All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them — and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing? A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real — to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth. From the author of A Ghost in the Throat. [Paperback]
”The effect is electric, like seeing a ghost returned to life.” —New Statesman
”Obliterates every clear definition of genre and form. Astounding and utterly fresh.” —Irish Independent
”Lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go: sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity.” —Sunday Times
”Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death — dichotomies abound, but the questions of women's lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.” —Paris Review
>>Lost voices from the asylum.
>>Grateful to live these days.
>>Also available in hardback!

Dear Memory: Letters on writing, silence, and grief by Victoria Chang $40
For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly and in the silences of her father. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In letters to family, past teachers, fellow poets, and to the imagination itself, Victoria Chang offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories. Illustrated with artworks by the author. [Paperback]
"Groundbreaking. Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." —NPR
"Dear Memory is an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection. Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still. Her own project is not to erase those incisions — or even, as a child might hope, to heal them — but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." —New Yorker
>>Look inside.
>>The grammar of loss.
>>A different kind of life.
>>Other books by Victoria Chang.

Hexes of Deadwood Forest by Agnieszka Szpila (translated from Polish by Scotia Gilroy) $38
Anna Frenza hates the tyrannical tree huggers and the idiotic eco-warriors, after all, she's the CEO of Poland's biggest oil company. But then she finds herself in a trance, sleepwalking into the woods and making love to a tree, manically, all caught on camera. Her career ends and, in the fallout, she discovers her husband's disturbing secret. Her mind splinters and whether by delusion or possession of spirit, she finds herself in medieval province ruled by the Catholic Church. Deep in the past, Anna falls in with Mathilde Spalt, leader of the Earthen Ones — a congregation of women who live in the woods and reject all patriarchy, instead engaging in ecstatic, sensuous worship of Mother Earth and learns to love the forest . . . until the Church decides to fell the forest and all the women within it. [Paperback]
”The kind of debut that grabs you by the collar and doesn't apologise, it's bold, surreal, feminist and ferociously funny — exactly the kind of book that rewires your brain. A fever dream of feminist fire, we've never read a book quite like it.” —Service 95
”You're holding a torpedo of a book in your hand. Take a seat and get comfortable. This novel's energy, humour, and rebel spirit will awaken your mind and change your way of thinking.” —Olga Tokarczuk
>>Ecofeminist rollercoaster.
>>Alchemical dreams.

B is for Bird by Lily Emo $25
Make your way through the alphabet with this stunning book featuring a cast of familiar birds. From albatross to fantails, ganets to quail, and all the way to the silvereye (also known as Zosterpos lateralis), B Is For Bird is a beautiful celebration of birds, illustrated with collage and written by Whakatū artist Lily Emo. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>How the collages were made.

Talking Classics: The shock of the old by Mary Beard $40
What's exciting about a piece of bread 4,000 years old? Or some pots of paint abandoned in the eruption Pompeii? Why should we be bothered with the distant past anyway? What's the point? The life, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome have something to offer everyone. They are not the property of wealthy white men only. They make us wonder how to make sense of people who lived long ago (from angry landlords to giggling senators) — and to think harder about our own world, to look at it differently. In Talking Classics, Mary Beard points to the surprising connections between antiquity and the present. From revolutionaries to dictators, Bob Dylan to Beyoncé, she joins forces with the varied modern characters who have been transfixed by the ancient world. It's not compulsory, she argues to be excited by antiquity, but it's a shame not to be. After half a century teaching and studying classics, she fills the book with lively stories, curious facts and some good gossip. Talking Classics explains why the deep past does really affect us all. [Hardback]
”This book is a true delight, a thought-provoking, engaging and deeply personal look at the classical world from an author who understands it like no other.” —Elodie Harper
>>A laboratory for understanding what it would be like to be different.

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan $38
Dilara's father is disappearing. His memories are collapsing, dementia stealing a little more of him each day. She has persuaded him to move in with her, hiring builders to adapt her apartment to his new needs, but when the renovation is complete she discovers a big problem: instead of a new en-suite bathroom, the builders have installed a Turkish prison cell. At first she is outraged. There has surely been some mistake. Dilara's family are exiles — they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her estranged homeland appearing uninvited in her new home. But as the weeks pass, her indignation gradually gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners murmuring, rustling, crying out in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue. Even as she struggles to care for her father, to keep the family finances afloat and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, Dilara is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her — to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets — drawn inexorably back to Istanbul. [Paperback]
”Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told — like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodovar — I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end. Kenan Orhan is a truly gifted writer, drawing us down into a tunnel of memory and madness.” —Avni Doshi
”Elegant, propulsive and wholly original, The Renovation is a profound meditation on familial duties, memory, displacement and the devastating longing for a home that exists solely in the past. It will stay with me for a long time.” —Cecile Pin
”The Renovation brilliantly describes what it's like for ‘elsewhere’ to be ‘here’. An instant entry not just into the canon of migrant literature but into the literature of now.” —Isabel Waidner
>>A thing and a half.
>>A place that no longer exists.

Ngāti Kuia: He pūtake, hei pakiaka ora; A history by Madi Williams $60
Ngāti Kuia are tangata whenua of Te Tauihu-o-Te-Waka-a-Māui (the northern South Island). Descended from the ancestress Kuia, their whakapapa sits within a rich and complex Māori lineage, connecting with the stories held by neighbouring iwi - particularly the other Kurahaupō waka groups. Their networks also stretch towards the head of the country, linking to iwi originating from the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island), such as Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu, Muaūpoko, and ultimately back to the Polynesian homelands, Hawaiki. Drawing on hundreds of whakapapa, pūrākau, waiata and karakia recorded in nineteenth-century tribal manuscripts and court records, Madi Williams presents Ngāti Kuia history in Ngāti Kuia voices. From the stories of such tīpuna as Kaikaiāwaro and Hinepopo, through early encounters with neighbouring iwi and European settlers, to recent events such as the Treaty settlement process, this expansive account places Ngāti Kuia at the heart of the region's living, layered history. As Te Kenehi Teira observed during the Ngāti Kuia Treaty claim, the history of the iwi resembles “one huge jigsaw puzzle — you have to find all the pieces and put them together”. In this book, the pieces finally sit alongside one another. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Strength and agency.

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a world of change by Rebecca Solnit $37
”An old world is dying; a new world is being born; now is the time of monsters'.” —Antonio Gramschi. Solnit maps the extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights that we've experienced over the last fifty years, which has profoundly changed our world. In recognising the interdependent and symbiotic relationships in nature and among humans, this revolution is beginning to overturn capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the human domination of nature — despite the best efforts of the old world to fight back. The Beginning Comes After the End is a culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach. [Hardback]
”The optimism of this book arrives like a breath of fresh air. Solnit is adamant that positive change — social, political, climate — is not only a possibility but inevitable.” —Irish Times
”It would be easy to think we inhabit a global-digital age of despair. Think again, says Rebecca Solnit. In nine deft chapters, she pushes back on the current political gloom, setting it against the achievements made since the 1960s in decolonisation, environmentalism and gender equality, as well as within her own experience of US civil, labour, LGBT+ and indigenous rights.” —Financial Times
”Beautiful and inspiring: this book gives us the courage to face change, and to make it.” —George Monbiot
”A powerful meditation on transformation in turbulent times. Solnit argues that the current turmoil signals the dying throes of patriarchy and colonialism. A rallying call for all those who yearn for a just, sustainable and flourishing society.” —The Conversation
”Timely. As a deliberate exercise in reframing — as an open-ended invitation to consciously adopt new paradigms — The Beginning Comes After the End is very effective. Solnit is wise to focus on the nonlinear, and sometimes almost entirely invisible ways that change happens.” —Guardian
>>The change has begun.

Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen $28
Life on a remote Scottish island is turned upside down by a stranger's arrival, testing bonds of family and tradition and leaving a young dreamer's future hanging in the balance. It's no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence. The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper, known as The Father, and his otherworldly son, Ouse. Them, and the occasional lodger to keep the wolf from the door. When one of those lodgers — Firth, a chaotic writer — arrives from Edinburgh, the limits of the world the keeper and his son cling to begin to crumble. A tug of war ensues between Firth and the lighthouse keeper for Ouse's affections — and his future. As old and new ways collide, and life-changing decisions loom, what will the tides leave standing in their wake? [Paperback]
”A kaleidoscopic and linguistically daring work.” —Ocean Vuong
”A quirky and original debut that sizzles with scintillating prose.” —Bernadine Evaristo
”Michael Pedersen is a rare writer of real passion and power and this debut is phenomenal.” —Matt Haig

The Secret Life of Fungi: Exploring the otherworldly beauty of New Zealand’s micro-marvels by Jay Lichter $50
Obsessive fungi photographer Jay Lichter takes you on an extraordinary journey into the mysterious world of fungi — from the tiniest fruiting bodies barely visible to the naked eye, to the sprawling mycelial networks that stretch for kilometres beneath our feet. From urban backyards to suburban parks and beyond exists a magical world that weaves every living thing together in a vast underground web of connection. Without fungi, there would be no plants, no animals, no us. With his stunning photography and infectious curiosity, Jay uncovers the bizarre beauty, hidden intelligence and ecological genius of the fungi world. Funny, fascinating and a little bit filthy, this book celebrates the unsung heroes of our planet — the recyclers, the networkers, the quiet alchemists who make life possible. Once you've glimpsed their secret world, you'll never look at fungi the same way again. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Shuffling in the moss.

Insuring the Future: Reimagining home insurance in Aotearoa by Jonathan Boston $35
Securing home insurance is no longer a sure thing. Nor is it always affordable. In this clear-eyed work, public policy expert Jonathan Boston tackles one of the defining policy challenges of climate change: how can residential property insurance remain accessible and affordable as climate-intensified risks escalate? Given New Zealand’s distinctive natural hazards profile and numerous at-risk communities, small policy changes won’t be enough. Sustainable insurance affordability will require a paradigm shift in risk governance, adaptation planning, and property insurance arrangements. We need fair, collective risk-sharing, vigorous risk avoidance, and serious public investment in risk reduction, including planned relocation where long-term protection is neither cost-effective nor feasible. Navigating the stark realities of climate-intensified risks and implementing effective reforms will be challenging. There are powerful political incentives for procrastination and buck-passing. But delay will be costly; poor policy choices likewise. To enable progress, evidence-informed public debate about the policy options is vital. Insuring the Future seeks to encourage that debate and proposes a practical, integrated set of reforms. [Paperback]
”Urgent and timely.” —Max Rashbrooke
>>A climate-impacted future.
>>”Politics is the art of the possible.”

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton $38
What does it mean to lose yourself — and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention.  On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession - not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton's formidable novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny.  Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A stunning achievement of narrative craft. The pleasures of What Am I, A Deer? lie in the way its constituent episodes, themes and recursions crystallize into layers of insight on the hopes and fantasies that drive people to action. It is a funny, moving work that rewards thoughtful, careful reading — with breaks to listen to the songs and videos it references.” —Arin Keeble, Financial Times
”Barton's prose is offbeat and witty, alive to the excruciating pain of clutching at a romantic fantasy. A good novel tells us about ourselves, scooping out our worst impulses and deepest hopes, and Barton does so with a disarming candour. What emerges is a piercing study of yearning, and of the modern condition of feeling perpetually on the verge of one's own life.” —Emma Loffhagen, Guardian
“Its prose tidal and prone to extending the briefest encounters into meditations full of associative logic, the novel is a brilliant, sustained monologue. Indeed, by laying bare a primal, feminine solitude — crafted by the narrator's selective interiority, buoyed by obsession, and further exacerbated by her work-abroad circumstances — the woman becomes an integral conduit for wider fissures between hoped-for escapist fantasies and a lonelier reality in which communication is fraught but worth braving. A woman's candid thoughts percolate in the striking, artful novel What Am I, A Deer?, about trying to fit in, love, and become self-aware.” —Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews
>>Love and limerence.
>>Shyness, obsession, and the joy of karaoke.
>>The extremes of having a crush.

Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff $45
Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America's ‘War on Terror’, countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start. [Paperback]
"A work of genius. What began as a playful collaboration became, like most of DeWitt's work, weirder, riskier and more ambitious. After at least 20 drafts and countless revisions, it morphed into a 600-page work that resists categorization and almost defies description." —The New York Times Magazine
"It is a novel of permanent, persistent becoming, a story whose endings are multiple and essentially arbitrary, and it takes its own seeming unpublishability as a theme, or perhaps a promise. Reading a novel like Your Name Here, you can come to see that there are no real limits in literature, and fewer in life than you'd expect." —The Atlantic
"Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless, it turns out to be tightly organised: a Godard-like enfilade of shaftings, a frontispiece-of-Leviathan-type portrait of the world as a great 'Biz' made up of millions of little bizzes. Your Name Here is a novel that doesn't really believe in novels. The writing is delightfully shameless, disheveled and dissolute; globalised and pornified and digitised somehow, bit after bit after bit." —The London Review of Books
>>Move your head and the picture changes.

Knife-Woman: The life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac (translated from French by Lauren Elkin) $72
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. She is known for a body of work that spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking but eludes any aesthetic classification. Her life and art were so intertwined that it is often difficult to tell them apart. In her own words: "Sculpture is the body. My body is the sculpture." Marie-Laure Bernadac's biography of Bourgeois traces the career of a great artist, her training, and her influences, as it tells the story of an exceptional woman's life. Featuring personal photographs as well as reproductions of her work, this landmark publication is the first major biography to draw on the artist's unpublished personal archives, including diaries, correspondence, and psychoanalytic writings, as well as the many interviews she gave and the reminiscences of those who knew her. Bernadac elucidates Bourgeois's friendships and rivalries with other major figures, including sculptor Louise Nevelson and Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. She also draws on Bourgeois's well-known fascination with psychoanalysis to explore the deeply autobiographical nature of her artwork. This erudite and keenly insightful biography pays tribute to the talent of the artist and the complexity of the person. [Hardback]
"Bourgeois's life was inseparable from her art and this too was constantly revised. One of the triumphs of Bernadac's book is her sangfroid in dealing with this slipperiness. She was deeply untrustworthy, impossible to believe. Yet truth, as Bernadac notes, wasn't the point. Louise Bourgeois had to be experienced." —Charles Darwent, Literary Review
"In Knife-Woman, Louise Bourgeois is revealed as a complex, self-analysing, and profound artist —embedded and respected in both the New York and Paris art worlds, impassioned by materials, and worldly and introspective. Her penchant for living for work was periodically arrested by the agony of depression, yet this never stopped the flow of wit, insight, and creative energy." —Griselda Pollock
>>Look inside.
>>Chelsea.

