes (writer & mother): 'Parenting in the first 1000 days: Moving towards equity' — Amanda Malu (CEO of Whānau Awhina Plunket); 'Stories for the children of the Anthropocene' — Jess Berentson-Shaw (researcher & advocate): 'The future is ours to design and build' — Dr David Galler (intensive care specialist): 'Inheriting climate disruption' — Mia Sutherland (youth climate-change activist); 'When do we talk about childlessness?' — Briohny Doyle (writer & lecturer); 'Reproductive and familial futures in Aotearoa New Zealand' — Nicola Surtees, PhD (academic & former ECE teacher); 'Poipoia te kākano: Nuturing tamariki Māori' — Leonie Pihama (Te tiawa, Waikato, Ngā Māhanga a Tairi); 'Be kind' — Brannavan Gnanalingam (writer & lawyer); 'Futures literacy and youth resilience: Educating for the future' — Amy L. Fletcher, PhD (academic & futurist); 'Are our children capitalism’s succession plan?' — Sacha McMeeking (researcher & commentator); 'Books for challenging times: Children and youngsters' — Terrisa Goldsmith (librarian); 'Books for challenging times: Caregivers' — Jane Keenan (librarian)
Empire of Pain: The secret history of the Sackler dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe             $40
Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize. 
The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis-an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people. Compelling. 
Wars Without End; Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua: New Zealand's land wars, A Māori perspective by Danny Keenan              $40
The possession and dispossession of land continues to cast a long shadow between the partners of the Treaty of Waitangi, and until these issues are adequately addressed a wound will remain in New Zealand race relations. 




Helen Kelly: Her life by Rebecca Macfie           $50
Kelly was the first woman to lead the country’s trade union movement: a visionary who believed that all workers, whether in a union or not, deserved to be given a fair go; a fighter from a deeply communist family who never gave up the struggle; a strategist and orator who invoked strong loyalty; a woman who could stir fierce emotions. Her battles with famous people were the stuff of headlines. Macfie examines not only  Kelly’s life but also a defining period in the country’s history, when old values were replaced by the individualism of neo-liberalism, and the wellbeing and livelihood of workers faced unremitting stress.
Imagining Decolonisation by Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton, and Amanda Thomas         $15
What is decolonisation? Why is it urgent? What would Aotearoa be like if it were decolonised? Certainly the way in which Aotearoa was colonised is responsible for many of the social, ethical and environmental problems we face collectively today—could a process of decolonisation remedy some of these problems and create a more equitable, healthy and sustainable approach to living in this place in the twenty-first century?
Black Spartacus: The epic life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh         $65
The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age—slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Treacherously seized by Napoleon's invading army in 1802, this charismatic figure ended his days, in Wordsworth's phrase, "the most unhappy man of men", imprisoned in a fortress in France.
Uprising: Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand by Nic Low          $40
Guided by Ngāi Tahu’s ancient oral maps supplemented by a modern satellite atlas, Low crossed the Southern Alps more than a dozen times, trying to understand the relationship between people and land — both now and in history — and seeking to reclaim his ancestors’ view of a world in which these mountains loomed large. If walking is in itself a form of knowing, what can we learn from tracing the backbone of the island on which we live? 

War: How conflict shaped us by Margaret MacMillan          $45

There is always a war in progress somewhere—is it an essential part of being human? What is the relationship between society and war? Economies, science, technology, medicine, culture: all are instrumental in war and have been shaped by it—without conflict it we might not have had penicillin, female emancipation, radar or rockets. Throughout history, writers, artists, film-makers, playwrights, and composers have been inspired by war—whether to condemn, exalt or simply puzzle about it. If we are never to be rid of war, how should we think about it and what does that mean for peace?

The Power of Geography: Ten maps that reveal the future of the world by Tim Marshall            $38
Marshall's global bestseller Prisoners of Geography showed how every nation's choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Since then, the geography hasn't changed, but the world has. In this new book, Marshall takes us into ten regions that are set to shape global politics and power. Find out why the Earth's atmosphere is the world's next battleground; why the fight for the Pacific is just beginning; and why Europe's next refugee crisis is closer than it thinks. Chapters cover Australia, The Sahel, Greece, Turkey, the UK, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Space.

NUKU: Stories of 100 indigenous women by Qiane Matata-Sipu           $65
An interesting and inspiring snapshot of Indigenous wāhine today, with both text and photographs. Through wide-ranging voices this ambitious social documentary showcases diverse representations of leadership, systems change and success. From Oscar-nominated filmmakers and award-winning musicians, to scientists, entrepreneurs, tribal leaders, artists, environmental champions, knowledge holders, mothers and more. The youngest wahine is 14, the eldest is in her mid-70s, and their locations span both North and South Islands of Aotearoa and across to Rēkohu (Chatham Islands). They are wāhine Māori, wāhine Moriori, Pasifika, Melanesian, Wijadjuri, Himalayan and Mexican.
>>Check out the NUKU 100. 
Mortals: How the fear of death shaped human society by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies              $40
The human mind can grapple with the future, visualising and calculating solutions to complex problems, giving us advantages over other species throughout our evolutionary history. However, this capability comes with a curse. By five to ten years of age, all humans know where they are ultimately heading: to the grave. Rachel and Ross Menzies examine the major human responses to death across history, from the development of religious systems denying the finality of death to 'immortality projects' involving enduring art, architecture and literature. While some of these have been glorious, like the construction of the pyramids, others have been destructive, leading to global conflicts and genocide. The authors hypothesise that worse is to come — our unconscious dread of death has led to the rampant consumerism and overpopulation of the 20th century, which has driven the global warming and pandemic crises that now threaten our very existence. In a terribly irony, Homo sapiens may ultimately be destroyed by our knowledge of our own mortality.
He Ringatoi o ngā Tūpuna: Isaac Coates and his Māori portraits by Hilary and John Mitchell             $80
Isaac Coates was an Englishman who lived in Wellington and Nelson between 1841 and 1845. During that time he painted watercolour portraits of 58 Māori from Nelson, Marlborough, Wellington, Waikanae and Kapiti. Some of these portraits have been well-known for nearly 180 years, although their creator was not definitively identified until 2000. The discovery in 2007 of a Coates book of portraits in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University added many previously unknown images to his body of work. The portraits depict Māori men and women from chiefly whakapapa, as well as commoners and at least one slave. Coates's meticulous records of each subject's name, iwi and place of residence are invaluable, and his paintings are strong images of individuals, unlike the more stereotyped work of some of Coates's contemporaries. Whānau, hāpu and iwi treasure Coates's works because they are the only images of some tūpuna, and they are reminders of those who risked their lives to bring their people to a better life in the Cook Strait regions of Kapiti coast, Wellington, Nelson and Marlborough. In He Ringatoi o ngā Tūpuna Te Tau Ihu historians John and Hilary Mitchell unravel the previously unknown story of Isaac Coates, as well as providing biographical details and whakapapa of his subjects, where they can be reliably identified. Meticulously researched and beautifully presented.
Hei Taonga mā ngā Uri Whakatipu | Treasures for the Rising Generation: The Dominion Museum Ethnological Expeditions, 1919–1923 by Wayne Ngata, Arapata Hakiwai, Anne Salmond, Conal McCarthy, Amiria Salmond, Monty Soutar, James Schuster, Billie Lythberg, John Niko Maihi, Sandra Kahu Nepia, Te Wheturere Poope Gray, Te Aroha McDonnell and Natalie Robertson         $75
From 1919 to 1923, at Sir Apirana Ngata’s initiative, a team from the Dominion Museum travelled to tribal areas across Te Ika-a-Māui The North Island to record tikanga Māori that Ngata feared might be disappearing. These ethnographic expeditions, the first in the world to be inspired and guided by indigenous leaders, used cutting-edge technologies that included cinematic film and wax cylinders to record fishing techniques, art forms (weaving, kōwhaiwhai, kapa haka and mōteatea), ancestral rituals and everyday life in the communities they visited. The team visited the 1919 Hui Aroha in Gisborne, the 1920 welcome to the Prince of Wales in Rotorua, and communities along the Whanganui River (1921) and in Tairāwhiti (1923). Medical doctor-soldier-ethnographer Te Rangihīroa (Sir Peter Buck), the expedition’s photographer and film-maker James McDonald, the ethnologist Elsdon Best and Turnbull Librarian Johannes Andersen recorded a wealth of material. This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of these expeditions, and the determination of early twentieth century Māori leaders, including Ngata, Te Rangihiroa, James Carroll, and those in the communities they visited, to pass on ancestral tikanga ‘hei taonga mā ngā uri whakatipu’ as treasures for a rising generation.
The New Zealand Wars of the mid-nineteenth century profoundly shaped the course and direction of our nation's history. This book takes us to the heart of these conflicts with a series of first-hand accounts from Maori and Pakeha who either fought in or witnessed the wars that ravaged New Zealand between 1845 and 1872. From Heni Te Kiri Karamu's narrative of her remarkable exploits as a wahine toa, through to accounts from the field by British soldiers and powerful reports by observers on both sides, we learn about the wars at a human level. The often fragmentary, sometimes hastily written accounts that make up Voices from the New Zealand Wars vividly evoke the extreme emotions — fear, horror, pity and courage — experienced during the most turbulent time in our country's history. Each account is expertly introduced and contextualised, so that the historical record speaks to us vividly through many voices.
September 12: The third test and final protest of the 1981 Springbok tour, photography by Anthony Phelps, foreword by John Minto     $85
A large-format book featuring over 50 superb photographs, many previously unseen, from the Springbok Tour protests of 1981, showing the people, marches, and often violent clashes between the police, protesters and spectators around Eden Park  Photographed on the day of the 3rd rugby test match between New Zealand and South Africa at Eden Park in Auckland with some photos from earlier protest marches including the Day of Shame, the 22nd of July when the first match of the Tour was played. Limited edition of 100 signed copies.
The Origins of You: How childhood shapes later life by Richie Poulton, Jay Belsky, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Avshalom Caspi           $95
Does temperament in childhood predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad--or good--for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is health in adulthood shaped by childhood experiences? A fascinating and important book, based on the internationally significant ongoing Dunedin Study. 

Today, someone in the wealthiest 1 per cent of adults — now a roughly 40,000-strong club — has a net worth 68 times that of the average New Zealander. Too Much Money is the story of how wealth inequality is changing Aotearoa New Zealand. Possessing wealth opens up opportunities to live in certain areas, get certain kinds of healthcare, make certain kinds of social connections, exert certain kinds of power. But when access to these opportunities becomes alarmingly uneven, the implications are profound. This new book by the country's leading chronicler of economic inequality provides a far-reaching and compelling account of the way that wealth — and its absence — is transforming our lives. Drawing on the latest academic research, personal interviews and previously unexplored data, Too Much Money reveals the way wealth is distributed across the peoples of Aotearoa. Having helped elevate the word 'inequality' into the political lexicon, Max Rashbrooke's widely-anticipated new book arrives at a time of heightened concern for the division of wealth and what this means for our country's future.
Alexandria: The quest for the lost City Beneath the Mountains by Edmund Richardson             $33
For centuries the city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1833 it was discovered in Afghanistan by the unlikeliest person imaginable: Charles Masson, an ordinary working-class boy from London turned deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist and scholar. On the way into one of history's most extraordinary stories, Masson would take tea with kings, travel with holy men and become the master of a hundred disguises; he would see things no westerner had glimpsed before and few have glimpsed since. He would spy for the East India Company and be suspected of spying for Russia at the same time, for this was the era of the Great Game, when imperial powers confronted each other in these remote lands. Masson discovered tens of thousands of pieces of Afghan history, including the 2,000-year-old Bimaran golden casket, which has upon it the earliest known face of the Buddha. 
"Full, extraordinary, heart-breaking, utterly brilliant." —William Dalrymple
Azadi: Freedom fascism, fiction by Arundhati Roy             $18
In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.

Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora         $60
24 Māori academics share their personal journeys, revealing what being Māori has meant for them in their work. 

News, And how to use it by Alan Rusbridger             $28
An A-Z guide on how we stay informed in the era of fake news, from former Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger. Nothing in life works without facts. A society that isn't sure what's true can't function. Without facts there can be no government or law. Science is ignored. Trust evaporates. People everywhere feel ever more alienated from—and mistrustful of—news and those who make it. We no longer seem to know who or what to believe. We are living through a crisis of 'information chaos'.

Waves Across the South: A new history of revolution and empire by Sujit Sivasundaram              $38
Too often, history is told from the northern hemisphere, with modernity, knowledge, selfhood and politics moving from Europe to influence the rest of the world. This book traces the origins of our times from the perspective of indigenous and non-European people in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. From Aboriginal Australians to Parsis and from Mauritians to Malays, people asserted their place and their future as the British empire drove unexpected change. The tragedy of colonisation was that it reversed the immense possibilities for liberty, humanity and equality in this period. Waves Across the South insists on the significance of the environment: the waves of the Bay of Bengal or the Tasman Sea were the context for this story. Sivasundaram tells how revolution, empire and counter-revolt crashed in the global South. Naval war, imperial rivalry and oceanic trade had their parts to play, but so did hope, false promise, rebellion, knowledge and the pursuit of being modern.
"Fresh, sparkling and ground-breaking, Waves Across the South helps re-centre how we look at the world and opens up new perspectives on how we can look at regions, peoples and places that have been left to one side of traditional histories for far too long." —Peter Frankopan
"Global history at its finest: eloquent, surprising, and deeply moving." —Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters
The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo by Paul Strathern           $37
Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642 something happened which transformed the entire culture of western civilisation. Painting, sculpture and architecture would all visibly change in such a striking fashion that there could be no going back on what had taken place. Likewise, the thought and self-conception of humanity would take on a completely new aspect. Sciences would be born, or emerge in an entirely new guise. The ideas which broke this mould largely began, and continued to flourish, in the city of Florence in the province of Tuscany in northern central Italy. These ideas, which placed an increasing emphasis on the development of our common humanity - rather than other-worldly spirituality - coalesced in what came to be known as humanism. This philosophy and its new ideas would eventually spread across Italy, yet wherever they took hold they would retain an element essential to their origin. And as they spread further across Europe this element would remain.
The Commercial Hotel by John Summers         $30
When John Summers moved to a small town in the Wairarapa and began to look closely at the less-celebrated aspects of local life - our club rooms, freezing works, night trains, hotel pubs, landfills - he saw something deeper. It was a story about his own life, but mostly about a place and its people. The story was about life and death in New Zealand. Combining reportage and memoir, The Commercial Hotel is a sharp-eyed, poignant yet often hilarious tour of Aotearoa: a place in which Arcoroc mugs and dog-eared political biographies are as much a part of the scenery as the hills we tramp through ill-equipped. We encounter Elvis impersonators, the eccentric French horn player and adventurer Bernard Shapiro, Norman Kirk balancing timber on his handlebars while cycling to his building site, and Summers's grandmother: the only woman imprisoned in New Zealand for protesting World War Two. And we meet the ghosts who haunt our loneliest spaces. As he follows each of his preoccupations, Summers reveals to us a place we have never quite seen before.
"A beautiful, robust collection of work. Every once in a while a book comes along that you read, reread, and treasure. This is one of those books." —Laurence Fearnley
"This book is an achievement of much clarity and grace, but more importantly it is a work of promise." —Landfall Review Online
The Amur River, Between Russia and China by Colin Thubron             $40
In his eightieth year Thubron travelled the length of the river that divides China from Russia, using public transport where possible and sleeping where he could. In his inimitable elegant prose, he evokes the ordinary lives of those in a place of tension between superpowers. 

Land: How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world by Simon Winchester           $40
Winchester explores the the possession of land, the ways it is delineated and changes hands, the great disputes, and the questions of restoration – particularly in the light of climate change and colonialist reparation. A global study, this is an exquisite exploration of what the ownership of land might really mean for the people who live on it.
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List #5: NATURE & SCIENCE

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, or e-mail us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

Across the Pass: A collection of tramping writing edited by Shaun Barnett          $45

For generations, New Zealanders have taken to the hills and into the forests on foot to find out more about this land, its flora and fauna, themselves, and their companions. This book presents a wide gathering of writing concerned with tramping — from journals to yarns to poetry, from articles to fiction to songs — and captures something unique in the experience of Aotearoa. Sits well on a shelf alongside Laurence Fearnley’s and Paul Hersey’s To the Mountains: A Collection of New Zealand Alpine Writing. 

I am an Island by Tamsin Calidas           $37
When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move the 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of crofting, or of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she'd longed for fail to materialise, and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation. Injured, ill, without money or friend she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of renewal. 

How to Be Animal: A new history of what it means to be human by Melanie Challenger           $33
Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive and baffling animals on the planet. But how well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal writes a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this psychology evolved, the book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the ways we distance ourselves from other species.
“Melanie Challenger’s wonderful book teaches me this: our blazing continuity with the depth of time and the whole of life. It is a huge, complex and triumphant thing: challenging, but also celebratory, courageous, mournful and apprehensive. Her language is lovely: exact and lyrical and sparklingly full of suggestion and implication. It is a hymn to generosity. I know it will be something I will return to again and again.” —Adam Nicholson
Birds: An anthology edited by Jacqueline Mitchell, illustrated by Eric Fitch Daglish          $40
Arranged by bird, these literary excerpts and poems from classic and modern writers are accompanied by striking woodcuts. A very attractive hardback volume. 

Around the World in 80 Plants by Jonathan Drori and Lucille Clerc       $45
 In his follow-up to the equally fascinating and beautiful Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori takes another trip across the globe, bringing to life the science of plants by revealing how their worlds are intricately entwined with our own history, culture and folklore. From the seemingly familiar tomato and dandelion to the eerie mandrake and Spanish 'moss' of Louisiana, each of these stories is full of surprises. Some have a troubling past, while others have ignited human creativity or enabled whole civilisations to flourish.

The Light Ages: A medieval journey of discovery by Seb Falk          $30 
An interesting survey of the under-recognised scientific achievements of the Middle Ages, concentrating on the life and journeys of a real-life fourteenth century monk, John of Westwyk—inventor, astrologer, crusader—who was educated in England's grandest monastery and exiled to a clifftop priory.