As If by Isabel Waidner $40
Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams. Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has. As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman- a character trapped in reality's hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for. [Hardback]
”Wonderfully implausible and absurdly humorous, the latest novel from a Goldsmiths Prize-winner follows a rich tradition. As If is a great step forward, a maturing of Waidner's talent with no loss of the quixotic qualities that gave the other books their charm. It adds depth without sacrificing energy. Kafka and Beckett are good touchstones, because, like Waidner, they are very funny without telling obvious jokes.” —Daily Telegraph
”The novel feels calculatedly aloof, the emancipatory glee of Waidner's past work giving way to a more subterranean drama shaped by psychic contortions of dissimulation and masquerade. A taut psychological puzzler, As If leaves behind antic cartwheeling — no UFOs or repurposed celebrity biographies — for suspense and ambiguity.” —Observer
”A surreal existential caper exploring identity and performance, midlife purpose and regret, and the difficulty of finding — and escaping — yourself. Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition of dopplegangers, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett. Sly, absurd and poignant, it is a triumph of narrative voice.” —Spectator
”Waidner's writing, always dazzlingly clever and formally inventive, is here also deeply moving. As If is a great success and an intriguing departure: a dourly beguiling dark comedy about fluffing your lines halfway through the performance of a lifetime and being given another chance.” —Times Literary Supplement
>>Absurdist realism, queerness, and doppelgängers.
>>Hours of my life are lost to writing.
>>Absurdity is anything but nonsensical.
>>Some other books by Isabel Waidner.

Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle $30
Carlisle examines life writing and philosophy across certain European and Indian traditions, exploring questions of childhood and mortality, art and religion, beauty and loss. Informed by her experience as a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot as well as her own life, Carlisle asks what one human existence can reveal, and how writing can transmit its truth. Intellectually stimulating and deeply moving, Transcendence for Beginners enacts a philosophy of the heart, told by a generous and compelling guide. This bold, enlivening work asserts Carlisle's place as one of our most innovative thinkers. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The final chapter of Transcendence for Beginners ties it all together, asking whether we can have access to a noble or radiant realm while still in the midst of life. By this time, we have climbed quite a mountain of ineffability, but Carlisle has led us so gently step by step that we are willing to follow. Having arrived at the ending, we look back to see that we have traversed territory that is not completely religious but is not merely aesthetic or literary or psychological either. Like the man in Blixen’s fable, we see a picture traced by our steps, but I suspect it may vary for each reader, and even for the same reader at different times and in different moods. This is to Carlisle’s credit: we can make our own shape out of her words because she is never dogmatic and because she is clearly on an open-ended quest herself. All possibilities remain alive in this subtle, generous and humane book.” —Sarah Bakewell, Guardian
”In this gem of a book, Carlisle asks a question that may especially preoccupy professors of philosophy (which she is) and biographers (which she is also, of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot), but that equally concerns the rest of us: How to make sense of a human life?” —New Yorker
”This is the book of a lifetime, and a book about lifetimes. What is the relationship between philosophy and biography? How can a line of writing reveal a line of living? Clare Carlisle is a guide and a guru: Transcendence for Beginners is a transformative and transcending experience.” —Frances Wilson
>>Half-way up a mountain.
>>Life to the page.

A Very Cold Winter by Fausta Cialente (translated from Italian by Julia Nelsen) $40
It is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men — lost to war, death, or abandonment — leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to incubate fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this ‘hotel for the poor’ consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they're able to escape the weight of what they've lived through. Fausta Cialente's exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it. [Paperback]
"Cialente was a pioneering feminist, anti-fascist writer with a profound literary sensibility. In this crucial account of post-war Italy, her rootless authorial perspective sheds unique light on individual, collective, and national trauma, and speaks to ever-relevant questions about what it means to be a woman, a foreigner, and a survivor. Julia Nelsen's engrossing English translation is cause for celebration." —Jhumpa Lahiri
"The first of the undersung Fausta Cialente's books to appear in English, A Very Cold Winter contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war." —The New Yorker
"In this overdue translation of Cialente's vital 1966 novel, a family struggles to find harmony while crammed together in a frigid Milan squat. The result is an exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.

The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease by Svetislav Basara (translated from Serbian by Randall A. Major) $35
Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease follows the progression of the contagion's patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness. Hailed as one of Serbia's most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara's scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him acclaim and notoriety. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humour evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka's novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colourful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society. [Paperback]

Alone in Japan: A journey to the future by Tom Feiling $65
When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later, the country was still a sign of things to come - but, he began to realize, it was no longer a beacon. It was a warning. This book offers a unique portrait of life in contemporary Japan, from the quiet of its furthest flung villages to the dynamism of its megacities. It tells the story of how, from the mid-seventies onwards, Japanese society unknowingly embarked on a vast, silent process of transformation that is still unfolding today. The country is still peaceful; it is still prosperous. But the population is shrinking. As things stand, it will fall by a third with each new generation. Travelling through shrines and bars, rice fields and mango farms, coffee shops and old peoples' homes, Feiling meets those affected by, and driving, this transformation. Through countless interviews and extensive research, he weaves together a powerful account of how and why men and women are ceasing to pair off and have kids. He reveals how sexual appetites and behaviours are both shaped by, and reshaping the evolving economy, and considers the risks — and the opportunities — of the rise in solo living in Japan, and beyond. Clear-sighted and surprising, Alone in Japan is a portrait of love, sex and death in contemporary Japan that should provoke and engage us all. [Hardback]
>>Days without seeing any children.
>>The story of the book in 21 photos.

The Roof Beneath Their Feet by Geetanjali Shree (translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni) $35
In this Indian modern classic, roofs are a special place; they are meant for wild things, for romance and for play. They are realms of freedom freedom from the male gaze, sexual freedom, and freedom from society. Chachcho and Lalna use their roofs to build a friendship that transcends time and memory. Suddenly one day, Lalna has to leave, to return only after Chachcho's passing. Amidst rumors and gossip in the neighborhood, Chachcho's nephew tries to piece together his memories of the two women, one of whom is his mother. The truth he is searching for could destroy him forever, but to not find out is no longer an option. Now finally published outside of India, this consummate novel of twists and turns by the International Booker Prize-winning author of Tomb of Sand. [Paperback with French flaps]
”What does mourning look like? What is the nature of grief? These are some of the questions that Geetanjali Shree explores. In The Roof Beneath Their Feet, grief takes different forms. It spreads everywhere. Memory becomes grief. This is a lucid meditation on desire, grief and belonging. Geetanjali Shree's prose is animated — the walls and doors have a special role to play. They hold people's secrets. They have seen and heard things. They have eyes and ears, but none of the biases of people.” —Hindustan Times

The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and he making of history by Selena Wisnom $35
When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen — the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal's library to the ground — yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform — the first written language in the world. More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories — in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognisable. The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilisation at once strange and strangely familiar — a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity's first civilisation — their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe. [Now in paperback]
”Fascinating and rich in detail, this book provides an excellent survey of Mesopotamian literary classics, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the ways in which they influenced later cultures and texts, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Wisnom also offers snippets of daily life, including an account of Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon, getting into a panic because a mongoose had run under his chariot (was it a fatal omen?) and the actual agenda of a meeting.” —Bijan Omrani, Literary Review
”In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding tour through one of antiquity's great monuments to knowledge: the Library at Nineveh. As she surveys the clay tablets that were buried in a blaze millennia ago, a lost world of learning and literature comes back to life.” —Sophus Helle, author of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic

Hyperpolitics: Extreme politicisation without political consequences by Anton Jäger $30
What happens when politics is everywhere, yet nothing seems to change? From the abandoned dance floors of Thatcher's London to the mass mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, Anton Jäger traces how pub­lic life has become infused with protest, spectacle, and moral urgency — while the old infrastructure of parties, unions, and civic solidarity has been hollowed out. Hyperpolitics revisits the illusions of the ‘end of history’ and dissects the strange energies that replaced them: viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish overnight. Jäger shows how the promises of post-Cold War liberalism gave way to a restless, unsteady public sphere where private pas­sions overflow into politics but rarely build enduring power. Ranging from Guy Debord and Wolfgang Tillmans to Houellebecq's disenchanted fictions, Hyperpolitics makes sense of a world in which collective action remains fragmented and the social fabric thinner than ever. For anyone trying to grasp why our age feels so charged yet so incon­sequential, this book offers a vital map through the new contradictions of our hyperpolitical moment. [Paperback with French flaps]