This is a book about abandoned places: exclusion zones, no man's lands, ghost towns and post-industrial hinterlands – and what nature does when we're not there to see it. Exploring some of the eeriest, most desolate places in the world, Cal Flyn asks: what happens after humans pick up and leave? Whether due to war or disaster, disease or economic decay, each extraordinary place visited in this book has been left to its own devices for decades. In this time, nature has been left to work unfettered – offering a glimpse of how abandoned land, even the most polluted regions of the world, might offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour         $30
Gilmour's developing relationship with a magpie leads him to deeply consider his relationship with his father, anarchist poet and absconder Heathcote Williams, and also Williams's relationship with a jackdaw. What repeats across generations? Can birds 'run in the blood'? What else 'runs in the blood'?
"The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years." —Neil Gaiman
"Wonderful - I can't recommend it too highly." —Helen Macdonald


Tree Sense: Ways of thinking about trees edited by Susette Goldsmith          $37
As climate change imposes significant challenges on the natural world we are being encouraged to plant trees. At the same time, urban intensification and expansion threatens our existing arboreal resources and leads to disputes among communities, councils and developers over the fate of mature trees. To find our way through this confusion, we need to build our respect for trees and to recognise their essential role in our environment, our heritage, our well-being and our future. We need to build a 'tree sense'. This collection of essays, art and poetry by artists, activists, ecologists and advocates discusses the many ways in which humans need trees, and how our future is laced into their roots and their branches. Includes contributions from Huhana Smith, Mels Barton, Elizabeth Smither, Philip Simpson, Anne Noble, Kennedy Warne, Meredith Robertshawe, Glyn Church, Jacky Bowring, and Colin Meurk.
>>Have a look inside the book. 
What do we know, and how do we know it? What do we now know that we don't know? And what have we learnt about the obstacles to knowing more? In a time of deepening battles over what knowledge and truth mean, these questions matter more than ever. Grayling seeks to answer them in three crucial areas at the frontiers of knowledge — science, history, and psychology. In each area he illustrates how each field has advanced to where it is now, from the rise of technology to quantum theory, from the dawn of humanity to debates around national histories, from ancient ideas of the brain to modern theories of the mind. A remarkable history of science, life on earth, and the human mind itself.
50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In this book he explains the scientific and technological advancements—in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example—that allowed each of these discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived, interacted and live on in our genes today. 
In the company of bats, owls, moths and seabirds, Annette Lees guides us from dusk to dawn with fascinating night stories: tales of war stealth and ghosts; nights lit by candles and lighthouses; night surfing, fishing, diving and skiing; mountain walking and night navigation on ocean voyaging waka. From the author of Swim. 

Piripai by Leila Lees             $39
Piripai is natural history as prose poetry. It is a story of place, time and a subtle coming of age on the sand dunes between the river and the sea. The book is structured around twenty-six birds that inhabited Piripai, and ordered according to the time of year, beginning in spring and ending in winter. It is suffused with observation and memory, conveyed in a stripped-back style that both evokes and abstracts. Through the eyes of the book's three characters we learn about their family, their culture, their birds and the rough, beautiful land they call home.

Long unavailable and now completely revised and extended, this wonderful well-illustrated book is the definitive guide to the alpine regions that comprise so much of New Zealand. An essential book (even if you already have the earlier edition). 




Walking in the Woods by Yoshifumi Miyazaki         $28
"It is clear that our bodies still recognize nature as our home." —Yoshifumi Miyazaki. 'Forest bathing' or Shinrin-yoku is a way of walking in the woods that was developed in Japan in the 1980s. It brings together ancient traditions with cutting edge environmental health science.

Conversātiō: In the company of bees by Anne Noble          $60
"To fear the sting of a bee and know the sweetness of honey." Renowned New Zealand photographer Anne Noble has become increasingly fascinated with bees: their social complexity, their otherness, their long importance to humans, and the clarity with which they raise the alarm over environmental stress and degradation. This beautifully presented and idiosyncratic book displays Noble's bee photographs, at once sensitive and stunning, and helps us to think in new ways about the bees with which we share our world.
>>Look inside.

This is Your Mind on Plants: Opium, coffee, mescaline by Michael Pollan           $40
Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness—to stimulate, calm, or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. In This Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan explores three very different drugs - opium, caffeine, and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos. Why are some drugs encouraged by governments and others restricted?
How to Live a Good Life: A guide to choosing your personal philosophy edited by Massimo Pigluicci, Skye Cleary and Daniel Kaufman         $38
This thought-provoking collection brings together essays by fifteen philosophers reflecting on what it means to live according to a philosophy of life. From Eastern philosophies (Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism), to classical Western philosophies (such as Aristotelianism and Stoicism), to the four major religions, as well as contemporary philosophies (such as existentialism and effective altruism), each contributor offers a lively, personal account of how they find meaning in the practice of their chosen philosophical traditions.


Fox & I: An uncommon friendship by Catherine Raven        $38
A solitary woman's inspiring, moving, surprising, and often funny memoir about the transformative power of her unusual friendship with a wild fox. Catherine Raven left home at 15, fleeing an abusive father and an indifferent mother. Drawn to the natural world, she worked as a ranger in national parks, at times living in her run-down car on abandoned construction sites, or camping on a piece of land in Montana she bought from a colleague. She managed to put herself through college and then graduate school, eventually earning a PhD in biology and building a house on her remote plot. Yet she never felt at home with people. Except when teaching, she spoke to no one. One day, she realised that a wild fox that had been appearing at her house was coming by every day precisely at 4.15. He became a regular visitor, eventually sitting near her as she read to him. Her scientific training had taught her not to anthropomorphise animals, but as she grew to know him, his personality revealed itself - and he became her friend. But friends cannot always save each other from the uncontained forces of nature. Though this is a story of survival, it is also a poignant and dramatic tale of living in the wilderness and coping with inevitable loss. 
The Unseen Body: A doctor's journey through the hidden wonders of human anatomy by Jonathan Reisman           $38
Through his offbeat adventures in healthcare and travel, Reisman discovers new perspectives on the body: a trip to the Alaskan Arctic reveals that fat is not the enemy, but the hero; a stint in the Himalayas uncovers the boundary where the brain ends and the mind begins; and eating a sheep's head in Iceland offers a lesson in empathy. By relating his experiences in far-flung lands and among unique cultures back to the body's inner workings, he shows how our organs live inextricably intertwined lives in an internal ecosystem that reflects the natural world around us.
Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli        $45
In June 1925, twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg, suffering from hay fever, retreated to a small, treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland. It was there that he came up with one of the most transformative scientific concepts—quantum theory. Almost a century later, quantum physics has given us many startling ideas—ghost waves, distant objects that seem magically connected to each other, cats that are both dead and alive. At the same time, countless experiments have led to practical applications that shape our daily lives. Today our understanding of the world around us is based on this theory. And yet it is still profoundly mysterious. In this book, Carlo Rovelli tells the story of quantum physics and reveals its deep meaning—a world made of substances is replaced by a world made of relations, each particle responding to another in a never ending game of mirrors.
>>Other excellent books by Rovelli. 
How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy            $50
"I was tired of speed. I wanted to live tree time." Drawn to trees' wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photographers, scientists, and spiritual figures have gleaned through their engagement with trees—from Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves.

Being You: A new science of consciousness by Anil Seth           $37
Consciousness is the great unsolved mystery in our scientific understanding of the brain. Somewhere, somehow, inscribed in the brain is everything that makes you you. But how do we grasp what happens in the brain to turn mere electrical impulses into the vast range of perceptions, thoughts and emotions we feel from moment to moment? Anil Seth charts the developments in our understanding of consciousness, revealing radical interdisciplinary breakthroughs that must transform the way we think about the self. Drawing on his original research and collaborations with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards, mathematicians and philosophers, he puts forward a new theory about how we experience the world that should encourage us to view ourselves as less apart from and more a part of the rest of nature. 
"Beautifully written, crystal clear, deeply insightful." —David Eagleman
Raised in the forests of British Columbia, Simard was working in the forest service when she first discovered how trees communicate underground through an immense web of fungi, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees — the mysterious, powerful entities that nurture their kin and sustain the forest. 

Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death, and art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes          $40
Neanderthals became a distinct population 450,000 to 400,000 thousand years ago, and lived all over the world from north Wales to China and Arabia, in climates ranging from glacial to tropical, until about 40,000 years ago. They were shorter than we are, with strong arms for working hides and fine motor skills for making small tools, but probably saw, heard, smelled and possibly even spoke much like we do. With a sketch and a short piece of fiction at the start of each chapter, Wragg Sykes paints a vivid picture of life as lived by a Neanderthal parent, hunter or child. She doesn’t just want us to see Neanderthals for who they (probably) really were; she wants us to see their world through their eyes.
In this impressive reassessment Neanderthals emerge as complex, clever and caring, with a lot to tell us about human life." —Guardian
Edith Widder grew up wanting to become a marine biologist. But after complications from surgery caused her to go temporarily blind while at university, she became fascinated by light, and her focus turned to bioluminescence. On her first visit to the deep ocean, in an experimental diving suit that took her to a depth of 250 metres, she turned off the suit's lights and witnessed breathtaking explosions of bioluminescent activity. Why was there so much light down there? Below the Edge of Darkness takes readers deep into the mysteries of the oceans as Widder investigates one of nature's most widely used forms of communication. She reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of creatures, from microbes to leviathans—many never before seen or, like the giant squid, never before filmed.
New Zealand Seabirds: A natural history by Kerry-Jayne Wilson      $50
Definitively describes the different groups of seabirds, where in New Zealand they occur, their breeding biology, foods and foraging behaviours, the conservation threats they face, and the vast distances they often travel to feed and breed.
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List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, or e-mail us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.


The Savage Coloniser by Tusiata Avia          $25
"Savage is as savage does. And we’re all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world – outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish wit, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you’ll feel your pulse anew." —Selina Tusitala Marsh
Winner of the Mary & Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
On We Go by Catherine Bagnall and L. Jane Sayle            $35
This exquisite little hardback of 21 poems and 26 watercolour paintings is the result of a long-time poet-and-artist collaboration and grew out of their thinking about the natural world, childhood memories and thoughts about the climate change crisis. It’s part of a growing literary genre based on emerging forms of ecological thinking that cross genres and scientific disciplines. An adult picture book to be read aloud to all ages, and a gesture of playful joy, this small treasure can be enjoyed in one sitting and returned to on a regular basis.

Bird Collector by Alison Glenny            $28
A patchy archive of hallucinatory field notes, dictionary definitions from inside a dream, and diary entries from an alternate history. This collection of strange poems maintains both excitement and melancholy like the two-edged blade of a letter opener.
"Reading Bird Collector is like walking through the rooms of a nineteenth century house, filled with curiosities but also with a deeper sense of buried trauma: both on a personal and an environmental scale. The fragmentary pieces invite the reader to search for a narrative at the same time as they frustrate this desire—much like the appearance and disappearance of ghosts or spirits. Alison Glenny’s writing suggests a literary lineage that includes Gertrude Stein and Anne Carson. There is a mastery of technique and a skilled repurposing of language and text. I am very much in awe of this work." —Airini Beautrais
"I often think of Emily Dickinson when I read Alison Glenny. There are the same provoking gaps and absences, the same particular gaze; and always — to adapt one of Alison Glenny’s own phrases — the steady habit of turning starlight into song." —Bill Manhire
All Tito's Children by Tim Grgec            $25
Stjepan and Elizabeta are siblings in Kotoriba, a small village between two rivers in Yugoslavia. They want to know everything about the world. From their tiny corner of communist Europe, small cracks are starting to appear in their adoration of their national leader, Tito. The poems in All Tito's Children are shadowed by the story of Grgec's own grandparents, who fled communist Yugoslavia in the 1950s and came to New Zealand as refugees. The collection is a multilayered portrait of personal and political disillusionment, deception, escape and loss.

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan           $35
Hassan's poems chartan intimate course through memories from his childhood and upbringing in Egypt, New Zealand, Turkey and elsewhere to untangle the intersecting traumas of migration, Islamophobia and grief and ask difficult questions about the essence of nationalism and belonging.
Rejoice Instead: Collected poems by Peter Hooper           $43
New Zealand West Coast poet, novelist, teacher, bookseller and conservationist Peter Hooper (1919-1991) was described by Colin McCahon, who used his poems in a number of art works, as a 'poet of grace and truth'. His voice on behalf of nature and the environment, and clear insight into where our treatment of the environment was heading, has only deepened in its relevance in the 21st century. 

The Sea Walks into a Wall by Anne Kennedy       $25
"A new book by Anne Kennedy, one of our most exciting and innovative poets, is always a cause for celebration. These poems, like her mind, are a treasure trove – full of wit, intelligence, innovation, challenge, beauty and a whole lot of heart." —Helen Rickerby
"Anne Kennedy celebrates and memorialises the world in a state of flux, at once dynamic, absurd and magical. Her poems are funny, sceptical and impassioned by turns, and always finely calibrated. Ultimately, she writes about the minor daily miracles of life itself, the narratives of the moment, the human surplus that eludes legal tidiness and finality of judgement." —David Eggleton
Great Works by Oscar Mardell               $32
Great Works consists of thirteen poems, each about a different freezing works in Aotearoa New Zealand. Satirising the colonial-pastoral mythologies through which the local landscape has often been interpreted, the collection gives due attention to an industry which, in spite of its centrality to the nation’s economic history, has remained conspicuously absent from its art and literature. Here, as in Bataille, ‘the slaughterhouse is linked to religion’: Great Works offers a darkly comic view of sacrifice and slaughter in ‘God’s Own Country’. Limited edition of 100. 
>>Read some of the poems. 

Burst Kisses on the Actual Wind by Courtney Sina Meredith               $30
A beautifully presented collection of surprising and shifting poems, focused on connection and displacement, the blurring between internal landscapes and longed-for realities.
"Courtney Sina Meredith is one of New Zealand's most talented and influential authors. Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind will find an eager audience." —Paula Morris. 
"Courtney Sina Meredith has grown a distinctive voice. Her arrangements are formally inventive. She surprises in ways that writers ought to." —Lloyd Jones

I Am a Human Being by Jackson Nieuwland         $20
The first collecting from an exciting emerging poet. "Take part in a new transformation with every new page as the speaker becomes by turns an egg, multiple trees, a town crier, a needle in a haystack, and a cone of blue light in this incisive and pathos-filled exploration of what it means to be anything at all."
Selected Poems by Harry Ricketts        $40
From his 1989 collection Coming Here – in which he wrote the first of his ‘Secret Life’ poems – to his 2018 collection Winter Eyes, which reviewer Tim Upperton called "unsettling, moving, both estranging and empathetic", Ricketts has written of friendship, youth, romance, loss, and the small moments that carry a lifelong weight, or light, within us. 
Tōku Pāpā by Ruby Solly          $25
"When you first told me that you gave me the name of our tupuna so that I would be strong enough to hold our family inside my ribcage, I believed you. Here you are. Here is how I saw you, trapped in your own amber. Now it’s time for you to believe me. Tōku Pāpā is a book that serves as a map of survival for Māori growing up outside of their papakāika. These poems look at how we take the knowledge we are given by our ancestors and hide it beneath our tongues for safekeeping. They show us how we live with our tūpuna, without ever fully understanding them. This book encompasses a journey spanning generations, teaching us how to keep the home fires burning within ourselves when we have forgotten where our homes are. But have our homes forgotten us?"
Rangikura by Tayi Tibble           $25
Tibble's eagerly awaited second collection, following 2018's Poūkahangatus.
"The intricate politics woven into Tibble’s poetry give her writing strength and purpose." —Winnie Siulolovao Dunn, Cordite Poetry Review
"Tibble speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality." —Hinemoana Baker
>>Two poems from the book. 

The Ladies' Home Haiku Book by Elizabeth McNaughtan Williams, illustrated by John Helle-Nielsen                $25
Is it the case that repetitive tasks of quotidian cleaning better distill our existential predicaments than the loftiest theoretical musings? Possibly, but, be that as it may, this little book of delightfully sprightly, concisely insightful verse, matched with equally amusing illustrations, will improve the mood of anyone who reads it. 
>>And there are cards!! 


A Clear Dawn: New Asian voices from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Paula Morris and Alison Wong               $50
This collection of poetry, fiction and essays by emerging writers is the first-ever anthology of Asian New Zealand creative writing. A Clear Dawn presents a new wave of creative talent. With roots stretching from Indonesia to Japan, from China to the Philippines to the Indian subcontinent, the authors in this anthology range from high school students to retirees, from recent immigrants to writers whose families have lived in New Zealand for generations. Some of the writers – including Gregory Kan, Sharon Lam, Rose Lu and Chris Tse – have published books; some, like Mustaq Missouri, Aiwa Pooamorn and Gemishka Chetty, are better known for their work in theatre and performance. The introduction outlines New Zealand's long yet under-recognised history of immigration from Asia. 
"Breathtaking in its parts and as a hole. Even if you know a part of Asia well, even if you feel in touch with present-day Aotearoa, this anthology will surprise you again and again, as, voice by unique voice, truth by particular truth, its artists build a mosaic you have never seen before." —Rajorshi Chakraborti
Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes           $50
Aotearoa is a land of extraordinary queer writers, many of whom have contributed to our rich literary history. But you wouldn’t know it. Decades of erasure and homophobia have rendered some of our most powerful writing invisible. Out Here will change that. This landmark book brings together and celebrates queer New Zealand writers from across the gender and LGBTQIA+ spectrum with a generous selection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and more.
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

 

THE 2020 VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR
Use the selector to choose books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
List #1: FICTION
List #4: FOOD & DRINK
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

 List #2: FICTION FOR CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULTS

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

Mihi by Gavin Bishop         $18
This beautiful te Reo board book introduces ideas of me and my place in the world in the shape of a simple mihi: introducing yourself and making connections to other people and places. Essential. 


The Phantom Twin by Lisa Brown          $33
Isabel spent her life following Jane's lead. Of the conjoined twins, Jane was always the stronger one, both physically and emotionally. But when Jane dies on the operating table during a risky attempt to separate the twins, Isabel is left alone. Or is she? Soon, Jane returns, attached to Isabel from shoulder to hip just like she used to be. Except Isabel is the only person who can see Jane — a ghost, a phantom limb, a phantom twin.
>>Read Stella's review. 


The Stone Giant by Anna Höglund        $27
When her father leaves to save people from a giant who turns them to stone with his gaze, a child in a red dress is left alone. Many days and many nights go by. Every evening the girl says good night to herself in her mirror. When the last light burns down, the girl takes her mirror and a knife and sets out to find her father. "I will save my father from the giant," she says. A beautifully illustrated version of a Swedish fairy tale. 
>>Read Stella's review. 


What We'll Build: Plans to build our together future by Oliver Jeffers         $30
A father and daughter set about laying the foundations for their life together. Using their own special tools, they get to work; building memories to cherish, a home to keep them safe and love to keep them warm. We all need to build a together future.
A companion volume of sorts to Here We Are. 

The Inkberg Enigma by Jonathan King         $30
Miro and Zia live in Aurora, a fishing town nestled in the shadow of an ancient castle. Miro lives in his books; Zia is never without her camera. The day they meet, they uncover a secret. The fishing works, the castle, and the town council are all linked to an ill-fated 1930s Antarctic expedition. But the diary of that journey has been hidden, and the sea is stirring up unusual creatures. Something has a powerful hold over the town. With Zia determined to find out more, Miro finds himself putting aside his books for a real adventure. A superb graphic novel for 8—12-year-olds. 
>>Watch the trailer!
>>Read Stella;s review. 
Monstrous Devices by Damien Love          $17
On a winter's day, twelve-year old Alex receives a package in the mail—an old tin robot from his grandfather. 'This one is special,' says the enclosed note, and when strange events start occurring around him, Alex suspects this small toy is more than special; it might be deadly. Alex's grandfather arrives, saving him from an attack and plunging him into the macabre magic of an ancient family feud. Together, the duo flees across snowy Europe, unravelling the riddle of the little robot while trying to outwit relentless assassins of the human and mechanical kind. Exciting. 