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Te Tiriti, Equality, and the Future of New Zealand Democracy by Dominic O’Sullivan $40
leading Māori political scientist Dominic O'Sullivan draws on theories of republicanism and the commonwealth to challenge understandings of Te Tiriti as a partnership between races, or between Māori people and the Crown. O'Sullivan also critiques the idea that Te Tiriti created one people, assimilating Māori into colonial ways of governing. Instead, he proposes a new politics where Māori self-determination and liberal democracy, rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga, complement one another to promote meaningful and culturally grounded political equality. O'Sullivan enables us to see a future for Aotearoa in which political authority and responsibility belong to everyone and should therefore work equally well for all; a country where Māori people, as much as anyone else, bring their tikanga to public life; and a society where the Crown is no longer the word we use to describe government. For scholars, policymakers and political leaders, for Māori and Pākehā, for all of us imagining a respectful and inclusive future for our island democracy, this is essential reading. [Paperback]
”This will be a seminal book in Aotearoa New Zealand political and Maori scholarship. O'Sullivan moves beyond the weirdness of the Treaty principles and interminable originalist arguments. Instead, he provides a language grounded in republican ideals of non-domination and equality to debate the political morality of our current institutional arrangements. He thinks through the practical implications of rangatiratanga, mana motuhake, and community control amongst iwi, hapu and other Maori political authorities — offering a new way of thinking about how we ought to live together, given the legacies of colonisation.”—Lindsey Te Ata o Tu MacDonald, University of Canterbury, Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha
”I admire O'Sullivan's work and think it is significant and timely. He explores the potential of deliberative democracy in a commonwealth that draws upon legacies from te ao Maori, the indigenous 'world' as well as cosmopolitan modernity in a way that respects his own critique of 'a simple Maori/Pakeha or kawanatanga/rangatiratanga binary'. This holds great promise. As O'Sullivan argues throughout, the challenge is for deliberation and decision-making to be equally shared, rather than unilaterally imposed, as has too often been the case from the beginning.” —Anne Salmond
>>Refraining from ignorance.
>>Indigenous diplomacy.

Nova by Tim Corballis $38
Set on NOVA, a self-contained world launched into deep time, the novel unfolds through conversations between Kalla, a former councillor uneasy with consensus and ceremony, and System, the voice of all NOVA's mechanisms and processes. System is curious and anxious — and seems to know about every aspect of life on NOVA, but in some ways knows nothing at all. Kalla is sceptical, smart and increasingly troubled by what can and can't be measured. Together, System and Kalla circle around questions of democracy, labour, memory, entropy and love. As it moves between scenes of work, public ritual and speculative reflections on systems theory and time, and as NOVA itself coasts, rotates and persists in its unknowable form, the novel asks disarming questions: what might it mean to have on-demand access to the voice of the world? What would we do with that knowledge? And is it possible for a world to be meaningfully organised at all? [Paperback]
”This novel is such a wise, far-reaching, and funny reflection of organised societies and the relationship between humans and machines. What an ambitious, enlightening, and strangely joyful book.” —Alice Miller

Vocal Break: On women, music, and power by Lauren Elkin $70
For millennia, women's raised voices have been heard as unruly, uncivilised, dangerous. Women singing were cast as sirens — mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death. In Vocal Break, Lauren Elkin blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voices — and how women have used them to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism and sexism. Drawing on her own experiences training as a young soprano in the 1990s, Elkin reflects on the way power and identity shape our voices, focusing on the women who most excited her when she was learning to sing. A vocal break refers to the place where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers, so from one thing to another, and this is a book about what kind of meanings, and sounds, can be made there. Immersing readers in an eclectic soundscape, from musicals and pop music to art punk, what follows is a full-throated tour of women's voices, including Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Beyonce, FKA Twigs and Billie Eilish. [Hardback]
”Reading Vocal Break felt like being round at a friend's house playing through a stack of records and talking about them until sunrise. Warm, clever, funny and deeply thoughtful, this is a rich work of feminist criticism with a beautifully light touch.I loved it.” —Octavia Bright
”An essential, eclectic, authentic exploration of the politics of women's voices. I loved it! It took me ten years to go from shy young girl to punk rocker, if I'd had this book I'd have got there much quicker.” —Viv Albertine
>>A celebration of the female voice.
>>Not only theoretical but personal.
>>Some voices stay with us.

Becoming George: The invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson $60
Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself — cigar-smoking, cross-dressing, and promiscuous — scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society. What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy, or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day — from Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert — form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself? In Becoming George, poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time. [Hardback]
”From Sampson's approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson's sympathetic assessment of the challenges faced by female writers. She would also have enjoyed Sampson's quietly witty touches. When Sand died, Hugo sent a tribute claiming: ‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Many readers will start this fascinating biography with the assumption that he was merely being polite. By the time they have finished it they will probably agree with him.” —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times
>>Radical self-invention.

Make Believe: On telling stories to children by Mac Barnett $33
Make Believe is a book for adults about books for children, a rallying cry for art and imagination, and a celebration of the power of storytelling in all our lives. Mac Barnett, the beloved children's author and U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, urges us to think expansively about the potential of children's books-and the particular brilliance of young readers: What if children are a great audience for art? What if they are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults? What if humans' ability to appreciate art is, if not innate, awakened early in childhood? Well, then we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books. Make Believe is his incisive, intimate, and timely invitation to approach children's literature not only as an art form worthy of deep study and criticism, but as a portal into the lives of the children. And at a time when we are faced with a national literacy crisis, he champions the profound joys of literature and the importance of reading for pleasure. [Paperback]

He Aha te Raru ki Tai? / Mij le Abijn Dahpaduvvamin? / What's the Matter with the Sea? by Rita Sørly; Malgorzata Piotrowska (Illustrator); Kanapu Rangitauirat (Translator); Are Tjihkkom (Translator); Maria Nayr de Pinho Correia Ibrahim (Translator); Charlotta Maria Langejan (Translator) $30
Alerted to the appearance of a rare whale in the north of Norway, Māori marine biologists Aihe and Whina set out from Otago to track its path and find out what is going wrong with the world's oceans. Co-publishing with Saami publisher Davvi Girji, this unique picture book is trilingual in Lule Sami, Māori and English — foregrounding the connection between the indigenous peoples of Norway and Aotearoa, while telling a neat story that highlights the need to care for our marine environment. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Ungrounding: The architecture of genocide by Eyal Weizman $80
Eyal Weizman is one of the world's leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice's genocide case against Israel.In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the 'deep cartography' of the area extending from Gaza's subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable. Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised - and how Israel's actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide. Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time. [Hardback]
”Ungrounding by Eyal Weizman proves that decolonisation is not revenge but a condition for justice and, in the end, for the liberation of both Palestinians and Israelis.” —Francesca Albanese
”In the face of overwhelming state violence, forensic architecture is becoming an indispensable tool of international law and human rights, as well as a new approach to history. Ungrounding is a work of profound moral clarity and scientific precision, based on years of tireless collaboration and advocacy. Urgent and essential reading.” —David Wengrow
”A wake-up call to the world and the international community — a very important book.” —Shawan Jabarin
”Ungrounding leads us between layers of earth and history, soil and infrastructure, elucidating both the long story of Israeli aggression against Gaza and the histories of Palestinian resistance. Weizman cuts through obfuscations and horror, and helps us to see something of the truth.” —Isabella Hammad
”Eyal Weizman's work has long manifested a unique combination of moral passion and scientific rigour. It makes him, as Ungrounding shows, a formidable adversary of technically sophisticated regimes of violent dispossession. No further evidence of Israeli genocidal acts and intentions in Gaza would be necessary after this shocking report.” —Pankaj Mishra
”A timely and crucial contribution tracing the trail of the Israeli architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip. The ruthlessness and inhumanity detailed in this extraordinary book, nonetheless, also hold hope for turning the future soil and grounds into spaces of liberation and reconciliation.” —Ilan Pappe
>>All they will find is sand.
>>Some books by Eyal Weizman.
>>Investigations by the Forensic Architecture team.