Lark by Anthony McGowan          $17
Things are tense at home for Nicky and Kenny. Their mum's coming to visit and it will be the first time they've seen her in years. A lot has changed since they were little and Nicky's not so sure he's ready to see her again. When they head for a trek across the moors to take their minds off everything, a series of unforeseen circumstances leaves the brothers in a vulnerable and very dangerous position. There might even be a chance that this time not everyone will make it home alive. Exciting and well written.
Winner of the 2020 CILIP Carnegie Medal. 
"The clear, poetic prose in this affecting story about two brothers creates a perfectly pitched, moving tale which captures the humour and strength of their love for one another.  The characters are skilfully drawn making them realistic and believable.  There is an incredible sense of place when the boys are out on the moors, effectively conveying their fear and the dangers of their situation.  The growing sense of jeopardy and building tension is perfectly balanced with instances of humour and palpable brotherly love, making this a breath-taking read. The epilogue brings the story to a moving and powerful conclusion." —Judges' citation
Mophead Tu: The Queen's poem by Selina Tusitala Marsh          $25
In this sequel to the wonderful Mophead, Selina is crowned Commonwealth Poet and invited to perform for the Queen in Westminster Abbey. But when someone at work calls her a 'sellout', Selina starts doubting herself. Can she stand with her people who struggled against the Queen . . . and serve the Queen? From the sinking islands in the south seas to the smoggy streets of London, Mophead Tu: The Queen's Poem is a hilariously thought-provoking take on colonial histories and one poet's journey to bridge the divide. Selina has to work out where she stands and how to be true to herself.

The Kiosk by Anete Melece           $30
For years, the kiosk has been Olga's life, but she dreams of distant places. One day a chance occurrence sets her on an unexpected journey. Absurd and heart-lifting, this is a picture book about being stuck and finding a way to get free.
>>How to travel. 



The Pōrangi Boy by Shilo Kino       $25
Twelve-year-old Niko lives in Pohe Bay, a small, rural town with a sacred hot spring and a taniwha named Taukere. The government wants to build a prison over the home of the taniwha, and Niko's grandfather is busy protesting. People call him pōrangi, crazy, but when he dies, it's up to Niko to convince his community that the taniwha is real and stop the prison from being built. With help from his friend Wai, Niko must unite his whanau, honour his grandfather and stand up to his childhood bully.

Burn by Patrick Ness       $28
“On a cold Sunday evening in early 1957, Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron Gas Station for the dragon he'd hired to help on the farm.” This dragon, Kazimir, has more to him than meets the eye. Sarah can't help but be curious about him, an animal who supposedly doesn't have a soul but is seemingly intent on keeping her safe from the brutal attentions of Deputy Sheriff Emmett Kelby. Kazimir knows something she doesn't. He has arrived at the farm because of a prophecy. A prophecy that involves a deadly assassin, a cult of dragon worshippers, two FBI agents – and somehow, Sarah Dewhurst herself.
>>Read Stella's review. 

Glassheart by Katharine Orton             $22
Nona and her uncle travel everywhere together, replacing stained-glass windows in war-torn buildings throughout England. One day a mysterious commission takes them to the lonely moors of Dartmoor, where a powerful magic threatens everything that Nona holds dear. She is determined to do whatever it takes to protect those she loves – even if it means fighting darkness itself. 


A Bear Named Bjorn by Delphine Perret         $25
Bjorn lives in the forest with his animal friends. When a sofa is delivered to his cave, he is not impressed — what will he do with it? When his friend Ramona, who is a human and lives in the city, sends him the present of a fork, he knows what it is for — to scratch his back — but what would be a good present to send in return? Bjorn is happy just being himself — he doesn’t want to wear his new spectacles, because he likes the world blurry. A charming book about being happy who you are. 


The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff           $18
"Everyone talks about falling in love like it's the most miraculous, life-changing thing in the world. Something happens, they say, and you know That's what happened when I met Kit Godden. I looked into his eyes and I knew. Only everyone else knew too. Everyone else felt exactly the same way." An excellent YA novel about a family and a summer — the summer when everything changes.
>>Read Stella's review. 



Hare Pota me te Whatu Manapou nā J.K. Rowling, nā Leon Heketū Blake i whakamāori         $25
"No te huringa o te kopaki, i tana ringa e wiri ana, ka kite iho a Hare i tetahi hiri-wakihi waiporoporo e whakaatu ana i tetahi tohu kawai; he raiona, he ikara, he patiha me tetahi nakahi e karapoti ana i tetahi pu 'H' e rahi ana. Kaore ano a Hare Pota i paku rongo korero e pa ana ki Howata i te taenga haeretanga o nga reta ki a Mita H. Pota, i Te Kapata i raro i nga Arapiki, i te 4 o te Ara o Piriweti. He mea tuhi ki te wai kanapanapa i runga i te kirihipi ahua kowhai nei, i tere ra te kohakina e nga matua keke wetiweti o Hare, e nga Tuhiri. Heoi, i te huringa tau tekau ma tahi o Hare, ka papa mai tetahi tangata hitawe ake nei, a Rupehu Hakiri, me etahi korero whakamiharo: he kirimatarau a Hare Pota, a, kua whai turanga ia ki Te Kura Matarau o Howata. I te pukapuka tuatahi o nga tino korero ma nga tamariki a mohoa nei, ka whakamohio a Rana ratou ko Heremaiani, ko Tamaratoa, ko Ahorangi Makonara i a Hare me te kaipanui ki te Kuitiki me Tera-e-Mohiotia-ra, ki te whainga o te matarau me te oha mai i mua. I te whakaawenga o te whakawhitia ki te reo Maori e Leon Blake, ka timata te korero i konei." Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in te reo Māori!
Those Seal Rock Kids by Jon Tucker          $23
When a group of young Australian and Kiwi sailing friends are allowed to camp in New Zealand's Bay of Islands, they discover something very unexpected on a tiny nearby rocky islet. Fresh cultural and environmental insights are introduced with the arrival of a pair of children from the local iwi who bring humour and resilience while facing problems that threaten to turn their lives upside-down. 




Lisette's Green Sock by Catharina Valckx        $30
One day Lisette finds a pretty green sock. She's delighted, until some bullies begin to tease her: socks should come in pairs; what use is one sock? Lisette searches and searches, but she cannot find the sock's missing mate. Fortunately, her friend Bert helps her see the situation in a new way.


Migrants by Issa Watanabe           $30
The migrants must leave the forest. Borders are crossed, sacrifices made, loved ones are lost. It takes such courage to reach the end. At last the journey is over and the migrants arrive. This is the new place. A beautiful picture book with an important message. 



Aspiring by Damien Wilkins         $22
Fifteen-year-old Ricky lives in Aspiring, a town that's growing at an alarming rate. Ricky's growing, too - 6'7", and taller every day. But he's stuck in a loop: student, uncommitted basketballer, and puzzled son, burdened by his family's sadness. And who's the weird guy in town with a chauffeur and half a Cadillac? What about the bits of story that invade his head? Uncertain what's real — and who he is  Ricky can't stop sifting for clues. He has no idea how things will end up.

VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

 List #1: FICTION

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves

Nothing to See by Pip Adam         $30
The new novel from the winner of the 2018 Acorn Prize for Fiction unsettles as it compels, undermining the reader's conceptions of the workings of reality in the age of surveillance capitalism. Adam both attracts and deflects attention to her characters, effective or abandoned doubles, shrinking from the twin monstrosities of alcohol and boredom in a novel both mathematical and disconcerting. 
"Adam has advanced even further as a writer. There is an evenness to her writing that is hypnotic rather than monotonous, steady rather than flat, and the sustained melancholy recalls the sadder end of science-fiction — films like Her and Never Let Me Go. At its heart, this is a novel about shame, loneliness, about wanting to do good and hoping for second chances — or third or fourth chances. It’s about finding new ways of being. That it can cover all this, and be deeply affecting as it does so, while also pushing at the traditional limits of fiction, is a real achievement." —Philip Mathews (ANZL)

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar        $30
Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this novel is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a 13-year-old girl whose family is compelled to flee their home in Tehran for a new life in a small village, hoping in this way to preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives. But they soon find themselves caught up in the post-revolutionary chaos that sweeps across the country, a madness that affects both living and dead, old and young.
"The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree speaks of the power of imagination when confronted with cruelty, and of our human need to make sense of the world through the ritual of storytelling. Through her unforgettable characters and glittering magical realist style, Azar weaves a timely and timeless story that juxtaposes the beauty of an ancient, vibrant culture with the brutality of an oppressive political regime." —judges' citation, 2020 International Booker Prize

Bug Week by Airini Beautrais              $30
A scalpel-sharp short story collection: A science educator in domestic chaos fetishises Scandinavian furniture and champagne flutes. A group of white-collar deadbeats attend a swinger's party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mic night. 

A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom by John Boyne         $37
Some stories are universal. Some are unique. They play out across human history. This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons. One with his father's violence in his blood. One with his mother's artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning. Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years. They will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium and journeying across fifty countries to a life among the stars in the third, the world will change around them, but their destinies remain the same. Can this pattern be escaped? An astounding new novel from the author of The Heart's Invisible Furies, A History of Loneliness and A Ladder to the Sky. 
"John Boyne brings a completely fresh eye to the most important stories. He is one of the greatest craftsmen in contemporary literature." —Colum McCann
>>Read Stella's review. 

The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara      $38
A remarkable reimagining of Argentina's macho national origin myth from a female perspective; a joyful, hallucinatory journey across the pampas of 19th century.
"The Adventures of China Iron sets British industry and Argentine expansion against the sisterhood of the wagon and an indigenous society of fluid genders and magic mushrooms. Sentences bound on from one page to another, seeming almost as long as the vignette-like chapters, in a thrilling and mystical miniature epic. This story, drunk on words and visions, is an elegy to the land and its lost cultures." —Guardian

Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey       $35
The compelling new novel from the author of The Wish Child. The eyes of the wife of the new Buchenwald concentration camp administrator are opened to the actualities of her situation when she forms an alliance with one of the inmates, the inventor of a machine he claimed would cure cancer. Whether the machine works or not, it may yet save a life...
"Chidgey's compellingly gentle and empathetic treament of the consequences of very disturbing patterns of human behaviour serves to maintain her position as one of our 'must read' novelists." —Otago Daily Times

Shakti by Rajorshi Chakraborti          $36
Amid a political climate of right-wing, nationalist leadership, three very different women in the city of Calcutta find themselves gifted with magical powers that match their wildest dreams. There is one catch — the gifts come with a Faustian price. 
"Chakraborti has embarked on one of the most interesting career trajectories seen in recent times." —The Sunday Guardian
>>VOLUME feature. 
>>Read Stella's review. 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke           $30
An astounding new novel, reaching right to the shared core of fantasy and loneliness, from the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.  Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
"A remarkable feat, not just of craft but of reinvention." —Guardian

Dance Prone by David Coventry              $35
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of The Invisible Mile. During their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band's four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, and violence. With decades passed and compelled by his wife's failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty.
"A gorgeous panegyric to the purity, poison and impossibly high stakes of punk. Funny, filthy, erudite and rude." —Carl Shuker
>>VOLUME feature. 
>>Read Stella's review. 

The Innocents by Michael Crummey       $23
A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them. As they fight for their own survival through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested. The long-awaited new novel from the author of the wonderful Sweetland. 

The Silence by Don DeLillo          $30
Five people are meeting for dinner in a Manhattan apartment, but when all the screens go dark they are forced to face what is left of themselves without the internet. 
"DeLillo is a master stylist, and not a word goes to waste. DeLillo looks for the future as it manifests in the present moment." —Anne Enright, Guardian
"Mysterious and unexpectedly touching. DeLillo offers consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world." —Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review
"DeLillo has almost Dayglo powers as a writer." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Brilliant and astonishing...a masterpiece...manages to renew DeLillo's longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader's emotions...The effect is transcendent." --Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi             $35
In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
"Taut, unsettling, ferocious." —Fatima Bhutto
"Crystalline, surgical, compulsively readable. An examination of toxic relationships and the ties that bind us." —Sharlene Teo
"Raw, wise and cuttingly funny on love and cruelty, marriage and motherhood, art and illness, and one woman's fight for her sense of self." —Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
>>Read Stella's review. 

Actress by Anne Enright         $35
Looking back on her mother's life and career as an actor, both in Ireland and in Hollywood, a woman finds herself reassessing her own life and her relationship with her parents. 
"This novel achieves what no real actor’s memoir could. Enright triumphs as a chameleon: memoirist, journalist, critic, daughter – her emotional intelligence knows no bounds. This is a study of possession that includes the subtly implied pain of having to share your mother with a crowd." —Guardian


The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante          $37
Giovanna's pretty face has changed: it's turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into which mirror must she look to find herself and save herself? She is searching for a new face in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, which professes to be a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between these two cities, disoriented by the fact that, whether high or low, the city seems to offer no answer and no escape. An astounding new novel from the author of the quartet that began with My Brilliant Friend. 
"An astonishing, deeply moving tale of the sorts of wisdom, beauty and knowledge that remain as unruly as the determinedly inharmonious faces of these women." —Guardian

No Man's Land by A.J. Fitzwater          $30
Dorothea 'Tea' Gray joins the Land Service and is sent to work on a remote farm in North Otago, one of many young women who filled the empty shoes left by fathers and brothers serving in the Second World War. But Tea finds more than hard work and hot sun in the dusty North Otago nowhere—she finds a magic inside herself she never could have imagined, a way to save her brother in a distant land she never thought she could reach, and a love she never knew existed. Inspired by feminist and LGBTQ+ history and family wartime memories, A.J. Fitzwater has turned a piece of forgotten women's history into a tapestry of furious pride and love that crosses cultures, countries and decades.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan             $37
In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider...
"This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical. This book is vintage Flanagan. It is urgent and angry and fierce. But it is also a kind book, a sorrowful book. It is a book that offers notes of grace and gratitude in the face of beauty, asking its readers to be vigilant in how we take care of our world, of each other, of ourselves. Nothing disappears, it suggests, if we’re brave enough to pay it the attention and regard it deserves. What an astonishing book this is." —Sydney Morning Herald

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa         $38
A blend of essay and autofiction exploring the inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. By reaching into the past and finding another woman's voice, a woman frees her own. 
>>VOLUME feature. 


Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam         $35
It is Saturday afternoon and two boys’ schools are locked in battle for college rugby supremacy. Priya — a fifteen year old who barely belongs — watches from the sidelines. Then it is Saturday night and the team is partying, Priya's friends have evaporated and she isn't sure what to do. Gnanalingam's new novel addresses New Zealand's culture of masculinity, racism and sexual predation, and the ways in which institutions seem often to have priorities than acknowledging victims' needs.  

A Lover's Discourse by Xiaolu Guo            $35
An exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in a Britain still reeling from the Brexit vote, Xiaolu Guo shows us how this couple navigate these differences, and their relationship, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped and stifling flat share in east London. Full of resonances with Roland Barthes's book by the same name and with Xiaolu Guo's own novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. 
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison           $38
"That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment. Austere, unflinching and desperately moving, he is one of the very great writers alive today. And yes, he writes fantasy and sf, though of a form, scale and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction." —China Mieville
Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age fourteen. It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical. Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies? As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.
Winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize.

The Harpy by Megan Hunter         $40
A man calls one afternoon with a shattering message for Lucy: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy's husband, he wants her to know. The revelation marks a turning point. Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage: she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take. As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return.
"The Harpy is brilliant. Hunter imbues the everyday with apocalyptic unease. A deeply unsettling, excellent read." —Daisy Johnson
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Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the café by Toshikazu Kawaguchi       $20
In this sequel to the wildly popular Before the Coffee Gets Cold, four more customers avail themselves of the time-travelling offered by the Cafe Funiculi Funicula. 

People from My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami           $28
Take a story and shrink it. Make it tiny, so small it can fit in the palm of your hand. Carry the story with you everywhere, let it sit with you while you eat, let it watch you while you sleep. Keep it safe, you never know when you might need it. In Kawakami's super short 'palm of the hand' stories the world is never quite as it should be: a small child lives under a sheet near his neighbour's house for thirty years; an apartment block leaves its visitors with strange afflictions, from fast-growing beards to an ability to channel the voices of the dead; an old man has two shadows, one docile, the other rebellious; two girls named Yoko are locked in a bitter rivalry to the death. Short stories from the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo. 

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami          $38
A novel exploring the inner conflicts of an adolescent girl who refuses to communicate with her mother except through writing. Through the story of these women, Kawakami paints a portrait of womanhood in contemporary Japan, probing questions of gender and beauty norms and how time works on the female body.
>>Read Stella's review. 



Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann        $38
Kehlmann's resetting of the adventures of the folkloric prankster Tyll Ulenspiegel during the Thirty Years' War delivers a book that is funny, frightening, dirty, informative, both alien and familiar, and completely engrossing. 
"This energetic historical fiction, featuring a folkloric jester in a violent, superstitious Europe, is the work of an immense talent. It’s a testament to Kehlmann’s immense talent that he has succeeded in writing a powerful and accessible book about a historical period that is so complicated and poorly understood. He never pushes the parallels between present and past, but there are many ways in which this strife-torn Europe, fractured by religion, intolerance and war, is a reflection of our own times." —Guardian

Monsters in the Garden: An anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand science fiction and fantasy edited by Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen       $35
Casting its net widely, this anthology of Aotearoa-New Zealand science fiction and fantasy ranges from the satirical novels of the 19th-century utopians one of which includes the first description of atmospheric aerobreaking in world literature to the bleeding edge of now. Includes Godfrey Sweven, Janet Frame, Margaret Mahy, Maurice Gee, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall, Phillip Mann, Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Juliet Marillier, Elizabeth Knox, Dylan Horrocks, Bernard Beckett, Anon, Craig Gamble, Danyl Mclauchlan, Pip Adam, Kirsten McDougall, Tina Makereti, Lawrence Patchett, Octavia Cade, Rachael Craw, Karen Healey, Jack Barrowman, Emma Martin, Samantha Lane Murphy, Jack Larsen, Tamsyn Muir, and some worried sheep. 
Red Pill by Hari Kunzru            $38
A writer on a residency in Berlin falls into a web of frightening associations through the internet. Red Pill is a novel about the alt-right, online culture, creativity, sanity and history. It tells the story of the 21st century through the prism of the centuries that preceded it, showing how the darkest chapters of our past haunt our present. More than anything, though, this is a novel about love and how it can endure in a world where everything else seems to have lost all meaning.    
>>Read Stella's review. 

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane       $30
Erin's mother has motor neurone disease and has decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Erin looks back at her twenty-six-year-old self, she can finally tell the story of the unimaginable task she faced one winter.
"The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader. It's an incredibly humane book that looks closely at love — not the easy, conventional love but the complicated, brutal love that invites us at once to forget ourselves and know ourselves completely. We are faulty and perfect in our faults. Sad and buoyant with our sorrows. I can't remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out." —Pip Adam

Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride         $33
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. A hotel room is a no-place that could be any place. When there, the occupant has only the forces of their past to provide momentum. Destabilised by loss, the protagonist becomes increasingly uncertain of her identity. 
"Strange Hotel evokes a precariousness that flits between the physical, the mental and the linguistic — specifically, the narrator’s identity as a woman. Reading Strange Hotel is indeed a matter of strange immersion, and one that will often puzzle and sometimes frustrate the reader, but its portrait of sadness and alienation is, in the end, also strangely revivifying." —The Guardian
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The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay         $37
Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Jean is not good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in a wildlife park. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu — its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too.
>>Read Stella's review. 