America, América: A new history of the New World by Greg Grandin $45
A sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both continents. The story of the United States' unique sense of itself was forged facing south — no less than Latin America's was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the Americas emerged from constant, turbulent engagement with each other, shedding new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain. America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest — the greatest mortality event in human history — through the eighteenth-century wars for independence and the Monroe Doctrine, to the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century. This monumental work of scholarship fundamentally changes our understanding of racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. America, América shows how the United States and Latin America together shaped the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. Drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World. [Paperback]
”Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing. This is a once-in-a-generation contribution destined to become our new reference for understanding the making of the modern world. With extraordinary depth, erudition and precision, Grandin avenges the dead and fights for the living.” —Naomi Klein
”In this sweeping and provocative work, Greg Grandin provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the intertwined histories of the two Americas, foregrounding Latin American resistance to the hegemony of the United States. This is a compelling new vision of the relationship between the two continents.” —Amitav Ghosh

Leaving Home: A memoir in full colour by Mark Haddon $65
As an artist and writer, Mark Haddon has always created vivid and unforgettable images. Now he takes his own life as raw material, writing about growing up in the cultural wastelands of the English Midlands of the 1960s and 70s. Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It's about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It's about family. It's about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier m che and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It's about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It's richly illustrated throughout with images from the author's childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does. [Hardback]
”His distillation of the fear and powerlessness of childhood is so deeply moving and beautifully drawn. The most tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written tale I have read all year. In Leaving Home, Mark Haddon turns words, images and his trademark empathy upon himself to conjure all the repressed emotion, strained relationships, shyness, humour and orange formica of his childhood in 1970s provincial England. Simply glorious, from start to finish.” —Rachel Clarke
”A really extraordinary book. Painful, funny, beautifully illustrated. Nobody does it quite like Mark Haddon.” —Max Porter
”I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being. It also made me quite badly want a Walnut Whip.” —Sarah Perry
>>Look inside.

Bothy: In search of simple shelter by Kat Hill $30
The door to the bothy is always unlocked, you just need to step inside. A bothy is a remote hut in the wilderness that you can’t reserve, with no electricity, mod-cons or running water. And it’s here you’ll find Kat Hill — kettle on, feet up and pen out. Leading us on a gorgeous and erudite journey around the UK, Kat reveals the history of these wild mountain shelters and the people who visit them. With a historian’s insight and a rambler’s imagination, she lends fresh consideration to the concepts of nature, wilderness and escape. All the while, Kat weaves together her story of heartbreak and new purpose with those of her fellow wanderers, past and present. Writing with warmth, wit and infectious wanderlust, Kat moves from a hut in an active military training area in the far-north of Scotland to a fairy-tale cottage in Wales. Along her travels, she explores the conflict between our desire to preserve isolated beauty and the urge to share it with others — embodied by the humble bothy. Bothy is a stirring, beautiful book for anyone who longs to run away to the wilds. [Now in paperback]
”An intelligent and thoughtful book that will have you reaching for your boots. Hill offers learned and considered reflections on the consolations of retreat, simple living, of finding even temporary shelter when all outside is tempest. It is also a meditation on change: climate change, emotional growth, and the unquenchable nostalgia for a past slipping ever further from view.” —Cal Flyn
”It would be difficult to think of a subtler or more careful exploration of the wrinkles of modern life and modern nature, with all its traps, delights, delusions and possibilities.” —Adam Nicolson
>>The book came out of a bothy.

Bad Deeds by Andrew Hunter Murray $38
One murder is a crime. Two is a mystery. Alex used to break into houses illegally. These days, it's his job. Alex is part of a small firm of consultants who break into offices and homes to test their security. It's fun, it's well paid, and he's very good at it. It's almost like he's grown up at last. But when he gets fired from his firm, evicted from his flat and dumped by his girlfriend, all in the same evening, he decides to steal one last job from his company without their knowing. A job they had already decided not to accept. Big mistake. Before long, Alex is in remote northern Scotland, following the trail of an ambitious young man who supposedly fell to his death with no witnesses in sight. And if Alex doesn't get to the truth soon, he may well be the next one over the edge. [Paperback]
”Bad Deeds is the perfect page turner for those who like their thillers with propulsive plots, rollicking action, and a serving of bone-dry satire. An absolute hoot!” —Ross Montgomery
”Bad Deeds is a smart, page-turning romp that sees the ripples from one tiny not-quite-innocent action reach tidal wave proportions for its lively anti-hero. Funny, thoughtful and intriguing, this is crime writing with an edge of biting wit that sets Andrew Hunter Murray in a class of his own.” —Janice Hallett
”A brilliant and wickedly entertaining murder mystery by a brilliant and wickedly entertaining author.” —Emma Freud

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $60
In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them — and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing? A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real — to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth. From the author of A Ghost in the Throat. [Hardback]
”The effect is electric, like seeing a ghost returned to life.” —New Statesman
”Obliterates every clear definition of genre and form. Astounding and utterly fresh.” —Irish Independent
”Lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go: sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity.” —Sunday Times
”Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death — dichotomies abound, but the questions of women's lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.” —Paris Review
>>Lost voices from the asylum.
>>Grateful to live these days.
>>Or order the paperback (due by the end of June).

Taharaki Skyside by Fiona Pardington $75
Brimming with beauty and loss, Fiona Pardington’s avian portraits resurrect the charisma and wildness of native birds preserved as taxidermy specimens in museum collections. On these pages, her manu are not merely replicated but reborn. Ancestral memory is brought to life under the gaze of photographer Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht). One of Aotearoa’s most powerful contemporary artists, Pardington’s practice captivates audiences with her ability to convey the intangible through exquisitely composed photographs. This new book explores the practice of an artist at the height of her career and reveals the monumental avian portraits she has created for the New Zealand Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Essays from Hana O’Regan, Maia Nuku, Andrew Paul Wood, Geoffrey Batchen, Harry Rickit, and Megan Tamati-Quenell. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

The Expansion Project by Ben Pester $38
Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing — its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work. Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees — unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with. Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was?? A dizzying, haunted satire of the late-capitalist workplace. [Hardback]
”A tour de force in surrealist comedy. Fresh, sublime and eerie. Pester is a talented writer of the surreal who could be described, in part, as a comic descendant of J.G. Ballard. A novel about dislocation that feels dislocating. It should serve as an ominous warning to us all.” —Camilla Grudova
”Surreal and unsettling. Pester's deceptively lucid prose mocks office platitudes but also gets to the crux of the loneliness and alienation bred by corporate language and spaces. With a steely commitment to its outlandish form and plot, Pester's novel is as nebulous, mind-bending and delightfully strange as the workplace it describes.” —Observer
>>On the business bus.
>>Surreal scrutiny.

Women Without Men: A novel of modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (a new translation from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh) $40
A powerful and essential tale of female freedom. This long-suppressed Iranian novel traces the interwoven destinies of five women — including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher — as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on recent Iranian history and transcendent elements of Islamic mysticism, Parsipur's unforgettable novel sees women escaping strict confines of family and society. It is still as pertinent and discerning today as it was when travelling secretly from hand to hand upon its first publication in 1989. Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
”Women Without Men is the best feminist novel I know. It's thrilling, beautiful and hilarious, filled with weird women in transformation and the violent little men desperately trying to control them. I am convinced this novel is in fact a magic trick. Reading it feels like being invited to the rebellious unveiling of an age-old secret. It is both deeply mysterious and clear as water, filled to the brim with undeniable truth.” —Johanne Lykke Holm
"Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer." —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis
>>Read an extract.
>>An interview with the author and the translator.
>>The book was made into an astounding film by Shirin Neshat.

Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s hidden places and lost memorials by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson $28
A moving meditation on memory and the preservation of Palestinian heritage. Forgotten uncovers the hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine — now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories — and what they might tell us about the land and the people who live on the small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. From ancient city ruins to the Nabi Ukkasha mosque and tomb, writers and researchers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson ask: what has been memorialised, and what lies unseen, abandoned, or erased — and why? Whether standing on a high cliff overlooking Lebanon or at the lowest land-based elevation on earth at the Dead Sea, they explore lost connections in a fragmented land. Shehadeh and Johnson grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba but also with the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration today. [Now in paperback]
”Shehadeh is engaged, forensic, alert to history's weight but unwilling to let it crush him. Shehadeh's books are like beacons held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression. Forgotten is perhaps the brightest light of all.” —Observer
”Again and again, I thought of W.G. Sebald as I read Forgotten. The resemblance lies not only in the mournful elegance of the prose but also in its method: a meditative excavation of history embedded in the landscape.” —Guardian

Nostalgia: A history of a dangerous emotion by Agnes Arnold-Foster $30
Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from seventeenth-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illness that could, quite literally, kill you) to the present day (when it is co-opted by advertising agencies and politicians alike to sell us goods and policies). It is a fascinating, compelling story of a social and political emotion, vulnerable to misuse, and one that reflects the anxieties of the age. It is also a clear-eyed analysis of what we are doing now, how we feel about it and what we might want to change about the world we live in. [Paperback]
”This absorbing exploration of nostalgia raises questions about its slippery nature, and shows how it has been chillingly deployed in politics, from the cold war to Trumpism.” —Guardian
”Beautifully compact, wide-ranging and enjoyable.” —TLS
”Illuminating.” —Vogue
”With its juicy readability and historical wanderings, Nostalgia evidences the flaws of memory, and how it cherry picks the pleasant elements of the 'good old days'.” —nb.
>>On nostalgia.

Ballot by Anjali Enjeti $23
Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organizer, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one of the most tumultuous political eras in US history, and recounts the astonishing events leading up to the 2024 presidential election. Enjeti lays out the growing challenges for voters in battleground states, where rightwing legislatures have introduced staggering numbers of voter suppression bills and redrawn district lines, all to disenfranchise as many Black and other marginalized voters as possible. As her account of the history and stakes of election integrity shows, the aftershocks of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021 have manifested most egregiously on the four corners of the ballot. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ballot packs detailed information and emotional resonance into few words, and at the same time, the book conveys important and timely insight into the democratic process in the United States. The well-crafted sentences and punchy paragraphs are crucial for emphasizing the importance of voting and the precarious state of the ballot.” —Chicago Review of Books
”Enjeti examines what it means to vote today, and how endangered some of our votes truly are in an era of rising voter suppression, partisan redistricting, and disenfranchisement. Brilliant, humane, and useful.” —Boston Globe
”It is so easy amidst so much of talk of voting to forget what it is to vote. What the right to vote means to you personally and to the country in which you live. Anjali Enjeti has written a moving and brilliant autobiography of her vote that intersects with the history of the right to vote, speaking all the while to the subtext of the times: that bound up in our vote is our lives, and what we mean to each other, our future and our past, our possibilities. I felt a renewed commitment to democracy, and I will reflect on how I didn't know I needed that for some time. I want this book everywhere.” —Alexander Chee
”Anjali Enjeti makes an essential and timely case for voting as a tactic. She welcomes in both skeptics and believers to explain what's at stake when we go to the ballot box and what happens when voting rights are curtailed. A necessary text at this point in human history, I hope that young people especially will read it and that elders will join them.” —Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Bibliophile: Diverse Spines; 500-piece jigsaw puzzle by Jamise Harper and Jane Mount $40
This 500-piece puzzle features art from Bibliophile: Diverse Spines by Jamise Harper (founder of the Diverse Spines book community) and Jane Mount (author of Bibliophile). With over 60 books colorfully illustrated, this puzzle comes with a handy "Where to Start" reading checklist, so you can be inspired to go on your own literary adventure. Puzzle size: 40cm x 61cm. [Served in a book-shaped box]
>>See the completed puzzle.

The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare (translated by Barbara Bray and Jusuf Vrioni) $30
At the heart of the Sultan's vast but fragile empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams: the most secret and powerful Ministry ever invented. Its task is to scour every town, village and hamlet to collect the citizens' dreams, then to sift, sort and classify them, and ultimately to interpret them, in order to identify the ‘master-dreams’ that will provide the clues to the Empire's destinies and those of its Monarch. An entire nation's consciousness is thus tapped into and meticulously laid bare in the form of images and symbols of the dreaming mind. Kadare's ‘Palace of Dreams’ stands as the symbol of the thought-police who have, through history, been the most effective instruments of oppression at the service of dictators. [Paperback edition]
”Kadare's most daring novel, one of the most complete visions of totalitarianism ever committed to paper.” —Vanity Fair
”If there is a book worth banning in a dictatorship, this is it.” —Guardian

Inside the Box: How constrainst make us better by David Epstein $39
We live in a world that gives us seemingly infinite choices and values freedom above all else. We have an unprecedented number of options regarding what to do, who to be and how to spend our time. All that choice is wonderful; it is also overwhelming. The irony is that total freedom can be paralysing, and unlimited resources don't necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, overvaluing complete freedom can be disastrous for everything from starting a company to harnessing creativity to finding personal satisfaction. David Epstein argues that all of us — individuals, businesses, institutions, even societies — can benefit from narrowing our options. He dives into the science and practice of constraints, exploring exactly when and how guardrails can be beneficial, whether we're working with limited resources or using self-imposed boundaries to tap unexpected wells of focus and innovation. Epstein celebrates the surprising potential of hard deadlines, boring goals, and unexpected obstacles. [Paperback]

The Fluffy Futon by Yuichi Kasano $30
Grandma spreads her newly washed futon to dry in the sun. The futon is so soft and smells so clean! The cat can't resist nestling down for a snooze. Instead of chasing it away, Grandma settles in alongside, soon followed by the hen and her chicks, a little boy, the dog, the goat, and the pig family. Soon the whole household is taking a nap! Until Grandma starts to find the futon so comfy that no one else can fit. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Cosy sleepers!

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

The Work of Angels by Anisha Sankar $35
The Work of Angels is a meditation on sex, the celestial, and the spectre of communism. These appear where history and subject don’t quite meet; here, the lover (a worker, child, philosopher of history, mystic-astronomer) speaks to her other through a language made possible by losses, thefts, and the wars that constitute politics. Desire—the etymology of which is something like of the stars—is inaugurated by these planetary negations, setting into orbit a conspiracy between romance and exploitation, mysticism and violence, prophecy and ordinary inertia. [Paperback]
Anisha Sankar is Chennai-born and Te Awakairangi-raised. She lives in Toronto, where she’s completing her PhD. She is a member of Al-Rifaq, a Pōneke-based collective that translates and publishes contemporary political analysis produced by the revolutionary currents of Palestine and the Arab world. With Emma Blackett, she is writing a book elaborating a Marxist and psychoanalytic theory of the subject. The Work of Angels is her first book of poetry.
“Like Clarice Lispector and Aimé Césaire before her, Anisha Sankar twirls history, myth, and ordinary relation into a shining wing that hovers above the void. Elegant, intelligent, and tender, this book does something that only poetry can do.” —Sholto Buck, author of Light Film (Pilot Press, 2025)

Granta 174: Therapy edited by Thomas Meaney $37
When Sigmund Freud died, Auden wrote ‘he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion’. Something similar could be said for therapy today. We live in a therapeutic age. It is generally accepted that the world of subconsciousness plays into all of our thoughts and actions, and that, in the hands of experts, it can be directed along more fruitful pathways. But as a science and a practice, therapy has always been fraught with dilemmas and crises. It has been bound up with power and manipulation, though its finest practitioners and participants counter that it contributes to human liberation. This issue of Granta explores all of these dimensions of therapy. Featuring non-fiction by Jesse Barron, Dushko Petrovich Córdova, Sheila Heti, Elfriede Jelinek, Paul Keegan and Deborah Levy. New fiction by Camilla Grudova, Benjamin Kunkel, Anne Serre and Missouri Williams. Conversations between Christopher Bollas and Granta, Juliet Mitchell and Lidija Haas, and Jonathan Lear and Benjamin Y. Fong. Art and photography by Louise Bourgeois, Rinko Kawauchi, Musuk Nolte (introduced by Guadalupe Nettel) and Nigel Shafran. Poetry by Olive Franklin, Robert Hass, Victor Heringer and Natalie Shapero. [Paperback]
>>The animal side of life.
>>Louise Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings.