Auē by Becky Manawatu        $35
Winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Judges' commendation: "Auē, by first-time novelist Becky Manawatu, introduces readers to the orphaned Arama, who is deposited in rural Kaikōura with relatives, and his brother Taukiri, a young man fending for himself in the big smoke. There is violence and sadness and rawness in this book, but buoyant humour, too, remarkable insights into the minds of children and young men, incredible forgiveness and a massive suffusion of love. With its uniquely New Zealand voice, its sparing and often beautiful language, the novel patiently weaves the strands of its tale into an emotionally enveloping korowai, or cloak. In the words of Tara June Winch, 'There is something so assured and flawless in the delivery of the writing voice that is almost like acid on the skin.'”

The Mirror and the Light ('Wolf Hall' #3) by Hilary Mantel        $50
"If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?"*
The intensely and long-anticipated and superlatively wonderful conclusion of Mantel's trilogy based on the life of Thomas Cromwell (1485—1540).
*Apologies for the spoiler! 
"A novel of epic proportions, every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors. This is a masterpiece that will keep yielding its riches, changing as its readers change, going forward with us into the future." —Guardian


2000ft Above Worry Level by Eamonn Marra           $30
"Eamonn Marra writes about trying to grow into a complete human being in a world that wants only selected parts of you. He does it better than anyone I can think of. His stories are thoughtful and introspective, but each contains a wallop of insight that comes from forgetting that anyone but you exists, and looking up to suddenly see someone close to you in a flash of complex vulnerability." —Annaleese Jochems

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor          $37
The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing near the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village of La Matosa is rife with rumours about how and why this murder occurred. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, Fernanda Melchor paints a moving portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. 
"Brutal, relentless, beautiful, fugal, Hurricane Season explores the violent mythologies of one Mexican village and reveals how they touch the global circuitry of capitalist greed. This is an inquiry into the sexual terrorism and terror of broken men. This is a work of both mystery and critique. Most recent fiction seems anaemic by comparison." —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste        $33
A compelling novel concerning women soldiers defending Ethiopia during the Italian invasion of 1935. 
"Devastating." —Marlon James
"Magnificent." —Aminatta Forna


Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell         $38
Utopia Avenue are the strangest British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief and blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.
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Summerwater by Sarah Moss       $35
On the longest day of the summer, twelve people sit cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish cabin park. In twenty-four hours they reveal their capacity not only for kinship but for cruelty. 
"Moss’s ability to conjure up the fleeting and sometimes agonised tenderness of family life is unmatched. ... A great part of a novelist’s skill lies in the breadth of their sympathies and their ability to enter into the lives of people unlike themselves. Moss does this so naturally and comprehensively that at times her simple, pellucid prose and perfectly judged free indirect speech feel almost like documentary or nonfiction – there is an artfulness to her writing so accomplished as to conceal itself." —Guardian 
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata          $33
The remarkable new novel from the author of Convenience Store Woman. Natsuki isn't like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what. Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki's family are increasing, her friends wonder why she's still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki's childhood are pursuing her.

The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting          $38
The new novel from the author of The Sixteen Trees of the Somme (and Norwegian Wood), is fitted together live the staves of a Norwegian stave church. As long as people could remember, the stave church's bells had rung over the isolated village of Butangen, Norway. Cast in memory of conjoined twins, the bells are said to ring on their own in times of danger. In 1879, young pastor Kai Schweigaard moves to the village, where young Astrid Hekne yearns for a modern life. She sees a way out on the arm of the new pastor, who needs a tie to the community to cull favor for his plan for the old stave church, with its pagan deity effigies and supernatural bells. When the pastor makes a deal that brings an outsider, a sophisticated German architect, into their world, the village and Astrid are caught between past and future, as dark forces come into play.

Escape Path Lighting by John Newton         $25
Rock Oyster Island. It's a slack kind of place, but that's the way the locals like it: lifestyle farmers, pensioned-off bikers, seekers and healers, meth cooks and fishing guides. It's only a ferry ride to the city but the modern world feels blessedly remote. Working hard is not greatly valued. Mild Pacific sunshine pours down unfailingly. When Arthur Bardruin, fugitive poet, washes up on Marigold Ingle's beach, he dares to hope he may be safe from the gaze of the Continence Police. With Marigold and her parrot, Chuck, he finds an indulgent sanctuary. But the reach of aesthetic decorum is long. A chilly wind is blowing through Paradise. Meanwhile, at the Blue Pacific Wellness Farm, Juanita Diaz, Lacanian analyst, has problems with dissolute musician Frank Hortune, who has problems with his mother and a glad eye for Juanita's lover. Where did Chuck learn his bad-tempered Spanish? Can Juanita keep her man on the couch? Can Bardruin keep his trousers on? Will poetry be the winner on the day? John Newton's verse novel Escape Path Lighting is a throwaway epic, a romp, a curmudgeonly manifesto. Every blow rings true. 

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell         $38
Set in a plague-stricken Elizabethan England, O'Farrell's tender and incisive novel looks at the effects on William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes of the death of their son Hamnet. 
Winner of the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. 
"Dazzling. Devastating." —Kamila Shamsie
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Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan         $33
In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news — news that forces the life-long friends to confront their own mortality head-on. What follows is a moving examination of the responsibilities and obligations we have to those we love.
"This funny and plangent book is shot through with an aching awareness that though our individual existence is a 'litany of small tragedies', these tragedies are life-sized to us. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist working now who writes about both youth and middle age with such sympathy, and without condescending to either." —Guardian
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Weather by Jenny Offill         $33
Very funny on top of an underlying anxiety, Offill's new novel is absolutely on the pulse. The burdens and ironies of contemporary urban life — motherhood, sisterhood, wifehood, workerhood — are exemplified in Lizzie's endless surges of underachievement and misdirection. 
"Perhaps the most powerful portrait of Trump’s America yet." —Guardian
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Mordew by Alex Pheby         $38
God is dead, his corpse hidden in the catacombs beneath Mordew. In the slums of the sea-battered city a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud and the half-formed, short-lived creatures it spawns. Until one day his desperate mother sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew. The Master derives his magical power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength - and it is greater than the Master has ever known. Great enough to destroy everything the Master has built. One of the most fascinating books published this year. A book unlike any other. 
"Mordew is a darkly brilliant novel, extraordinary, absorbing and dream-haunting. That it succeeds as well as it does speaks to Pheby’s determination not to passively inhabit his Gormenghastly idiom but instead to lead it to its most extreme iteration, to force inventiveness and grotesqueness into every crevice of his work." —Guardian 

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld    $33
This memorable novel, short-listed for the 2020 Booker International Prize, tells of the impact of a tragic accident on the the world-view of a ten-year-old growing up in a religious family on a rural dairy farm. The book is shot through with memorable images, unsettling moments, and passages of remarkable linguistic power. 
Winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize. 
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The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel         $35
Mirage and subterfuge, reality and counterlives, transformation and invention are the players in Emily St.John Mandel’s latest novel. Set in a hotel on Vancouver Island and in New York, the book explores the fragility of both capital and esteem when crises both financial and personal are triggered by the collapse of a ponzi scheme. A devastating look at emotional turbulence in the age of late capitalism.
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The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan        $23
Anonymous people in anonymous towns; mothers screaming inside their houses, unapologetic doctors, mournful dogs, hungry girls, grandmothers on the couch tethered in a blue spell, steaks in soft sacks of blue blood, rare breeds of show cats in big black sedans, baby rabbits beneath heavy boots; and lonesome men crouched among the thorny shrubs and the rough, wild grasses... With the economy of Lydia Davis and Grace Paley, and the unsettling verve of Mary Gaitskill and Claire-Louise Bennett, The Dominant Animal is a powerful short story collection.
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Minor Detail by Adania Shibli        $35
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.
"All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice, and as an author Shibli is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good." —Fatima Bhutto, Guardian
"An extraordinary work of art, Minor Detail is continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral intelligence, political passion, and formal virtuosity." —Pankaj Mishra
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Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld         $37
What if Hilary Rodham had turned down Bill Clinton's proposal of marriage? How might things have turned out for them, for America, for the world itself, if Hillary Rodham had really turned down Bill Clinton?
"Brilliantly re-imagined and enjoyable." —Guardian


Summer by Ali Smith        $34
Smith's outstanding quartet, written 'in real time' comes to its conclusion with this eagerly anticipated volume. 
"These novels, in straddling immediacy and permanence, the personal as well as the scope of a world tilting toward disaster, are the ones we might well be looking back on years from now as the defining literature of an indefinable era. And the shape the telling takes is, if not salvation, brilliance itself." —The New York Times
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Rat King Landlord by Murdoch Stephens           $25
Colossal rats invade from the Wellington town belt. Your rent is going up but everyone is calling it a summer of love. Cryptic posters appear around town inciting people to join an evening of mayhem. Until now the rats have contented themselves with scraps. But as summer heats up and the cost of living skyrockets, we can no longer ignore that our friends are seeking their own rung on the property ladder.
>>Read Stella's review. 

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart            $38
The winner of the 2020 BOOKER PRIZE is informed by the author's own coming-of-age in Glasgow in the 1980s with an alcoholic mother, and was described by the judges as “destined to be a classic: a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values.”




Here We Are by Graham Swift          $33
A relationship triangle between a young show magician, his assistant, and their compère threatens not only their show (in Brighton, in 1959), but also those things they hold most dear. Both intimate and coolly observed, Swift's writing retains its economical power. 
"The variety of voices and its historical and emotional reach are so finely entwined, it is as perfect and smooth as an egg. Passages leap out all the time, demanding to be reread, or committed to memory. It is perhaps too simple to say that Swift creates a form of fictional magic, but what he can do with a page is out of the ordinary, far beyond most mortals’ ken. —The Herald
>>Read Stella's review. 

Real Life by Brandon Taylor          $23
Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms, a slow and painstaking process. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that's a world away from his childhood growing up in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace has not been home, and he hasn't told his friends. For reasons of self-preservation, he has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. Over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, a catastrophic mishap and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with intimacy, desire, the trauma of the past and the question of the future.

The Reed Warbler by Ian Wedde         $35
Drawing from his own family history, and the experiences of others, Wedde's new novel tells of a young woman from northern Germany who straddled two worlds and ended up in New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, and asks, how reliable are memories? and what is the nature of stories? 
"Epic, engrossing and richly patterned, The Reed Warbler explores complex migrations: the way human lives move inexorably towards their futures while at the same time doubling back on their pasts. In tracing the story of Josephina and her family, Ian Wedde invites us to consider the threads that tether us to our own histories." —Catherine Chidgey

The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams           $35
mountweazel n. a fake entry deliberately inserted into a dictionary or work of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement. 
It is the final year of the nineteenth century and Peter Winceworth has reached the letter 'S', toiling away for the much-anticipated and multi-volume Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. He is overwhelmed at his desk and increasingly uneasy that his colleagues are attempting to corral language and regiment facts. Compelled to assert some sense of individual purpose and exercise artistic freedom, Winceworth begins inserting unauthorised, fictitious entries into the dictionary. In the present day, young intern Mallory is tasked with uncovering these mountweazels as the text of the dictionary is digitised for modern readers. Through the words and their definitions she finds she has access to their creator's motivations, hopes and desires. More pressingly, she must also field daily threatening anonymous phone calls. Is a suggested change to the dictionary's definition of marriage (n.) really that controversial? What power does Mallory have when it comes to words and knowing how to tell the truth? And does the caller really intend for the Swansby's staff to 'burn in hell'? As their two narratives combine, Winceworth and Mallory must discover how to negotiate the complexities of an often nonsensical, untrustworthy, hoax-strewn and undefinable life. From the author of Attrib. (winner of the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize). 

The New York Times, aware that only fiction could help readers grasp reality in strange times, commissioned these stories. Includes Caitlin Roper, Rivka Galchen, Victor LaValle, Mona Awad, Kamila Shamsie, Colm Tóibín, Liz Moore, Tommy Orange, Leila Slimani, Margaret Atwood, Yiyun Li, Etgar Keret, Andrew O'Hagan, Rachel Kushner, Téa Obreht, Alejandro Zambra, Dinaw Mengestum Karen Russell, David Mitchell, Charles Yu, Paolo Giordano, Mia Cuoto, Uzodinma Iweala, Rivers Solomon, Laila Lalami, Julián Fuks, Dina Nayeli, Matthew Baker, Esi Edugyan, John Wray, Edwidge Danticat.
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

List #5: BIOGRAPHY, MEMOIR & ESSAYS 

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

Down South by Bruce Ansley           $50
From Curio Bay to Golden Bay, who could be a better companion on a road trip of the South Island than Bruce Ansley? 

Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish fishing village by Lamorna Ash          $35
There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child — the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land's End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn't seem like a place that would welcome strangers. Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour. Out on the water, miles from the coast, she learns how fishing requires you to confront who you are and what it is that tethers you to the land. But she also realises that this proud and compassionate community, sustained and defined by the sea for centuries, is under threat.
"Marks the birth of a new star of non-fiction." —William Dalrymple

Life, A user's manual: Philosophy for (almost) any eventuality by Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro          $40
There are no easy answers to the big questions, but at least we have the questions. 

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and me by Deirdre Bair        $33
Becket and Beauvoir lived on essentially the same street, and, apparently, despised each other. Bair wrote incisive biographies of each. How did she juggle these personalities, and the different approaches she needed to take with each of them? 


In the Time of the Manaroans by Miro Bilbrough       $40
In 1978, when Miro Bilbrough was fourteen she was sent to live with her father living by "alternative lifestyle" back-to-the-land principles (and poverty) near Canvastown. Their house is a stopping point for the Manaroans travelling to and from their remote Marlborough commune. 
"A lost world of hippies and drifters breaks into gleaming life. Miro Bilbrough trains a poet's tender, unsparing gaze on growing up female in the anything-goes 1970s. In the Time of the Manaroans lucidly portrays the visions and limits of the counter-culture, as well as all the fearful ecstasy of being young." —Michelle de Kretser

Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski       $39
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books—selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude—have been described as "virtuoso performances," and "small masterpieces." From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated—and mordantly funny.
"She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be." —New Yorker

Not a Novel: A memoir in pieces by Jenny Erpenbeck         $36
Following astonishing, insightful, and pellucidly written novels, including Visitation and Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck turns her pen on herself and reveals aspects of her life, her literary and musical influences and preoccupations, and thoughts on society. Her essays are as astonishing, insightful and pellucidly written as her fiction. 
"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating. Ferocious as well as virtuosic." —Deborah Eisenberg
"Her restrained, unvarished prose is overwhelming." —Nicole Krauss
"Erpenbeck's writing writing is a lure that leads us — off-centre as into a vortex — into the most haunted and haunting territory." —Anne Michaels

Signs of Life: To the ends of the earth with a doctor by Stephen Fabes        $45
When Stephen Fabes left his job as a junior doctor and set out to cycle around the world, frontline medicine quickly faded from his mind. Of more pressing concern were the daily challenges of life as an unfit rider on an overloaded bike, helplessly in thrall to pastries. But leaving medicine behind is not as easy as it seems. As he roves continents, he finds people whose health has suffered through exile, stigma or circumstance, and others, whose lives have been saved through kindness and community. After encountering a frozen body of a monk in the Himalayas, he is drawn ever more to healthcare at the margins of the world, to crumbling sanitoriums and refugee camps, to city dumps and war-torn hospital wards.

Hundred: What you learn in a lifetime by  Heike Faller and Valerio Vidali        $48
How does our perception of the world change in the course of a lifetime? When Heike Faller's niece was born she began to wonder what we learn in life, and how we can talk about what we have learnt with those we love. And so she began to ask everyone she met, what did you learn in life? Out of the answers of children's writers and refugees, teenagers and artists, mothers and friends, came 99 'lessons' — each here delightfully illustrated by Valerio Vidali. 


Know Your Place by Golriz Ghahraman        $40
When she was nine, Golriz Ghahraman and her parents were forced to flee their home in Iran. After a terrifying and uncertain journey, they landed in Auckland where they were able to seek asylum and create a new life. Ghahraman talks about making a home in Aotearoa New Zealand, her work as a human rights lawyer, her United Nations missions, and how she became the first refugee to be elected to the New Zealand Parliament.

Feline Philosophy: Cats and the meaning of life by John Gray           $45

The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats—the animal that has most captured our imagination—than from the great thinkers of the world.

Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg           $48
A beautifully drawn and thoughtful graphic novel about the imaginary world invented by the four Brontë siblings when they were children — and what happened to that world when its creators grew up and abandoned it. From the author of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and The One Hundred Nights of Hero. 


Specimen by Madison Hamill         $30
Shape-shifting personal essays probing the ways in which a person’s inner and outer worlds intersect and submit to one another. Discomfiting, vivid and funny. 
"I never felt that I was looking at fine writing — only at astonishing writing." —Elizabeth Knox

The Shapeless Unease: A year of not sleeping by Samantha Harvey           $35
Those who cannot sleep are the only ones who do not take sleep for granted. For the insomniac, every detail of their lives is seen in relation to their insomnia. Harvey's insomnia came upon her without warning. This is the poetic and insightful account of how she spent a year under its dominance. 

The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere, A biographical portrait by Vincent O'Sullivan           $45
Hotere invited O'Sullivan to write his life in 2005, and this nuanced and insightful portrait of one of Aotearoa's most important and interesting artists is the long-awaited and supremely fulfilling result. 

This Pākehā Life: An unsettled memoir by Alison Jones         $40
"This book is about my making sense here, of my becoming and being Pākehā. Every Pākehā becomes a Pākehā in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Māori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pākehā — and other New Zealanders — curious about their sense of identity and about the ambivalences we Pākehā often experience in our relationships with Māori."

Lockdown: Tales from Aotearoa          $35
19 superb graphic novelists and comic artists provide their takes on the New Zealand lockdown and the ways our lives have been changed by the unforeseen events of 2020. Alex Cara, Hana Chatani, Li Chen, Miriama Grace-Smith, Sloane Hong, Ruby Jones, Sarah Laing, Sarah Lund, Toby Morris, Sharon Murdoch, Ross Murray, Ant Sang, Coco Solid, Anthony Stocking (Deadface Comics), Mat Tait, Jessica Thompson Carr (Māori Mermaid), Zak Waipara, Tokerau Wilson, and Jem Yoshioka!

Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel         $45
Thirty years of incisive essays from the London Review of Books, including 'Royal Bodies', 'In Bed with Madonna', and ruminations on Jane Boleyn, Robespierre, the murder of James Bulger, Britain's last witch, the Hair Shirt Sisterhood, and numerous other historical, political and social matters. Compelling. 
>>VOLUME feature. 


A Promised Land by Barack Obama         $70
The first volume of Obama's presidential memoirs. Thoughtful and revealing. 

Motherwell: A girlhood by Deborah Orr          $60
An insightful, devastating and well-written account of growing up in a housing estate on the west coast of Scotland. 
"A non-fiction book for the ages. Motherwell is a searching, truthful, shocking (and timely) observance of the blight that monetarist policies can bring about in a community of workers, indeed on a whole culture of fairness and improvement, while also showing — in sentences as clean as bone — the tireless misunderstandings that can starve a family of love." —Andrew O'Hagan, Guardian

Sweet Time by Weng Pixin              $48
A charming, intimate graphic rumination on love, empathy, and confidence. Singaporean cartoonist Weng Pixin delicately explores strained relationships with a kind of hopefulness while acknowledging their inevitable collapse. 
>>Look inside!


Figuring by Maria Popova          $33
“How, in this blink of existence book-ended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?” From the creator of the hugely popular Brainpickings blog.
"A highly original survey of life, love and creativity; an intellectual odyssey that challenges easy categorisation. It interweaves the 'invisible connections' between pioneering scientists, artists and writers to create a tapestry of ideas and biographies. Her approach subverts the idea that lives 'unfold in sensical narratives'. Popova’s unique act of 'figuring' in this book is to create resonances and synchronicities between the lives of visionary figures." —Guardian

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power           $37
A relentless advocate for promoting human rights, Power has been heralded by President Barack Obama as one of America's "foremost thinkers on foreign policy." The Education of an Idealist traces Power's extraordinary journey, from Irish immigrant to human rights activist to war-zone correspondent to United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter        $32
In 1934, the Austrian painter Christiane Ritter travelled to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen to spend a year with her husband, an explorer and researcher. They lived in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies, but as time passes, and after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life. A rediscovered classic. 

The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager       $37
After spending her career peering into the stars in search of Earth-like planets, Seager found her connections with an Earth-like planet much closer to home following the death of her husband and the realisation that her Asperger's affects how she relates to every part of the universe. 

Intimations: Six essays by Zadie Smith           $16
A series of perceptive essays on the experiences and lessons of lock-down.  "There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those. What I've tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are, above all, personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity. Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table - I was in need of practical assistance. I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book, but I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard."

Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit          $40
How does a young writer find her voice in a society that would prefer women to be silent? Solnit's memoir is an electric account of the pauses and gains of feminism in the past forty years.
"There's a new feminist revolution — open to people of all genders — and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful voices." —Barbara Ehrenreich
>>Read Stella's review. 


You Have a Lot to Lose: A memoir, 1956—1986 by C.K. Stead        $50
In this second volume of his memoirs, Stead takes us from the moment he left New Zealand for a job in rural Australia, through study abroad, writing and a university career, until he left the University of Auckland to write full time aged fifty-three. It is a tumultuous tale of literary friends and foes (Curnow and Baxter, A. S. Byatt and Barry Humphries and many more) and of navigating a personal and political life through the social change of the 1960s and 70s.
>>"I'm an alien, a book man." 
>>'Janet Frame and Me" (extracted from the book)

Māori Philosophy: Indigenous thinking from Aotearoa by Georgina Tuari Stewart          $30
Addresses core philosophical issues including Maori notions of the self, the world, epistemology, the form in which Maori philosophy is conveyed, and whether or not Maori philosophy has a teleological agenda.

The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering nature in the modern world by Sue Stuart-Smith             $55
The garden has always been a place of peace and perseverance, of nurture and reward. A garden can provide a family's food, a child's playground, an adult's peaceful retreat. But around the world and throughout history, gardens have often meant something more profound. For Sue Stuart-Smith's grandfather, returning from the First World War weighing six stone, a year-long horticulture course became a life raft for recovering from the trauma. For prisoners in today's justice system, gardening can be a mental escape from captivity which offers, in a context when opportunity is scarce, the chance to take ownership of a project and build something positive up from seed. In The Well Gardened Mind, Stuart-Smith investigates the huge power of the garden and its little-acknowledged effects on health and wellbeing.

Square Haunting: Five women, freedom, and London between the wars by Francesca Wade       $45
Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently. 
"Outstanding. I'll be recommending this all year." —Sarah Bakewell
"A beautiful and deeply moving book." —Sally Rooney

At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies' Pond by  
Ava Wong Davies, Margaret Drabble, Esther Freud, Nell Frizzell, Eli Goldstone, Amy Key, Jessica J. Lee, Sophie Mackintosh, So Mayer, Deborah Moggach, Nina Mingya Powles, Leanne Shapton, Lou Stoppard and Sharlene Teo       $25
Esther Freud describes the life-affirming sensation of swimming through the seasons; Lou Stoppard pays tribute to the winter swimmers who break the ice; Margaret Drabble reflects on the golden Hampstead days of her youth; Sharlene Teo visits for the first time; and Nell Frizzell shares the view from her yellow lifeguard’s canoe.

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn         $40
In The Salt Path, Raynor and Moth went out to find the sea, the windswept and wild coastline, to find a way through homelessness, to find themselves again. Now, in The Wild Silence, they come back to what should be home, but four walls no longer feel that way. For Raynor, recovering self-esteem and trust in herself, and in others, is harder than she expected. She continues to face Moth's debilitating illness and struggles to find a way to adjust to a life in one place, unmoving. Then an incredible gesture by someone who read their story changes everything. 
"In this unflinching sequel to The Salt Path, nature provides solace against forebodings of mortality." —Guardian
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

List #3: SCIENCE & NATURE 

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

"There is the mammal way and there is the bird way." This is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviours they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive.


Long before Darwin, our ancestors were obsessed with the visual similarities and differences between the animals. Early scientists could sense there was an order that unified all life and formulated a variety of schemes to help illustrate this. This human quest to classify living beings has left us with a rich artistic legacy, from the folklore and religiosity of the ancient and Medieval world through the naturalistic cataloging of the Enlightenment to the modern, computer-generated classificatory labyrinth.

The Origins of You: How childhood shapes later life by Jay Belsky, Terrie E. Moffitt, Richie Poulton and Avshalom Caspi         $95
Based on the findings of the world-leading Dunedin Study, which tracked thousands of people from birth to middle age, this book helps us to thnk about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, about genes and parenting, and about vulnerability, resilience, and success. The evidence shows that human development is not subject to ironclad laws but instead is a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction a life will take. A child's early years do predict who they will become later in life, but they do so imperfectly. For example, genes and troubled families both play a role in violent male behavior, and, though health and heredity sometimes go hand in hand, childhood adversity and severe bullying in adolescence can affect even physical well-being in midlife.

Wayfinding: The art and science of how we find and lose our way by Michael Bond         $38
How do our brains make cognitive maps that keep us orientated, even in places we don't know? How does our understanding of and relationship to place help us to understand our world and our relationship to it? How does physical space affect the way we think?

A Short History of the World According to Sheep by Sally Coulthard        $38
An addictively free-ranging survey of the massive impact that the domesticated ungulates of the genus Ovis have had on human history. From the plains of ancient Mesopotamia to the rolling hills of medieval England to the vast sheep farms of modern-day Australia, sheep have been central to the human story. Starting with our Neolithic ancestors' first forays into sheep-rearing nearly 10,000 years ago, these remarkable animals have fed us, clothed us, changed our diet and languages, helped us to win wars, decorated our homes, and financed the conquest of large swathes of the earth. Enormous fortunes and new, society-changing industries have been made from the fleeces of sheep, and cities shaped by shepherds' markets and meat trading. 
"This book deserves a place in your bookcase next to Harari's Sapiens. It's every bit as fascinating and is surely destined to be just as successful." —Julian Norton

Living with the Climate Crisis: Voices from Aotearoa edited by Tom Doig        $15
The devastating summer of Australian bush fires underlined the terrifying sense of a world pushed to the brink. Then came Covid-19, and with it another dramatic shift. Fears have been raised that the all-consuming effort to control the pandemic will distract us from the long-term challenge of limiting catastrophic climate change. At the same time, many people are hoping for a post-pandemic ‘new normal’: a cleaner, greener, fairer and safer world. This book brings together researchers, commentators, activists and writers to bear witness to the current crisis. 

Livewired: The inside story of the ever-changing brain by David Eagleman          $37
How can a blind person learn to see with her tongue or a deaf person learn to hear with his skin? What does a baby born without a nose tell us about our sensory machinery? Might we someday control a robot with our thoughts? And what does any of this have to do with why we dream? The answers to these questions are not right in front of our eyes; they're right behind our eyes. This book is not simply about what the brain is, but what it does. Covering decades of research to the present day, Livewired also presents new findings from Eagleman's own research, including new discoveries in synaesthesia, dreaming and wearable neurotech devices that revolutionise how we think about the senses.

Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith         $38
From the human being to the octopus, the shark to the humble sea squirt, all animals are physical beings made up entirely of cells. And yet they can think, to varying degrees. How did this come to be? How did a mind first grow from the matter that is the body? And at what stage did that clump of cells become a 'self'? From the author of Other Minds. 

Hoffman argues that how we see the world is determined by our species's imperative t survive, and that this means not only that our world view may be very different from beings with different survival imperatives, but also may contain a large number of useful errors, or once-useful errors, that may no longer be so useful at all. What we see is determined more by our minds than by actuality: evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Interesting. 

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty        $37
From spring and through a year in his home patch in Northern Ireland, 15-year-old Dara spent the seasons writing. These vivid, evocative and moving diary entries of his intense connection to the natural world, and his perspective as a teenager juggling exams and friendships alongside a life of campaigning. "In writing this book," Dara explains, "I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child's eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere."

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald           $38
Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the acclaimed author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee's flight to the UK, and from accounts of swan upping on the Thames to watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary to seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, what we do when we watch wildlife and why.
On Time and Water by Andri Snaer Magnason            $40
Icelandic author and activist Andri Snaer Magnason's 'Letter to the Future', an extraordinary and moving eulogy for the lost Okjokull glacier, made global news and was shared by millions. Now he attempts to come to terms with the issues we all face in his new book On Time and Water. Magnason writes of the melting glaciers, the rising seas and acidity changes that haven't been seen for 50 million years. These are changes that will affect all life on earth. 
"The love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll." —Rebecca Solnit
"A cerebral tale, well told and unabashedly philosophical. It is dark, funny and grim." —The New York Times 
Music is filled with mathematical elements. The works of Bach are often said to possess a math-like logic, and Arnold Schoenberg, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote music explicitly based on mathematical principles. Yet Eli Maor argues that it is music that has had the greater influence on mathematics, not the other way around.

For most of human history, celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are—our religious beliefs, power structures, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us—and that disconnection comes at a cost. Marchant guides us through history and around the globe and reveals the richness of humanity's relationship with the heavens. 

In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John M. Marzluff      $55
From the cave walls at Lascaux to the last painting by Van Gogh, from the works of Shakespeare to those of Mark Twain, there is clear evidence that crows and ravens influence human culture. Yet this influence is not unidirectional, say the authors of this fascinating book: people profoundly influence crow culture, ecology, and evolution as well.

The Weil Conjectures: On maths and the pursuit of the unknown by Karen Olsson        $40
When Olsson came across the letters between the mathematician André Weil and his sister, the philosopher Simone Weil, she was struck by the way in which, between them, they grappled with the differences (and similarities) between abstract thought and practical approaches to life. What is the relationship between analytical and creative thought? 



99 Variations on a Proof by Philip Ording          $55
An exploration of mathematical style through 99 different proofs of the same theorem. This book offers a multifaceted perspective on mathematics by demonstrating 99 different proofs of the same theorem. Each chapter solves an otherwise unremarkable equation in distinct historical, formal, and imaginative styles that range from Medieval, Topological, and Doggerel to Chromatic, Electrostatic, and Psychedelic. With a rare blend of humor and scholarly aplomb, Philip Ording weaves these variations into an accessible and wide-ranging narrative on the nature and practice of mathematics. A wonderful book, the mathematical equivalent of Raymond Queneau's Elements of Style. 

Explaining Humans: What science can tell us about life, love, and relationships by Camilla Pang         $38
Through a set of scientific principles, this book examines life's everyday interactions including: Decisions and the route we take to make them; Conflict and how we can avoid it; Relationships and how we establish them; Etiquette and how we conform to it. Looking at human behaviour from her place on the autism spectrum has enabled Pang to present an  original and incisive exploration of human nature and the strangeness of social norms, written from the outside looking in.
Winner of the 2020 Royal Society Science Book Prize. 
Hope in Hell: A decade to confront the climate emergency by Jonathon Porritt        $33
"Brave and unflinching in setting out the reality of the hell towards which we're headed, but even more urgent, passionate and compelling about the grounds for hope if we change course fast enough, Hope in Hell is a powerful call to arms from one of Britain's most eloquent and trusted campaigners." —Caroline Lucas

How the Brain Lost its Mind: Sex, hysteria and the riddle of mental illness by Allan Ropper and B.D. Burrell         $33
In 1882, Jean-Martin Charcot was the premiere physician in Paris, having just established a neurology clinic at the infamous Salpetriere Hospital, a place that was called a 'grand asylum of human misery'. Assessing the dismal conditions, he quickly set up to upgrade the facilities, and in doing so, revolutionised the treatment of mental illness. Many of Carcot's patients had neurosyphilis (the advanced form of syphilis), a disease of mad poets, novelists, painters, and musicians, and a driving force behind the overflow of patients in Europe's asylums. The trend of neurology at the time, though, led towards hypnosis and the treatment of the mind and away from medicine and the treatment of the brain. Does the relationship between psychology and neurology mirror that between the mind and the body? 

When wildlife researcher Jonathan Slaght was a young Peace Corps volunteer in the Russian Far East, he caught a brief glimpse of a Blakiston's fish owl. It was the furthest south the species had been documented in over a hundred years, and a chance encounter that would change his life. In Owls of the Eastern Ice, Slaght tells the story of his decades-long quest to safeguard the world's largest owl from extinction in Primorye, a remote Russian province dominated by Ussuri taiga forest, the only place in the world where brown bears, tigers and leopards co-exist.
Nature, Stilled by Jane Ussher            $70
Astounding images of the natural history collections at Te Papa, from the award-winning photographer. Lavish and giftable. 




The Road to Conscious Machines: The story of A.I. by Michael Woolridge            $40
The ultimate dream of artificial intelligence is to build machines that are like us: conscious and self-aware. While this remains a remote possibility, rapid progress on AI in this century is already profoundly changing our world. Yet the public debate and media hype is still largely centred on unlikely prospects from sentient machines to dystopian robot takeovers.These anxieties distract us from the more immediate risks that this transformative technology poses — from algorithmic bias to fake news. 

The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men by Paolo Zellini         $40
Is mathematics a discovery or an invention? Have we invented numbers or do they truly exist? What sort of reality should we attribute to them? Mathematics has always been a way of understanding and ordering the world: from sacred ancient texts and pre-Socratic philosophers to twentieth-century logicians such as Russell and Frege and beyond.
VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

List #4:  FOOD & DRINK

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

Parwana: Recipes and stories from an Afghan kitchen by Durkhanai Ayubi       $45
These fragrant and flavourful recipes have been in the family for generations and include rice dishes, dumplings, curries, meats, Afghan pastas, chutneys and pickles, soups and breads, drinks and desserts. Some are everyday meals, some are celebratory special dishes. Each has a story to tell.  




Wild Kitchen: Nature-loving chefs at home by Claire Bingham         $55
This glimpse into the home kitchens and dining areas of twenty of the world's top chefs, food bloggers, and restauranteurs reveals inspiring ways that the food-obsessed are embracing the "wild" at home in their everyday cooking and dining. From a chef who experiments with herbs in a city apartment to a blogger who forages with her family in a local forest, each personality's featured kitchen story offers a behind-the-scenes view of their unique cooking philosophy along with their insider tips for creating a unique kitchen space. 

A Year of Simple Family Food by Julia Busuttil Nishimura        $40
At last, the new book from the author of Ostro (one of our favourite cookbooks)! This book, too, is beautifully presented and contains approachable recipes for  recipes for delicious food. 

The Art and Science of Food Pairing by Peter Coucquyt        $70
Foodpairing is a method for identifying which foods go well together, based on groundbreaking scientific research that combines neurogastronomy (how the brain perceives flavour) with the analysis of aroma profiles derived from the chemical components of food. This groundbreaking new book explains why the food combinations we know and love work so well together (strawberries + chocolate, for example) and opens up a whole new world of delicious pairings (strawberries + parmesan, say) that will transform the way we eat.

Mirka & Georges: A culinary affair by Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan      $48
Arriving in Melbourne in 1951 from Paris, Mirka and Georges Mora energised local society and transformed the culinary and artistic landscapes. Their apartment became a hub for the bohemian set, and their cafes and restaurants brimmed with sophisticated food, sexual intrigue and creative endeavours. Mirka's distinctive art, now collected by major galleries, was a vital part of this heady mix. Their eateries were magnets to the rich and famous, a who's who of the art world and those looking for a seriously good time. This beautifully presented book is filled with art, photographs and delicious French recipes. 

Eating for Pleasure, People and Planet by Tom Hunt        $50
"This book is like a hybrid of Michael Pollan and Anna Jones. It combines serious food politics with flavour-packed modern recipes. This is a call-to-arms for a different way of eating which seeks to lead us there not through lectures but through a love of food, in all its vibrancy and variety.'" —Bee Wilson

Seasonal, authentic and completely delicious, the relaxed—but—particular style of dining expresses all that is best in Scandinavian life. This lovely book includes both traditional and modern dishes. Recommended. 


The Sqirl Jam by Jessica Koslow         $55
Sqirl all began with jam—organic, local, made from unusual combinations of fruits, fragrant, and not overly sweet—the kind of jam you eat with a spoon. The Sqirl Jam book collects Jessica Koslow's signature recipes into a cookbook that looks and feels like no other preserving book out there, inspiring makers to try their own hands at preserving and creating.

Wine from Another Galaxy by Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew ("Noble Rot")           $55
A demystifying yet magical journey through European wine culture, avoiding cliches and rules but leaving you talking like an expert. 

Aegean: Recipes from the mountains to the sea by Marianna Leivaditaki         $50
Growing up in a taverna in Chania, the relaxed, delicious and achievable food of Crete  and the wider Mediterranean is second nature to Leivaditaki. Very well presented. 
Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower: How to cook with vegetables and other plants by Gill Mellor        $55
A celebration of seasonal vegetables and fruit, packed with 120 simple and surprisingly quick vegetarian recipes. With roots, we think of the crunch of carrots, celeriac, beetroot. From springtime stems like our beloved asparagus and rhubarb, through leaves of every hue (kale, radicchio, chard), when the blossoms become the fruits of autumn - apples, pears, plums - the food year is marked by growth, ripening and harvest. Beautifully presented, with photographs by Andrew Montgomery. 


FLAVOUR by Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage          $60
Flavour-forward, vegetable-based recipes are at the heart of Yotam Ottolenghi's food. In this stunning new cookbook Ottolenghi and co-writer Ixta Belfrage break down the three factors that create flavour and offer innovative vegetable dishes that deliver brand-new ingredient combinations to excite and inspire. FLAVOUR combines simple recipes for weeknights, low effort-high impact dishes, and standout meals for the relaxed cook. The book is presented in three parts, which reveal how to tap into the potential of ordinary vegetables to create extraordinary food: Process explains cooking methods that elevate vegetables to great heights; Pairing identifies four basic pairings that are fundamental to great flavour; Produce offers impactful vegetables that do the work for you. With 100 wonderful and beautifully photographed recipes, such as Aubergine Dumplings alla Parmigiana, Hasselback Beetroot with Lime Leaf Butter, Miso Butter Onions, Spicy Mushroom Lasagne and Romano Pepper Schnitzel, this book will immediately become one of the most frequently used on your kitchen bookshelf. 

Sun and Rain by Ana Roš       $95
A personal chef monograph, and the first book, from globally-acclaimed chef Ana Roš of Hisa Franko in Slovenia. Set near the Italian border in Slovenia's remote Soča valley, in the foothills of mountains and beside a turquoise river full of trout, Ana Roš tells the story of her life. Through essays, recollections, recipes, and photos, she shares the landscape that inspires her, the abundant seasonal ingredients from local foragers, the tales of fishing and exploring, and the evolution of her recipes. 