What We Remember, What We Forget: A memoir in memory by Siobhan Harvey $35
”We are our memories. They are a repository of our lives.” What We Remember, What We Forget is a personal narrative and poignant meditation on the power and peril of remembering — as well as of forgetting. Moving between childhood, early adulthood, imagination and the present, Harvey writes with honest intimacy about trauma, family and queerness; harm, silence and survival. Interweaving life story with reflections on philosophy and psychology, Harvey considers how memory both wounds and sustains, and how it may be safely carried so as to create the life one wants. Elegantly written, this is a powerful work about attention, language and the hard but fruitful labour of understanding. What We Remember, What We Forget asks: how should we retrieve our memories, and how can we trust what we find? “Memory is a creative endeavour: memory, the director’s cut; memory, a book of collected poems; memory, an exhibition of curated portraits; memory, a Surrealist retrospective.” [Paperback]
”The work is less autobiography and more a mosaic of fractured glimpses that catch the light as Harvey privately studies them. The experience feels less like witnessing a final version of a story, where every word and emotion have been decisively fixed in place, but observing the process of shifting and rearranging memories, constructing meaning and selfhood, and attempts at healing in action. The result is deeply intimate, vulnerable, and painful, at times almost overwhelmingly so.” —Sara Bucher, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

Immortal Thoughts by Christopher Neve $28
”Painting exists and exults in immortal thoughts.” —William Blake. In 2020, as the spread of Covid-19 causes pandemonium worldwide, an elderly artist returns to his childhood home to watch the transcendent beauty of the seasons and reflect on the final work of the artists he most admires. It seems to him that in their final art works — their late style — that they have something remarkable in common. This has more to do with intuition and memory than with rationality or reason and comes from trying to write about painting itself. Immortal Thoughts is an anthology of these reflections. In this personal and moving account, nineteen short essays on artists are interspersed with short accounts of the cataclysmic global progress of the disease in poignant contrast to the beauty of the seasons in the isolated house and garden, narrative strands that are closely intertwined. From Cézanne's last watercolours to Michelangelo's final five drawings, Rembrandt and suffering to Gwen John and absence, Christopher Neve dwells on artists' late ideas, memory, risk, handling and places, in the terrible context of Time and mortality. As much art history as a discussion of great art in the context of the Dance of Death, Neve writes with renewed passion about Bonnard, Michelangelo, Morandi, Poussin, Soutine and many others in his distinctive style. Introduction by John Banville. [Paperback]
”Completely and utterly marvellous.” —Max Porter
”From Titian and Michelangelo to Cezanne and Soutine, from Velazquez and Chardin to Bonnard and Pissarro, Neve sketches out the final periods of artists' lives in lilting, lyrical prose. His painterly style, his eye for detail and colour, is all the more powerful for the way that he juxtaposes it with the news of the outside world. His approach amounts to a kind of emotional ekphrasis.” —Times Literary Supplement

Pepeha Portal by Ariana Tikau $30
Rooted in Kai Tahu identity, the collection chronicles a homecoming and offers a moving account of memory, place and belonging. Born and raised in Otautahi Christchurch, Tikao left the city after the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. In 2023 she was awarded the Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury and returned to live in a place that was both deeply familiar and astonishingly new. Written largely during this period, Pepeha Portal is shaped by stories embedded in the landscape - many long erased by colonialism and only recently exposed by cultural, as much as geological, shifts. Responding to suburban landscapes and tipuna places, personal memory and ancestral voice, Pepeha Portal considers how language, whakapapa and whenua act as portals to belonging. [Paperback]
”There’s breathtaking scope and emotional depth in this collection, so much whakapapa wisdom, and finely hued poetry. He taoka toikupu.” —Robert Sullivan, New Zealand Poet Laureate
”Tikao sees the world from a clear and compelling Māori perspective. Pepeha Portal is one of the most polished and forthright poetry collections I have seen for years.” —Nicholas Reid, NZ Listener

E kō, nō hea koe by Matariki Bennett $35
The debut collection of poetry from Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) is a series of goodbyes and attempts to slow the shedding. It's a group of teenagers sparking up as they watch the great Pacific garbage patch catapult into space and become a second moon, it's endless conversations with Grandmama about stars, it is the constant rebirth of whakapapa and learning that silence isn’t the best part of her. [Paperback]

The Typing Lady, And other fictions by Ruth Ozeki $40
A story collection about the lives we almost lived, the people we can't quite forget, and the stories that shape us. A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches with tenderness and unease as the ghost of his wife's ambition roams the woods outside their home. A long-deceased Beat poet hijacks the mind of a young publishing assistant during a sales meeting, railing against the state of modern literature. A curious grandmother creates a fake online dating profile to spy on her granddaughter's romantic life — and sets in motion a deception she can't control. Spanning eras and geographies, The Typing Lady is a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we become. [Paperback]
”Delightful, moving, and profound, The Typing Lady is a book of love stories of every kind. It is a book of great treasures.” —Lily King

Tupaia, Captain Cook, and the Voyage of the Endeavour: A material history edited by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll $74
Centring priest and navigator Tupaia and Pacific worldviews, this richly illustrated volume weaves a new set of cultural histories in the Pacific, between local islanders and the crew of the Endeavour on James Cook's first 'voyage of discovery' (1768-1771). Contributors consider material collections brought back from the voyage, paying particular attention to Tupaia's drawings, maps, cloth and clothes, and the attending narratives that framed Britain's engagement with Pacific peoples. Bringing together indigenous and Pacific-based artists, scholars, historians, theorists and tailors, this book presents a cross-cultural conversation around the concepts of acquired and curated artefacts that traversed oceans and entwined cultures. Each chapter draws attention to a particular material, object or process to reveal fresh insights on the voyage, the societies it brought together and the histories it transformed. Authors also explore animal iconography, instruments and ethnomusicology, and performances and rituals. This work challenges colonial museum collections and celebrations of Cook's voyages, using materials old and new to make connections between past and present, whilst reinforcing Tupaia's agency as both a historical figure and a contemporary muse. Tracing overlapping folds of symbolism, this book draws together a picture of the diverse materials and people at the centre of cultural exchange. [Paperback]
>>Look inside.
”The book provides an enlightening alternative prism through which we can rediscover the Pacific agency in Tupaia, beyond the gaze of the dominant colonial history, which often revolves around Captain Cook's view of the world. It is a must-read collection of narratives woven together into an intellectually illuminating tapestry of cultural history with a strong Pacific flavour. A highly recommended text.” —Steven Ratuva, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury
”This rich and wonderful book exemplifies the explosion of research, reflection and creative practice around European maritime exploration over the last thirty years. Building especially on the work of Anne Salmond, commemorative studies of celebrity navigators such as Captain Cook have been succeeded by critical inquiry into cross-cultural voyaging, the deep histories of collecting, projects to return artefacts from institutions such as the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge to Australia, Aotearoa and Tahiti, and art practices that re-imagine encounters towards postcolonial futures. The Society Islands priest, artist and navigator Tupaia has been at the heart of these studies. This book offers a key set of debates and contributions that will be widely valued.” —Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK
”This set of essays does not result in a history, nor in a re-evaluation of previous histories but instead it is a tapestry of relations, of conversations and reflections on the Ra'iatean navigator Tupaia. This contemporary engagement with Tupaia redresses thin colonial understandings of his role with layers of social fabric that emerge from the multivocality of the volume's authors, including established and emerging artists, scholars, filmmakers and composers. From multiple vantage points, the authors reveal that the strength of material culture, in this case the cloaks of Tupaia and Cook, is in their relationship to the intangible, the cross-temporal, the sonic, the performative, and how these make kin of all involved.” —Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Director of the Bill Holm Center, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and Associate Professor of Native Art, University of Washington, USA