Japanese Home Cooking: Simple meals, authentic flavours by Sonoko Sakai        $75
Using seasonal ingredients in simple preparations, Sonoko Sakai offers recipes with a gentle voice and a passion for authentic Japanese cooking. Very nicely presented. 

The Restaurant: A history of eating out by William Sitwell       $60
Sitwell is good, witty company at tables from Pompeii to the present, tracing influences from an ancient traveller of the Muslim world, revelling in the unintended consequences for nascent fine dining of the French Revolution, revealing in full hideous glory the post-Second World War dining scene in the UK and fathoming the birth of sensitive gastronomy in the US counterculture of the 1960s.
Egg & Spoon by Alexandra Tylee & Gisella Clarkson         $40
Egg and Spoon is a beautiful illustrated cookbook for children—and adults—that celebrates imagination, confidence and the fun of cooking. A scrumptious collection for anyone who loves good healthy food— and an occasional indulgence. Here are after-school snacks, breakfast on a stick, cakes, slices and dinners. Egg and Spoon is for children learning to cook independently and families to enjoy cooking together. Much of the food is naturally gluten-free or vegan.



Falastin: A cookbook by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley         $60
Sami Tamimi wrote the wonderful Jerusalem with Yotam Ottolenghi (who contributes a foreword to this book), and here returns to present the recipes, cuisine and stories of the Palestinians of Bethlehem, East Jerusalem, Nablus, Haifa, Akka, Nazareth, Galilee and the West Bank. 

VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

List #9: CULTURE 

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.


Billy Apple: Life/work by Christina Barton         $75
The long-awaited monograph on this New Zealand artist of long relevance who burst onto the world stage in the 1960s alongside David Hockney. Well illustrated. 

>>Se also Anthony Byrt's The Mirror Steamed Over. 

Arboretum by David Byrne          $45
In a wonderful series of eccentric annotated drawings — each in the form of a tree! — Byrne presents his thoughts about just about every human foible, habit and concept with the same gusto, irony and individual flair that he brings to both his music and his writing. 


The Mirror Steamed Over: Love and pop in London, 1962 by Anthony Byrt         $45
In the early sixties at the Royal College of Art in London, three extraordinary personalities collided to reshape contemporary art and literature. Barrie Bates (who would become Billy Apple in November 1962) was an ambitious young graphic designer from New Zealand, who transformed himself into one of pop art's pioneers. At the same time, his friend and fellow student David Hockney - young, Northern and openly gay - was making his own waves in the London art world. Bates and Hockney travelled together, bleached their hair together, and, despite being two of London's rising art stars, almost failed art school together. And in the middle of it all was the secretary of the Royal College's Painting School - a young novelist called Ann Quin. Quin ghost-wrote her lover Bates's dissertation and collaborated with him on a manifesto, all the while writing Berg, the experimental novel that would establish her as one of the British literary scene's most exciting new voices. Taking us back to London's art scene in the late fifties and early sixties, Byrt illuminates a key moment in cultural history and tackles big questions: Where did Pop and conceptual art come from? How did these three young outsiders change British culture? And what was the relationship between revolutions in personal and sexual identities and these major shifts in contemporary art?

On Photographs by David Campany        $75
Is it possible to describe a photograph without interpreting it? Can a viewer ever be as dispassionate as the mechanism of a camera? And how far can a photographer's intentions determine responses to their image, decades after it was made? These are just a few questions that David Campany addresses in On Photographs. Campany explores the tensions inherent to the photographic medium — between art and document, chance and intention, permanence and malleability of meaning — as well as the significance of authorship, performance, time and reproduction. Rejecting the conventions of chronology and the heightened status afforded to 'classics' in traditional accounts of the history of the medium, Campany's selection of photographs is a personal one — mixing fine art prints, film stills, documentary photographs, fashion editorials and advertisements. 

Stranger than Kindness by Nick Cave          $70
A journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller and cultural icon Nick Cave. This highly collectible book contains images selected by Cave from 'Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition', presented by the Royal Danish Library in partnership with Arts Centre Melbourne. Featuring full-colour reproductions of original artwork, handwritten lyrics, photographs and collected personal artefacts, it presents Cave's life, work and inspiration and explores his many real and imagined universes, with texts from Cave and Darcey Steinke on themes that are central to Cave's work.

Index Cards by Moyra Davey           $34
In these essays, the artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter—with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book—and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others—in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.
"Her work is steeped in literature and theory without being deformed by contemporary iterations of such. I have a deep admiration of her as an artist, thinker, writer, and person." —Maggie Nelson, Artforum

Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon          $38
Dillon has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, his roaming love letter to literature. In this new book Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to Janet Malcolm, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—the book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. Whether the sentence in question is a rigorous expression of a state of vulnerability, extremity, even madness, or a carefully calibrated arrangement, Dillon examines not only how it works and why but also, in the course of the book, what the sentence once was, what it is today, and what it might become tomorrow.
"Taking as his starting point a sentence that has intrigued him for years or, in some cases, come into his ken more recently, Brian Dillon in Suppose a Sentence ranges through the centuries exploring the associations of what he observes and discovers about his object of study and its writer, through biographical anecdote, linguistic speculation, and a look at related writings. This rich and various collection resembles a beguiling, inspiriting conversation with a personable and wry intelligence who keeps you happily up late, incites you to note some follow-up reading, and opens your eyes further to the multifarious syntactical and emotional capacities of even a few joined words of English." — Lydia Davis
>>Read Thomas's review. 

Architek by Dominique Ehrhard         $55
An introduction to architectural creation, the 95 precut cardboard elements in this book can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to build all sorts of fantastical structures. Follow the full-color idea diagrams to create more than 20 unique projects, then disassemble them and try something different. Developing direction-following skills and 3-D creativity, this kit allows young architects to both learn traditional design rules and break them.



Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists by Leonard Bell         $75
Friedlander's incisive photographs chronicled the country's social and cultural life from the 1960s into the twenty-first century. From painters to potters, film makers to novelists, actors to musicians, Marti Friedlander was always deeply engaged with New Zealand's creative talent. This thoughtfully assembled book shows us new sides of both well-known and forgotten artists and writers. 


Shaping the World: Sculpture from prehistory to now by Anthony Gormley and Martin Gayford              $90
How has sculpture been central to the evolution of our thinking and feeling?  

Looking, Writing, Reading, Looking: Writers on art from the Lousiana Collection edited by Georgi Gospodinov       $60
26 poets, writers and essayists, including Anne Carson, Chris Kraus, Chigozie Obioma, Yoko Tawada, Jacques Roubaud, Richard Ford, Roxane Gay, Tóibín, Eileen Myles, Gunnhild Øyehaug, Anne Waldman and Claudia Rankine engage in dialogue with artworks from the collection of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art by artists as different as Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Alicja Kwade, Andy Warhol, Julie Mehretu, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Yayoi Kusama and Francesca Woodman. 

Eileen Gray: Her life and work by Peter Adam      $65
One of the most important designers and architects of the 20th century, Eileen Gray (1878-1976) wielded enormous influence — though often unacknowledged, especially in her lifetime — in a field largely dominated by men. Today, her iconic designs, including the luxurious Bibendum chair and the refined yet functional E.1027 table, are renowned throughout the world. Resolutely independent and frequently underappreciated, Gray evolved from a creator of opulent lacquer furniture into a pioneer of the modernist principle of form following function. Definitive. 

High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod         $45
A fascinating and beautifully presented collaboration between writer Lloyd Jones and artist Euan Macleod, exploring the tensions, exhilarations and dangers of the metaphorical tightrope walked by all who step out above the void in the search of new experience. Macleod's figures struggle against consuming backgrounds, or to emerge from the scribbles that are their genesis, and Jones's words slice and hum with the clarity of taut wires. An excellent piece of publishing. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 

Te Reo Māori: The basics explained by David Kārena-Holmes        $35
The use of te reo Māori in daily New Zealand life is snowballing, as is demand for resources to make learning the language efficient and enjoyable. This book helps answer that demand. Here in simple terms is a thorough guide to the building blocks of grammar in te reo, showing how to create phrases, sentences and paragraphs. The book employs real-life examples to illustrate how Māori grammar works day to day, and draws on David Kārena-Holmes's decades of experience teaching and writing about Māori language. 

Funny Weather: Art in an emergency by Olivia Laing             $50
We’re often told art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can: it changes how we see the world, makes plain inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living. This wide-ranging collection of essays on the arts and letters in both their 'high' and 'popular' forms is an urgent response to these times of funny political weather. 
"I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love; they're the essence of great 21st century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, willful and wonderfully unbound." —Philip Hoare
"Laing is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature." —Irish Times

Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land? (Volume 2: 1960—1987) by Peter Simpson       $80
Remarkable both for its breadth and its depth of insight, Peter Simpson's work on New Zealand's most important artist is completed in this second volume. Through landscapes, biblical paintings and abstraction, the introduction of words and Maori motifs, McCahon's work came to define a distinctly New Zealand Modernist idiom. Collected and exhibited extensively in Australasia and Europe, McCahon's work has not been assessed as a whole for thirty-five years.
"New Zealand's foremost artist Colin McCahon is many things to many people: modernist, visionary, environmentalist, shaman, preacher, rustic provincialist, bicultural trailblazer, painter-poet, graffiti artist, teacher, maverick. Peter Simpson's account interrogates as well as accommodates all of these possibilities. Guiding us year by year through the artist's career, he offers a ground-breaking overview of the life's work of a tenacious, brilliant and endlessly fascinating figure." —Gregory O'Brien
>>Volume 1: There is Only One Direction, 1919—1959     $75

Observations of a Rural Nurse by Sara McIntyre        $55
Sara McIntyre, the daughter of the artist Peter McIntyre, was nine years old when her family first came to Kākahi, in the King Country, in 1960. The family has been linked to Kākahi ever since. On the family car trips of her childhood, McIntyre got used to her fathers frequent stops for subject matter for painting. Fifty years on, when she moved to Kākahi to work as a district nurse, she began to do the same on her rounds, as a photographer. This book brings together her remarkable photographic exploration her observations of Kākahi and the sparsely populated surrounding King Country towns of Manunui, Ohura, Ongarue, Piriaka, Owhango and Taumarunui.

The Eighth: Mahler and the world in 1910 by Stephen Johnson       $40
The world premiere of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony in Munich in 1910 was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his adult life, filling Munich's huge Neue Musik-Festhalle on two successive evenings, to tumultuous applause. Stephen Johnson recounts its far-reaching effect on composers, conductors and writers of the time — Berg and Schoenberg, Korngold, Bruno Walter and Klemperer, and the writers Zweig and Mann

Karl Maughan edited by Hannah Valentine and Gabriella Stead        $80
For more than three decades, Karl Maughan has painted intricately painted gardenscapes, presenting idyllic yet unsettling enclosed spaces characterised by their claustrophobic and visually heightened atmosphere. 

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima       $45
the writer and the photographer visit a series of locations in New Zealand in an attempt to capture something of the experiences there of Iris Wilkinson/Robin Hyde— brilliant, desperate, and still refreshingly unassimilable to the literary canon. This is a thoughtful, moving, and beautifully produced book, full of sharp observations about the New Zealand literary community and wider society that made life difficult for this unconventional woman. 
>>VOLUME feature. 

Home Stories: 100 years, 20 visionary interiors by Jasper Morrison, Mateo Kries and Jochen Eisenbrand       $155
Our homes are an expression of how we want to live; they shape our everyday routines and fundamentally affect our well-being. Interior design for the home sustains a giant global industry and feeds an entire branch of the media. However, the question of dwelling, or how to live, is found increasingly to be lacking in serious discourse. This book sets out to review the interior design of our homes. It discusses 20 iconic residential interiors from the present back to the 1920s, by architects, artists and designers such as Assemble, Cecil Beaton, Lina Bo Bardi, Arno Brandlhuber, Elsie de Wolfe, Elii, Josef Frank, Andrew Geller, IKEA, Finn Juhl, Michael Graves, Kisho Kurokawa, Adolf Loos, Claude Parent, Bernard Rudofsky, Margarete Sch tte-Lihotzky, Alison and Peter Smithson, Jacques Tati, Mies van der Rohe and Andy Warhol. Including historic and recent photographs, drawings and plans, the book explores these case studies as key moments in the history of the modern interior. 

Māori Made Fun: 200+ puzzles and games to boost your reo by Scotty Morrison and Stacey Morrison          $25
The fun includes crosswords, word-finds, rhyming riddles, visual puzzles, colouring-in activities, word matches, and code crackers. 

A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti (translated by Fionn Petch)      $36
In his final version of the Variations, Glenn Gould introduces a subtle, almost imperceptible change, breaking with the nocturnal circularity. As if he didn’t want the Count to sleep after all, condemning Goldberg to inhabit that wakeful night forever. The change occurs in the last beat of the final aria: an ornament that concludes the recording. Gould’s great contribution lies not in what he modifies, but in the very gesture of modification.

Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Luis Sagasti takes on the role of Scheherazade to recount us story after story, interwoven in subtle and surprising ways to create unexpected harmonies. He leads us on a journey from the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands. A Musical Offering traverses the same shifting sands of fiction and history as the tales of Jorge Luis Borges, while also recalling the ‘constellation’ structure of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. 

Do You Read Me? Bookshops around the world by Marianne Julia Strauss     $120
Delectable.  


Lo-TEK: Design by radical indigenism by Julia Watson            $110
In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo-TEK, a design movement rebuilding indigenous philosophy and vernacular architecture to generate sustainable, resilient infrastructure and design solutions that are eco-positive. 
"Can ancient fixes save our crisis-torn world? This book is the result of a decade of travelling to some of the most remote regions on the planet, interviewing anthropologists, scientists and tribe members. Watson carefully documented their indigenous innovations using the landscape architect's language of plans, cross-sections and exploded isometric diagrams to explain clearly how they work." —The Guardian

Handmade in Japan: The pursuit of perfection in traditional crafts by Irwin Wong           $135
A beautifully presented record of the care, skill and aesthetic sensibilities of practitioners of traditional Japanese crafts. 

VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

List #8: HISTORY & POLITICS 

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves



Many of New Zealand's best hand-coloured photos were produced by Whites Aviation between the 1950s and 1970s . Once ubiquitous, these prints are now highly collectable. 

Auckland's Polynesian Panther movement were modelled on the US Black Panther Party — but without guns. The Polynesian Panthers was founded in response to the racist treatment of Pacific Islanders in the era of the Dawn Raids. Central to the group was a three-point 'platform' of peaceful resistance against racism, Pacific empowerment and a liberating education aimed at changing the landscape of race relations. The Polynesian Panthers defined an emerging group of Pacific people whose legacy still resonates. 

Humankind: A hopeful history by Rutger Bregman       $35
From 'the folk hero of Davos', Fox News antagonist and author of the international bestseller Utopia for Realists comes a radical history of our innate capacity for kindness. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, human beings are taught that we are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest. Providing a new historical perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history, Humankind makes a new argument — that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. When we think the worst of others, it brings out the worst in our politics and economics too.
"Humankind challenged me and made me see humanity from a fresh perspective." —Yuval Noah Harari

Not in Narrow Seas: The economic history of Aoteroa New Zealand by Brian Easton         $60
Both wide in scope and incisive in depth, Easton's magisterial work examines the broad swathe of economic activity in New Zealand, from pre-contact gift-based exchange systems to the current government's struggle with the economic impact of climate change. Easton is always alert to the impact of economic activity on all groups in society and on the environment, and of the contributions of all groups and the environment to the character and range of that economic activity. Is New Zealand a fair country? (and what does that mean?)

Going Dark: The secret social lives of extremists by Julia Ebner       $33
By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside, but two years ago, she began to feel that she was only seeing half the picture. She needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. So she decided to go undercover in her spare hours - late nights, holidays, weekends - adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum. Her journey would take her from a Generation Identity global strategy meeting in a pub in Mayfair, to a Neo-Nazi Music Festival on the border of Germany and Poland. She would get relationship advice from 'Trad Wives' and Jihadi Brides and hacking lessons from ISIS. She was in the channels when the alt-right began planning the lethal Charlottesville rally, and spent time in the networks that would radicalise the Christchurch terrorist. In Going Dark, Ebner takes the reader on a deeply compulsive, terrifying, illuminating journey into the darkest recesses of extremist thinking, exposing how closely we are surrounded by their fanatical ideology every day, the changing nature and practice of these groups, and what is being done to counter them.  

The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague by Richard Fidler         $45
Witnessing the Velvet Revolution in 1989 got Fidler hooked on Prague, and, in this book he presents the history and importance of the city—from the Dark Ages to the present— in an enjoyable and digressive way. 


The Book of Trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us by Nick Hayes       $39
The Book of Trespass takes us on a journey over the walls of England, into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows that are blocked from public access. By trespassing the land of the media magnates, Lords, politicians and private corporations that own England, and weaving together the stories of poachers, vagabonds, gypsies, witches, hippies, ravers, ramblers, migrants and protestors, Hayes argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land.
"What a brilliant, passionate and political book this is, by a young writer-walker-activist who is also a dazzlingly gifted artist. It tells o through story, exploration, evocation o the history of trespass (and therefore of freedom) in Britain and beyond, while also making a powerful case for future change. It is bold and brave, as well as beautiful; Hayes's voice is warm, funny, smart and inspiring. The Book of Trespass will make you see landscapes differently." —Robert Macfarlane

Imagining Decolonisation by  Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas       $15
Decolonisation is a term that scares some, and gives hope to others. It is an uncomfortable and bewildering concept for many New Zealanders yet it needs to be addressed if we are going to build a country that is fair and equal for all who live there.




Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What war does to women by Christina Lamb        $40
An important and angry book about rape used as a weapon of war, and about history's airbrushing of their plights. 
>>"Required reading." —Peter Frankopan, Guardian

Bland Fanatics: Liberals, the West and the afterlives of empire by Pankaj Mishra           $37
Decades of violence and chaos have generated a political and intellectual hysteria ranging from imperial atavism to paranoia about invading or hectically breeding Muslim hordes that has affected even the most intelligent in Anglo-America. In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines this hysteria and its fantasists, taking on its arguments and the atmosphere in which it has festered and become influential. In essays that grapple with colonialism, human rights, and the doubling down of liberalism against a background of faltering economies and weakening Anglo-American hegemony, Mishra confronts writers from Jordan Peterson and Niall Ferguson to Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 

When Darkness Stays: Hōhepa Kereopa and a Tūhoe oral history by Paul Moon         $30
This book – unsettling, harrowing, and ultimately redemptive – is based on the time the author spent with the Tūhoe tohunga, Hōhepa Kereopa. It plunges into a cultural landscape that has almost vanished, bringing to light insights that are enriching and sometimes shocking. The book includes an oral history that has never appeared in print until now, and which reveals one of the most tragic and distressing events in the country's colonial era.


Common Ground: Garden hsitories of Aotearoa by Matt Morris         $45

While a lot of gardening books focus on the grand plantings of wealthy citizens, Morris explores the historical processes behind humble gardens—those created and maintained by ordinary people. From the arrival of the earliest Polynesian settlers carrying precious seeds and cuttings, through early settler gardens to 'Dig for Victory' efforts, he traces the collapse and renewal of home gardening culture, through the emergence of community initiatives to the recent concept of food sovereignty. Considering compost, Maori gardens, the suburban vege patch, the rise of soil toxin levels, the role of native plants and City Beautiful movements, Morris looks at the ways in which cultural meanings have been inscribed in the land through our gardening practices over time. 

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty        $85
The much-anticipated new book from the author of the incisive and influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which was made into a film), exposing the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. With this in mind, he outlines a pathway to a fairer economic system. 

The 'Viking Age' is traditionally held to begin in June 793 when Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, and to end in September 1066, when King Harald Hardrada of Norway died leading the charge against the English line at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This book takes a refreshingly different view. It shows that the Viking expansion began generations before the Lindisfarne raid, but more than that, it traces Scandinavian history back centuries further to see how these people came to be who they were. It presents them, as far as possible, on their own terms, rather than through the eyes of those on the receiving end of their violence. The narrative ranges across the whole of the Viking diaspora, from Vinland on the eastern American seaboard to Constantinople and Uzbekistan, with contacts as far away as China. 
He Pukapuka Tātaku: Ngā Mahi a Te Rapuaraha Nui (A Record of the Life of the Great Te Rauparaha) by Tamihana Te Rauparaha (translated and edited by Ross Calman)           $60
A 50,000-word account in te reo Māori of Te Rauparaha's life, written by his son Tamihana Te Rauparaha between 1866 and 1869. A pioneering work of Maori (and, indeed, indigenous) biography, Tamihana's narrative weaves together the oral accounts of his father and other kaumatua to produce an extraordinary record of Te Rauparaha and his rapidly changing world. Published for the first time in a bilingual Māori/English edition. "Kāore kau he kaumātua hei rite mō Te Rauparaha te mōhio ki te whawhai, me te toa hoki, me te tino tangata ki te atawhai tangata. / There has never been a man equal to Te Rauparaha in terms of knowledge of warfare and prowess in battle, and in being so dedicated to looking after people." —Tamihana Te Rauparaha

The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts            $38
A fascinating history of Siberia as told through the pianos that have made their ways into houses there over the centuries. 
"An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book." —Paul Theroux


How to Argue With a Racist: History, science, race and reality by Adam Rutherford            $35
Examines the social constructs behind the perceived idea of 'race' and shows the factual and systemic flaws in the thinking behind so-called 'race science'. 
>>Read also Superior by Angela Saini. 

Paying the Land by Joe Sacco           $48
Canada's Northwest Territories are a huge, frozen wasteland populated only by the Dene, the indigenous people who once lived by hunting but are now divided in their response to an invasion of their land by mining companies. Some deplore it, arguing that the government misled their forebears with treaties they did not understand; others think the development was bound to happen anyway. Sacco's first work of comics journalism in over a decade is set against the background of a culture that has suffered the shattering impact of the residential school system which took children from their parents and returned them unable to speak their language and unable to relate to their traditional way of life. As recently as the 1970s the children were brutalised and abused in the government's stated policy to 'remove the Indian from the child'. Beautifully drawn, Sacco's latest work is a story of culture as much as it is a story of oil, money, dependency and conflict.

Tableland: The history behind Mount Arthur by Ray Salisbury         $60
Generations of Nelsonians have lived in sight of the Arthur Range on the western border of the Nelson district. But few of them know the stories that were played out on the Tableland, the high tussock plateau of Mt Arthur, in the adjacent Cobb Valley or in the ranges and valleys beyond.

The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive by Philippe Sands          $38
As Governor of Galicia, SS Brigadesführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed, including the family of the author's grandfather. By the time the war ended in May 1945, he was indicted for 'mass murder'. Hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the Poles and the British, as well as groups of Jews, Wächter went on the run. He spent three years hiding in the Austrian Alps before making his way to Rome and being taken in by a Vatican bishop. He remained there for three months. While preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline' he died unexpectedly, in July 1949, a few days after having lunch with an 'old comrade' whom he suspected of having been recruited by the Americans. Sands, author of the magisterial East West Street unravels the mysteries and implications of the story. 
>>Read Ste;;a's review. 

Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook by Alice Te Punga Somerville        $15
#29: With a Non-argument that’s Actually an Argument. Captain Cook? It’s all so very complex. I’m going to sit on the fence. (Whose fence? On whose land? Dividing what from what? You only have a fence when you fear something or when you’re trying to keep something in. Or, as a renovation show on TV informed me, when you want to upgrade your street appeal.) Alice Te Punga Somerville employs her deep research and dark humour to channel her response to Cook’s global colonial legacy.

We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and their forgotten battle for post-war Britain by Daniel Sonabend         $43
Returning to civilian life, at the close of the Second World War, a group of Jewish veterans discovered that, for all their effort and sacrifice, their fight was not yet done. Creeping back onto the streets were Britain's homegrown fascists, directed from the shadows by Sir Oswald Mosley. Horrified that the authorities refused to act, forty-three Jewish ex-servicemen and women resolved to take matters into their own hands. In 1946, they founded the 43 Group and let it be known that they were willing to stop the far-right resurgence by any means necessary. Their numbers quickly swelled. Joining the battle-hardened ex-servicemen in smashing up fascist meetings were younger Jews, including hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, and gentiles as well, some of whom volunteered to infiltrate fascist organisations. The Group published its own newspaper, conducted covert operations, and was able to muster a powerful force of hundreds of fighters who quickly turned fascist street meetings into mass brawls. The struggle peaked in the summer of 1947 with the Battle of Ridley Road, where thousands descended on the Hackney market to participate in weekly riots. Fascinating (and appropriately priced).

Stranger in the Shogun's City: A woman's life in nineteenth century Japan by Amy Stanley          $40
The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in 1804 in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a life much like her mother's. But after three divorces — and with a temperament much too strong-willed for her family's approval — she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo (present-day Tokyo). This book intimates life in Edo just before the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's fleet, which would open Japan up to trade and diplomacy with the West for the first time. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai and eventually ends up in the service of a famous city magistrate.

Work: A history of how we spend our time by James Suzman           $33
We live in a society where work defines who we are, what we do and who we spend our time with. But this wasn't always the case. For 95% of our history, our ancestors had a radically different view of its importance; hunter gatherers rarely worked more than fifteen hours per week. How did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? What are the social, economic and environmental consequences of a culture of work? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like?

Democracy May Not Exist, But we'll miss it when it's gone by Astra Taylor         $33
Is democracy a means or an end? A process or a set of desired outcomes? What if the those outcomes, whatever they may be - peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry - can be achieved by non-democratic means? Or if an election leads to a terrible outcome? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? Incisive. 


Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis         $37
What would a post-capitalist society and a post-capitalist economy look like? In a fascinating series of dialogues, the outstanding Greek economist discusses the necessities, the problems and possible solutions for making a society founded on equality, democracy and justice. Urgent. 



Caste: The lies that divide us by Isabel Wilkerson        $40
"The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power — which groups have it and which do not." Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste — and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. From the author of  the acclaimed The Warmth of Other Suns. 


VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY 

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.



The Savage Coloniser by Tusiata Avia          $25
"Savage is as savage does. And we’re all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world – outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish wit, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you’ll feel your pulse anew." —Selina Tusitala Marsh

Funkhaus by Hinemoana Baker       $25
A strong collection from a vital poet; radio signals crackling across the spaces between people, between cultures, between generations, and between worlds. 
I am not a building I say I have no pull-out map is what I meant to say so we deal with what comes up yes right there in the passersby one horse at a time you stepping 
out into traffic with your hand held up strong and me thanking every fucker for their help 


How To Be Happy Though Human: New and selected poems by Kate Camp       $30
The seventh collection from one of New Zealand's most admired poets. Camp stares down the ordinary until it reveals both its beauties and its threats. 


Nouns, Verbs, etc: Selected poems by Fiona Farrell            $35
Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Nouns, Verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books, and intersperses them with other poems thus far 'uncollected'. 

Mezzaluna: Selected poems by Michele Leggott         $35
Mezzaluna gathers work from critically acclaimed poet Michele Leggott's nine collections, from Like This? (1988) to Vanishing Points (2017). Leggott's poetry covers a wide range of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal. Leggott writes with tenderness and courage about the paradoxes of losing her sight and remaking the world in words. 

The Grief Almanac by Vana Manasiadis          $30
This bold hybrid of poetry, memoir, letter, essay and ekphrasis shows what alchemy can happen when pushing at the boundaries of what poetry is. Using strikingly unique forms and melding Greek with English, prose with poetry, and the past and present with fantasy and myth, The Grief Almanac defies conventions as it steers us over multiple terrains. The grief of the title is the grief of memory, inevitability, and in particular the grief of, and for, a lost mother, but the result goes beyond eulogy. Wry revisions, elegy, and a kind of poetic archiving, point to co-existence and interconnectedness and culminate instead in a guidebook, a legend and expansive lament. 
 "The Grief Almanac is rich, brilliant, with a kind of texturing that feels to me like complex symphonic music. This is not a collection of poems in any conventional sense. It is a sustained work of immense, far reaching intellect. With the two languages at her disposal and the full force of a great mind and heart, Manasiadis lifts her mother up into the light. We see the mother and we see the daughter and the primal truth that lies at the heart of those tragedies and myths that have endured for centuries because they are profoundly true." — Fiona Farrell

Wow by Bill Manhire         $25

Excuse me if I laugh.
The roads are dark and large books block our path.
The air we breathe is made of evening air.
The world is longer than the road that brings us here.
Bill Manhire's new book begins with the song of an extinct bird — the huia —and journeys on into troubling futures. These poems reach for the possibilities of lyric, even as their worlds are being threatened in a range of agitating ways. In the title poem we hear a baby say Wow to life and to the astonishing prospect of language; but almost immediately we hear the world reply: Also. Along the way there are several desperate jokes.
Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles          $30
Shanghai, Aotearoa, Malaysia, London—all are places poet Nina Powles calls home and not-home; from each she can be homesick for another.  The poems dwell within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-heritage girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words. 
"This is a book of the body and the senses, whether the million tiny nerve endings of young love; the hunger that turns ‘your bones soft in the heat’; the painterly, edible, physical colour of flowers and the fabric lantern in the pattern of Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam; or ‘the soft scratchings of dusk’. These are poems of ‘warm blue longing’ and understated beauty, poems to linger over, taste, and taste again. As Powles searches for home she leaves an ‘imprint of rain’ in your dreams'." —Alison Wong

Head Girl by Freya Daly Sadgrove         $25
"The first time I read Freya’s work I thought . . . uh oh. And then I thought, you have got to be kidding me. And then I thought, God fucking dammit. And then I walked around the house shaking my head thinking . . . OK – alright. And then – finally – I thought, well well well – like a smug policeman. Listen – she’s just the best. I’m going to say this so seriously. She is, unfortunately, the absolute best. Trying to write a clever blurb for her feels like an insult to how right and true and deadly this collection is. God, she’s just so good. She’s the best. She kills me always, every time, and forever." —Hera Lindsay Bird

The Lifers by Michael Steven         $28
From Sean Macgregor's lounge occupied by stoned youths, to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven's second poetry collection presents his clear, clean vision of 'the lifers' who inhabit these islands and beyond. A generation's subterranean memories of post-Rogernomics New Zealand are a linking thread, in the decades straddling the millennium, while other poems echo with the ghostly voices of the dead, disappeared and forgotten. 

VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

THE 2019 VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR
Use the selector to choose your seasonal gifts and summer reading. 
Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies, or pay on-line for delivery anywhere (let us know if you'd like them gift-wrapped). If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves — or browse our website. 
List #1: FICTION
List #3: SCIENCE & NATURE
List #4: FOOD & DRINK

VOLUME BooksBook lists, Gift selector

List #1: FICTION
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi         $28
In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. 
Winner of the 2019 Booker International Prize.
The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada        $32
“What knocks me out about The Wind That Lays Waste—a novel that starts in the great pause before a storm—is how it delivers exactly that compressed pressurised electricity of a gathering thunderstorm: it sparks and sputters with live-wire tension. The story centres around a reverend who is evangelising across the Argentinian countryside with his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God, or fate, leads them to an ageing, atheist mechanic and his young helper. As a long, strangely intimate day passes, curious tensions ebb and flow, until finally the storm breaks over the plains. Perfectly translated by Chris Andrews, this is a book for readers who like that metallic taste and the feeling of the hairs on the back of their necks rising.”—Barbara Epler
The Testaments ('The Handmaid's Tale' #2) by Margaret Atwood      $48
Unfortunately, the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale seems more plausible now than it was when the book was first published in 1985. The recent television series and the graphic novel are now followed by this sequel written by Atwood to further explore the workings of Gilead and to disclose what happens to Offred after the van door slams at the end of the first book. Atwood is one of the sharpest observers of power imbalances in human relationships and of injustice in society, and her books provide liberating ways of thinking about these issues. One of the most anticipated books of the year. 
Joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize.
>>Read Stella's review. 
Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann           $30
In the wholly remarkable Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Bachmann draws the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men, who may or may not exist outside her head. Viewed through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety — and genius. 
"If I was permitted to keep only one book it would be Malina. Malina has everything." —Claire-Louise Bennett
"Malina continually reveals new possibilities in literature and new impossibilities in living. The best book I've read this year." —Thomas
>>Read Thomas's review. 
The Divers' Game by Jesse Ball           $30
A strange, elegant and compelling new novel from the author of the Census (one of our favourite books of 2018). What happens when a society renounces the pretence of equality, when small acts of kindness are practically unknown, when what we would see as cruelty is sanctioned? This book is a subtle, spare and affecting meditation on violence, longing and beauty. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry         $33
Two middle-aged Irish gangsters in a Spanish port await a ferry from Tangier in their search for the wayward daughter of one of them. Barry is brilliant at catching the voices of the two, and at capturing lives that resonate with both pathos and humour. Charlie and Maurice are Barry's equivalents of Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, opening depths of humanity despite their limitations as persons. 
"A true wonder." —Max Porter
"Visionary. What distinguishes the book beyond its humour, terror and the beauty of description is its moral perception." —Guardian
"Brilliantly funny and terrifying at once, I was completely lost inside its dark craziness. Barry blends glorious voluptuous prose with entrancing storytelling." —Tessa Hadley
>>Read Thomas's review. 
The Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll      $26
First published in 1949, Böll's novel centres on the story of a German soldier, Andreas, taking a train from Paris (France) to Przemyśl (Poland). The story focuses on the experience of German soldiers during the Second World War on the Eastern Front where fighting was particularly vicious and unforgiving.
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite      $33
A blackly comic novel about lies, love, Lagos, and how blood is thicker - and more difficult to get out of the carpet - than water. 
When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the fit doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other.
Short-listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. 
The New Me by Halle Butler         $25
30-year-old Millie is overwhelmed by her unexpressed feelings of rancour - to the extent that she cannot express or achieve anything.  "A skewering of the 21st-century American dream of self-betterment. Butler has already proven herself a master of writing about work and its discontents, the absurdity of cubicle life and office work in all of its dead ends. The New Me takes it to a new level." -The Millions
"A definitive work of millennial literature." - The New Yorker
“A dark comedy of female rage. Halle Butler is a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity. She is Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood, showing us the futility of betterment in an increasingly paranoid era of self-improvement. Hilarious.” - Catherine Lacey
"Masterfully cringe-inducing. Makes the reader squirm and laugh out loud simultaneously.” —Chicago Tribune
All My Goodbyes by Mariana Dimópulos      $30
a novel told in overlapping vignettes, which follow the travels of a young Argentinian woman across Europe (Malaga, Madrid, Heidelberg, Berlin) and back to Argentina (Buenos Aires, Patagonia) as she flees from situation to situation, job to job, and relationship to relationship. Within the complexity of the narrator's situation, a backstory emerges about a brutal murder in Patagonia which she may or may not be implicated in, but whether this is the cause of her flight is never entirely clear — she is driven as much by psychological concerns, her relationship with her father, uncertainty about her identity and purpose in life.
>Read Stella's review. 
Murmur by Will Eaves           $23
A completely remarkable novel providing access to the mind of Alan Turing (here 'Alec Pryor') as he undergoes chemical castration after being convicted of homosexuality. Eaves's insights into the nature of consciousness and identity, and their implications for artificial intelligence, are subtle and humane. New edition. Highly recommended. 
"A really extraordinary book, unlike any other." —Max Porter
"A shining example of the moral and imaginative possibilities of the novel." —The Guardian
Winner of the 2019 Wellcome Prize. Co-winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 
Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg         $35
Each of Eisenberg's perfectly poised, preternaturally aware, precisely composed  and enjoyable stories carries the heft and resonance of novels (and take her about as long to write). 
>>"Reality is not conventional."

>>"I do feel myself to be anaesthetised."
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann          $40
An Ohio mother bakes pies while the the world bombards her with radioactivity and fake facts. She worries about her children, caramelisation, chickens, guns, tardigrades, medical bills, environmental disaster, mystifying confrontations at the supermarket, and the best time to plant nasturtiums. She regrets most of her past, a million tiny embarrassments, her poverty, the loss of her mother, and the genocide on which the United States was founded. Lucy Ellmann's scorching indictment of the ills of modern life is also a plea for kindness, a remarkable virtuoso sentence, and an unforgivably funny evocation of the relentlessness of one person's thoughts. 
"A triumph." —Guardian
Winner of the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo         $40
A novel in which twelve interconnected stories chart the lives and experiences of black women in contemporary Britain.   
"Bernadine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life." —Ali Smith
"Bernadine Evaristo is one of those writers who should be read by everyone, everywhere. Her tales marry down-to-earth characters with engrossing storylines about identity and the UK today." —Elif Shafak
Joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize.
Scented by Laurence Fearnley          $38
Can a person's life and identity by captured or constructed by the careful creation of a signature perfume? What would a novel be like if it was constructed according to the sense of smell? A new novel from the author of The Hut Builder, Edwin and Matilda and The Quiet Spectacular. 
This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill         $17
"In fewer than 100 pages, Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account. She pares a single story from the chorus of condemnations, with their similarities, varieties, truths and perceptions, and through select incidents and emotional focus we see the complex details of the wider picture. It takes an expert in short fiction to condense such a difficult subject, while allowing the reader interpretive space. Gaitskill is phenomenally gifted at the metaphysical microcosmic. She makes the abstruse world clearer. There are many ways the topic will be tackled in literature. This Is Pleasure sensitively and confidently holds its fury, momentum, contrary forces and imperfect humanity within a perfect frame." —Sarah Hall, Guardian
Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah         $33
The story of the body of Bwana Daudi, 'the Doctor', the explorer David Livingstone — and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country. In Petina Gappah's novel, it is those in the shadows of history — those who saved a white man's bones; his faithful retinue on an epic funeral march — whose voices are conjured. 
"Engrossing, beautiful and deeply imaginative." —Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh            $38
Bengali legend meets history meets politics meets adventure as Ghosh breaks new ground in this novel addressing crises of our time: climate change and migration. The novel is his first since The Great Derangement, his book that examines our inability — at the level of literature, history, and politics — to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.



Granta #148: Summer fiction           $28
New fiction from Andrew O'Hagan, Elif Shafak, Adam Foulds, David Means, Jem Day Calder, Magododi OuMphela Makhene, Caroline Albertine Minor, Thomas Pierce, Adam O'Fallon Price, Amor Towles. And Tom Bamforth on the refugee camp in Bangladesh known as 'Cox's Bazaar'.
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday         $23
A tripartite story of relationships across boundaries of age, gender, politics and nationality.
“Asymmetry is extraordinary. Halliday has written, somehow all at once, a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction.” — The New York Times Book Review
"A scorchingly intelligent first novel...Asymmetry will make you a better reader, a more active noticer. It hones your senses." - The New York Times
"A book unlike any you've read." - Chuck Harbach
>>Read Stella's review. 
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick         $23
First published in 1979, Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. Hardwick's experience of living in the twentieth century is indelibly presented in the most remarkable sentences. 
"A series of fleeting images and memories united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick's prose." —Sally Rooney
"Extraordinary and haunting." —Joan Didion
""Brilliant, brittle and strange, unlike any preconceived notion of what a novel could be. Few new books have felt so revolutionary or so brave." —Lauren Groff
"A novel of mental weather that enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash." —Susan Sontag
>>Read Thomas's review. 
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman        $26
"I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.'' Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl — the fortieth prisoner — sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. A compelling feminist science fiction novel, first published in Belgium in 1997.
"A small miracle." —The New York Times
>>Read Stella's review. 
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes        $35
A fiercely feminist novel of the Trojan War, seen through the eyes of the women and goddesses caught up in it.

Pūrākau: Māori myths retold by Māori writers edited by Whiti Hereaka and Witi Ihimaera     $38
An important new collection, written by Jacqueline Carter, David Geary, Patricia Grace, Briar Grace-Smith, Whiti Hereaka, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Kelly Joseph, Hemi, Kelly, Nic Low, Tina Makereti, Kelly Ana Morey, Paula Morris, Frazer Rangihuna, Renee, Robert Sullivan, Apirana Taylor, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Clayton Te Kohe, Hone Tuwhare and Briar Wood.

The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman       $38
When Ettie the Rabbi's daughter conjures a golem named Ava to protect Lea from the Nazis, can the three of them do more good than just survive? Can they even survive?
"Hoffman's exploration of the world of good and evil, and the constant contest between them, is unflinching. The book builds and builds, as she weaves together, seamlessly, the stories of people in the most desperate of circumstances - and then it delivers with a tremendous punch." —Elizabeth Strout

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson        $34
“Wilson’s Odyssey feels like a restoration of an old, familiar building that had over the years been encrusted with too much gilt. She scrapes away at old encrusted layers, until she exposes what lies beneath.” - Financial Times
"This translation will change the way the poem is read in English." - The Guardian
"Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianising (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean." - NPR
Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt       $38
The much anticipated autofictional novel from the author of What I Loved. The process by which an author looks back on her earlier self and turns their mutual regard into fiction is utterly compelling. 
"Among the many riches of Siri Hustvedt's portrait of a young woman finding her way as an artist are her reflections on how acts of remembering, if they reach deep enough, can heal the broken present, as well as on the inherent uncanniness of feeling oneself brought into being by the writing hand. Her reflections are no less profound for being couched as philosophical comedy of a Shandean variety." - J. M. Coetzee
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James          $38
Marlon James follows his remarkable 2015 Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings with this remarkable fusion of African mythology, history and fantasy. 
"Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter's." —Neil Gaiman
>>Read Stella's review. 
Stillicide by Cynan Jones           $33
Jones turns his spare, effective prose to good effect in this devastating climate change novel. Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life.

"Urgent." —Guardian 
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones         $26
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of the American Dream. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. Until one day they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Devastated and unmoored, Celestial finds herself struggling to hold on to the love that has been her centre, taking comfort in Andre, their closest friend. When Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, he returns home ready to resume their life together.
Winner of the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. 
“The prose is luminous, striking and utterly moving." —Judges' citation
For the Good Times by David Keenan        $33
Keenan's madcap and brutal novel hinges on the comradery between the members of a Provisional IRA cell in Belfast in the 1970s, whose madcap and brutal activities include kidnap, violence, arguing about the relative merits of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, and running a comics shop. Interesting to read in comparison with Anna Burns's Milkman, also set in Catholic Belfast in the 1970s. 
The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox       $35
The much-anticipated new novel from Elizabeth Knox is an epic fantasy that draws us deep into actuality, and is a book powerful on many levels. 
"An angelic book, an apocalyptic book, an astounding book." —Francis Spufford
"The master is present. To read Knox on such a huge canvas – to be immersed in her worlds, wrapped in her intelligence and craft so completely – is an experience not to be missed. Lessing, Le Guin, Knox – books where the best hearts meet the best minds meet the best imaginations are few and far between. The Absolute Book is a triumph of fantasy grounded in the reality and challenges of the moment we live in." —Pip Adam
>>Read Stella's review.
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories edited by Jhumpa Lahiri       $55
An excellent, wide and thoughtful selection, beautifully presented. More than half the stories appear here in English for the first time. 
Lonely Asian Woman by Sharon Lam      $29
Paula is lazy young woman mired in a rut. In the shallows of the internet she is pushed to a moment of profound realisation: she, too, is but a lonely Asian woman looking for fun. The debut novel of Wellington author Sharon Lam (currently living in Hong Kong) is a wildly sentimental book about a life populated by doubles and transient friends, whirrs of off-kilter bathroom fans and divinatory whiffs of chlorine. Lonely Asian Woman is not the story of a young woman coming to her responsibilities in the world. Funny from the first sentence on. 
>> Read an excerpt. 
The Wall by John Lanchester          $33
In a not-too-distant (and, metaphorically, not-too-different) future, Britain is surrounded by a vast wall that keeps out not only the higher seas that are the result of climate change, but also the refugees and other 'Others' who want to get in. In atrocious conditions, the walls are guarded by the young, but if any Others get in , the same number of Defenders are put adrift in the sea. Will Kavanagh and Hifa survive? 
"The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself. I was hugely impressed by it." - Philip Pullman
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner         $33
An insightful and well written novel about the impossibility of raising a son well in an age of toxic masculinity, from the author of pleasingly inventive Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. 
"A novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight and deep psychological sensitivity. The future of the novel is here." —Sally Rooney
"The Topeka School is what happens when one of the most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely writers of our day writes his most discerning, ambitious, innovative and timely novel to date. It's a complete pleasure to read Lerner experimenting with other minds and times, to watch his already profound talent blooming into new subjects, landscapes, and capacities. This book is a prehistory of a deeply disturbing national moment, but it's written with the kind of intelligence, insight, and searching that makes one feel well-accompanied and, in the final hour, deeply inspired." —Maggie Nelson
"In Ben Lerner's riveting third novel, Midwestern America in the late nineties becomes a powerful allegory of our troubled present. The Topeka School deftly explores how language not only reflects but is at the very center of our country's most insidious crises. In prose both richly textured and many-voiced, we track the inner lives of one white family's interconnected strengths and silences. What's revealed is part tableau of our collective lust for belonging, part diagnosis of our ongoing national violence. This is Lerner's most essential and provocative creation yet." —Claudia Rankine
The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy         $37
Levy's new novel is both subtle and audacious, exposing power play on both personal and epochal levels in the story of a man hit twice by cars on the same crossing but in different decades, causing his life to turn under itself like a Möbius strip.
"Brilliant." —Sam Byers, Guardian
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli        $37
A family from New York take a road trip into the parts of the US that used to be Mexico as a convoy of children approach the dangerous US border from the Mexican side, and an inhumane reception.
"Beautiful, pleasurable, engrossing, beguiling, brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising." - James Wood, New Yorker
"A mould-breaking new classic. The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli's hands - electric, elastic, alluring, new." - New York Times
"Valeria Luiselli offers a searing indictment of America's border policy in this roving and rather beautiful form-busting novel. Among the tale's many ruminative ideas about absences, vanished histories and bearing witness, it offers a powerful meditation on how best to tell a story when the subject of it is missing." - Daily Mail
"A novelist of a rare vitality." - Ali Smith
The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde         $38
From the author of The History of Bees comes another remarkable novel dealing with environmental catastrophe, this time a global shortage of water. Parallel narratives in 2019 and 2041 chart depths of human resilience, and reveal a love story, too. 
The Cockroach by Ian McEwan        $20
When Jim Sams woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed (from a cockroach) into the most powerful man in Britain. Once reviled by all, he now sets off to enact the will of the people. Nothing — legality, decency, common sense or the rules of parliamentary democracy — will stand in his way. Does this sound somehow familiar?
>>Read the first section. 
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan           $37
Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In this alternative 1980s London, Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. What happens when a love triangle develops between these three? 

"Intelligent mischief." - Guardian 
>>Read Stella's review. 
The Father of Octopus Wrestling, And other small fictions by Frankie McMillan          $28
Darkly comic, surreal and full of explorations of human vulnerability and eccentricity.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado         $23
Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A sales assistant makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the dresses she sells. A woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. 
"Carmen Maria Machado is the best writer of cognitive dysphoria I’ve read in years. " - Tor
"Life is too short to be afraid of nothing." - Machado
Auē by Becky Manawatu         $35
Auē is the sound of sorrow. Sorrow resonates through this multivocal novel about damaged childhoods and the strength that gets children through them. 
“Auē is a novel I could not stop reading” —Renée
To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek         $33
In a 14th century England a group of quite various individuals set off for France and into the oncoming disaster of the Black Death. 
"One of the many deep and destabilising pleasures Meek’s rich and strange new novel offers comes from trying to work out precisely what kind of a book – and what kind of a world – you are in at any particular moment. At the centre of this beautiful novel is an exploration of the difference between romance and true love, allegory and reality, history and the present. It plays out in unexpected and delightful ways." —Guardian
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern          $38
A strange old book in the library stacks sends its finder on a perplexing quest, including to a subterranean library. From the author of The Night Circus. 
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss        $23
It is high summer in rural Northumberland. Seventeen-year-old Silvie and her parents have joined an encampment run by an archaeology professor with an interest in the region's dark history of ritual sacrifice. As Silvie finds a glimpse of new freedoms with the professor's students, her relationship with her overbearing father begins to deteriorate, until the haunting rites of the past begin to bleed into the present.



The Friend by Sigrid Nunez        $28
When a friend dies, a woman inherits his Great Dane. As she gets to know this dog, so large, so inconvenient, so representative of her grief, she comes to understand the dog's grief, too, and their lives begin to change in subtle ways.
 "Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts--the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." - The New York Times 
US National Book Award winner.

Girl by Edna O'Brien             $33
"By an extraordinary act of the imagination we are transported into the inner world of a girl who, after brutal abuse as a slave to Nigerian jihadis, escapes and with dogged persistence begins to rebuild her shattered life. Girl is a courageous book about a courageous spirit." —J.M. Coetzee 
Selected Stories by Vincent O'Sullivan             $40
Thirty-five stories from seven collections published over forty years.
"For here is the artist, who, through the wide play and finish of his art, lit as it is by the bright loveliness of the world and its humours and warmth, its pleasures of the body and the mind, and by compassion and grace, can only give – of his wisdom, erudition, sensibility – in the utter, utter precision and delicacy of every sentence." —Kirsty Gunn
>>Read Kirsty Gunn' s perceptive assessment of O'Sullivan. 
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma       $26
Umuahia, Nigeria. Chinonso, a young poultry farmer, sees a woman attempting to jump to her death from a highway bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso joins her on the roadside and hurls two of his most prized chickens into the water below to demonstrate the severity of the fall. The woman, Ndali, is moved by his sacrifice. Bonded by this strange night on the bridge, Chinonso and Ndali fall in love. But Ndali is from a wealthy family, and when they officially object to the union because he is uneducated, Chinonso sells most of his possessions to attend a small college in Cyprus. Once in Cyprus, he discovers that all is not what it seems. Furious at a world that continues to relegate him to the sidelines, Chinonso gets further and further away from his dream, from Ndali and the place he called home. Partly based on a true story, An Orchestra of Minorities is also a contemporary twist on Homer’s Odyssey. In the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about the tension between destiny and determination.
Inland by Téa Obreht      $38
The Wild West might well be wilder than expected in this novel in which a woman waits with her youngest son and her husband's 17-year-old cousin for her husband to return from seeking water, and for her older sons to return after an argument. Is a mysterious beast stalking the land? What lies beyond the safety of the homestead? The decision is made to set off on an expedition that will change everything.
"This exquisite frontier tale from the author of The Tiger’s Wife is a timely exploration of the darkness beneath the American dream. Inland’s message is a rebuke to isolationist US policies written with a panache and heart." —Guardian
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa        $35
Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?

Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi        $38
A boundlessly imagined novel using fairy tale tropes, talking dolls, immigrants from forgotten countries and brushes with death to create a compelling and deeply satisfying story.
"A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam." - Ali Smith
"Exhilarating. A wildly imagined, head-spinning, deeply intelligent novel." - The New York Times Book Review

"Is there an author working today who is comparable to Helen Oyeyemi? She might be the only contemporary author for whom it’s not hyperbole to claim she’s sui generis, and I don’t think it’s a stretch either to say she’s a genius, as opposed to talented or newsworthy or relevant or accomplished, each of her novels daring more in storytelling than the one before. After reading any of her novels or her short story collection, you emerge as if from a dream, your sense of how things work pleasurably put out of order. If we read procedurals to enjoy a sense of order restored, everything put it in its place, we read Oyeyemi for the opposite reason, yet she is no less suspenseful." - Los Angeles Review of Books
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett          $33
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice, and the power of place.
""Irresistible. As always, Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature." —Guardian 
The Burning River by Lawrence Patchett      $30
In a radically changed Aotearoa New Zealand, Van's life in the swamp is hazardous. Sheltered by Rau and Matewai, he mines plastic and trades to survive. When a young visitor summons him to the fenced settlement on the hill, he is offered a new and frightening responsibility: a perilous inland journey that leads to a tense confrontation and the prospect of a rebuilt world.
Lanny by Max Porter        $30
The much anticipated new novel from the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers taps deep veins of language and folklore as it tells of a young boy who becomes the focus of a mythical force. 
"It's hard to express how much I loved Lanny. Books this good don't come along very often. It's a novel like no other, an exhilarating, disquieting, joyous read. It will reach into your chest and take hold of your heart." - Maggie O'Farrell
>>Read Stella's and Thomas's reviews. 
The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann         $33
When Gilbert Silvester, a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film, awakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees - immediately, irrationally, inexplicably - for Japan. In Tokyo he discovers the travel writings of the great Japanese poet Basho. Suddenly, from Gilbert's directionless crisis there emerges a purpose: a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the poet to see the moon rise over the pine islands of Matsushima. Falling into step with another pilgrim - a young Japanese student called Yosa, clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide - Gilbert travels with Yosa across Basho's disappearing Japan, one in search of his perfect ending and the other the new beginning that will give his life meaning.
Short-listed for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
"Almost miraculous in its successful blending of potentially clashing tones. The Pine Islands is a story that doesn’t tie up loose ends but leaves themes scattered as needles on the forest floor, allowing the reader to spot their patterns. The best approach to this beguiling, unpredictable book is to follow Gilbert’s advice on reciting poetry: 'to let it affect you, and simply accept it in all its striking, irrational beauty'." - The Guardian
The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine       $40
The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret "twin" tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but passionately, over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition.
Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin            $33
Schweblin manages to bury deep into the darkest recesses of her characters' and her readers' minds and find some small detail that inverts their reading of their situations. These superb stories demonstrate how unexpected events and situations bring to the fore aspects of their characters that the characters had hitherto been unaware. 
>> Read Thomas's review of Schweblin's Fever Dream. 

The Tempest by Steve Sem-Sandberg        $33
Andreas Lehman returns to the island off the coast of Norway on which he grew up, and starts to unravel the secrets of his past. What was the island's owner's connection with the Nazis via the wartime Quisling government? What horrendous experiments were made upon the island's inhabitants? Well and tightly written, disconcerting and complex. 
>> Read Stella's review. 
A Mistake by Carl Shuker         $30
What happens when a surgeon makes a mistake? The consequences and the contributing factors of and to misadventure reach deeply into the personal and professional lives of those involved. Elizabeth Taylor's life has been defined by her perfectionism but now it is dominated by her mistake. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
Spring by Ali Smith          $34
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door.
"Her best book yet." - Observer
>>Read Stella's review. 
Doggerland by Ben Smith           $33
Doggerland supposes a world in the not so distant future suffering the effects of climate change, pollution, surveillance  and decay. It tells the story of an old man (who isn't really that old) and a boy (who isn't really still a boy) living alone in a post apocalyptic world tending to a vast wind farm. 
"An unremittingly wet book, damp and cold and rusted, blasted by waves and tempests, but also warm, generous and often genuinely moving. It is a debut of considerable force, emotional weight and technical acumen." -Guardian
"The Road meets Waiting for Godot: powerful, unforgettable, unique." - Melissa Harrison
Grand Union by Zadie Smith        $38
Smith's first short story collection showcases her restless intellect, eclectic interests and verbal prowess, ranging through forms from Chekhovian neatness to autofiction to speculative delimitation. 
The Boyfriend by Laura Southgate        $30
The story of a young woman who finds herself subject to the gravitational field of a charismatic older man, The Boyfriend is a cautionary tale about blindly accepting traditional love narratives. This is a clear-eyed, dismaying and often hilarious examination of sexual desire, trauma and growth.
Winner of the 2018 Adam Foundation Prize. 
“This is a scalp-prickling dazzler of a novel, fizzing with quotable lines and remarkable characters—an astute comedy of manners combined with wrenching events that charts a new path through one of humanity’s oldest stories. Laura is an enormously exciting new writer.” —Emily Perkins
The Faculty of Dreams by Sara Stridsberg       $35
In April 1988, Valerie Solanas - the writer, radical feminist and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol - was discovered dead in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco. She was 52, alone, penniless and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings. Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminiscences and rantings, Stridsberg reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, articulating the thoughts and fears that she struggled to express in life and giving a voice to the writer of the SCUM Manifesto.
>>Read Thomas's review. 

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout          $35
Strout's new novel follows the lovably blunt Olive Kitteridge through the second half of her life, as she responds to changes both in her own life and in the wider community of Crosby, Maine. 
"Writing of this quality comes from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue." —Hilary Mantel 

Muscle by Alan Trotter          $25
In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They're the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice, and ask very few questions. Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses, or an inextricable fever dream.
"Muscle unfolds like a series of Russian dolls, each more Beckettian, winding and wonderful than the one before. Compelling enough to read in one gulping go." - Daisy Johnson
"Rare and accomplished - it teases out classic noir riffs and set-ups but in a language sinuous enough, and with invention ripe enough, to make them feel new." - Kevin Barry
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead          $35

Following his Booker Prize-winning The Underground Railroad, Whitehead unearths another shocking strand of US history, setting his novel in a hellish reform school in Jim-Crow-era Florida.
Doxology by Nell Zink          $33
No-one's sanity is safe from the pen (or, plausibly, keyboard) of novelist Nell Zink. This novel tackles the 90s music scene, hipsterdom, climate change and political misadventures on the minimal and maximal scale. It is hugely funny, audacious, sharp and indelible (as you would expect). 
"Doxology is superb. In terms of its author’s ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your media-warped mind and soul, it’s the novel of the summer and possibly the year. It’s a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral-satirical intellection. It’s bliss." —The New York Times
>>Read Stella's review. 
Faber Stories series         $10 each
A nicely presented series of outstanding short stories from Kazuo Ishiguro, Djuna Barnes, Sally Rooney, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Aickman, Edna O'Brien, P.D. James, Akhil Sharma, Sylvia Plath, and others. 





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