The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: a history of collaboration by Stephan Malinowski $50
The disappearance of the Hohenzollern family from the history of Germany in November 1918 as the Kaiser fled into Dutch exile is one of the most startling, rapid instances of a once all-powerful royal family becoming almost overnight irrelevant and marginal. Except this is not exactly what happened. Stephan Malinowski's book is an extraordinary work of recovery. It suited both the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich to view the Hohenzollerns with contempt, and yet the royal family's hatred of the former and approval of the latter were for millions of Germans a significant factor in their own view of their country and its government. With forensic and often shocking detail, Malinowski shows that, far from being ridiculous, marginal figures the Hohenzollerns lay at the heart of Germany's ongoing nightmare. Despite formally losing power, the members of the royal family remained prominent, catastrophically allowing many other conservative Germans to stay distanced from the new republic and to eventually betray conservative traditions and values. Battered from both left and right, the Republic collapsed in 1933 in part because conservative forces, fearful of both Communism and Fascism, had abandoned their own principles just as much as the leading members of former royal family had, who were themselves beguiled by and fooled by Hitler. This is an important and shocking book, as well as a devastating picture of an inadequate and trivial royal family painfully underequipped to fulfil its role. [Paperback]
”A highly detailed and scrupulously researched book. Malinowksi's work is a near-masterpiece, relating a story not synthesised in this way before, and about which any number of self-serving myths exist. He presents a devastating case why, with regards to their conduct during the Third Reich, the Hohenzollerns were the authors of their own misfortune.” —Simon Heffer

Lipstick by Eileen G'Sell $23
From Revlon to Glossier, from Marilyn to Gaga, lipstick is as shape-shifting and unwieldy as femininity itself. Who wears lipstick today as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world's most conspicuous and contentious tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Brilliant, biting, and irresistibly stylish, Lipstick treats beauty as the serious subject that it is. With deep insight, lyrical precision, and humor, Eileen G'Sell examines how painted lips expose the tensions between conformity and self-expression, beauty standards and personal agency. Less a book about makeup, and more about what we make of ourselves, this is cultural criticism at its most relatable and relevant.” —Zahra Hankir
”What if pigmented wax was one of humanity's oldest technologies of honesty? In this homage to the form, Eileen G'Sell gives us a lipstick for all. Her elegant book not only lays out the cultural evolution of the object, but points to the expansively feminist ethics and latently utopian politics of colorful mouths. Pucker up, dive in, and dispel your femmephobia today.” —Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Pasta for the People: A joyful cookbook for pasta lovers by Imogen Royall $45
Pasta is comfort — easy, familiar, endlessly satisfying. But too often we get stuck in the loop of the same recipes: a trusty bolognese, a jar of pesto, the reliable carbonara. What if pasta could be more? This book is an invitation to rethink pasta: to explore fresh flavours, global influences, and unexpected pairings that bring new joy to the table.This cookbook shares many of Imogen Royall’s recipes alongside favourites from celebrated chefs and food creators, including: Max La Manna's Zesty Radiatori Summer Salad, Olia Hercules's Rigatoni from Napoli via Genoa & Odesa, Izzie Cox's Miso Gochujang Pumpkin Rigatoni, Helen Graham's Tomato & Tamarind Gigli, Tom Jackson's Slow-cooked Courgette Casarecce, Saliha Khan's Desi Meema Rigatoni. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Try a few of the recipes.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Dog Days by Emily LaBarge $48
Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident's aftermath. Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences — from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch — LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative. Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving. [Paperback]
"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous, and totally original." —Olivia Laing
"Emily LaBarge renders trauma as a lived experience, and so Dog Days is not merely a trauma study, of which there are many, but also a unique literary experience. Dog Days is rich in ideas. A fascinating work, unusually conceived and written, disturbing, honest, and profound." —Lynne Tillman
"Dog Days is a book about the relentless presentness of the past and the philosophical vertigo that follows a harrowing life-altering event. What emerges is a profound and necessary inquiry into how we assemble a self from the fragments of what we've read, what we've seen, and what we've survived." —Anne Boyer
"Emily LaBarge is always intellectually agile and emotionally capacious." —Deborah Levy
"Embracing disorientation as a formal strategy, Dog Days locates a sympathy between traumatic experience and the practice of writing itself. LaBarge demonstrates that trauma entails its own mystical mode of reading, in which words and images become imbued with supra-rational connection and significance.” —Daisy Lafarge, Frieze
>>What narrative can and can’t do.
>>Refusing ‘The Good Story’.
>>The ordinary extraordinary event.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) $38
Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nestled in a mouthwatering exploration of food, language, history, and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of its cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. [Paperback]
Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize.
”With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>On food, power and structure.
>>Listen to translator Lin King.
>>A Reading.
>>Read an Extract.
>>Author Q&A.
>>The Meta Process.
>>Also available in this edition.

Ghost Stories, A memoir by Siti Hustvedt $40
Siri Hustvedt's most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster. It is a patchwork book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between early November 2023, when Paul first became ill, and 3 May 2024, the day of his funeral; e-mails Siri sent to friends during Paul's cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son. The book also contains Paul Auster's last ever piece of writing — the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri's and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1st January 2024. The result is the story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster's life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday. Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, Ghost Stories is unflinching, tender, and wise. It is a story of a woman haunting her own life, and the ghosts that inhabit us even as we carry on. [Paperback]
”She's a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf.” —Literary Review
”All love stories must end as ghost stories. So we are reminded in Siri Hustvedt's tremendously moving portrait of a man, a marriage, and the joys and sorrows of a shared artistic life. Love and grief lie, inseparable, on every page. This is essential reading from an all-time great.” —Sara Collins
”Both a work of intimate reflection and a moving tribute to the 43 years she and Auster shared: a profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature. For now, in dark times, we have Ghost Stories. Some will see it as a love letter to Paul Auster. Actually, more interesting than that, it's an account of a widow falling in love again, but with a ghost.” —Robert McCrum
”Hustvedt is a writer of astonishing range and depth. It seems necessary to give something of the background of these two writers, yet there is no need to know any of this to find solace and deep delight from the intelligence and humanity of Ghost Stories, its portrait of a marriage of true minds. Auster comes across here perfectly as he was: smart, funny, caustic, loving, idealistic — exasperated to the last by the politics of his native land. Hustvedt (who always looks so cool in her photographs, even when not dressed in a jumpsuit) reveals the nerves that co-exist with her grit and wisdom. The delight to be found in Hustvedt's book arises because so much of the landscape revealed is one of love: love of life, love of the world, love of family. Ghost Stories deserves its place among the enduring accounts of sorrow and survival. It will console you for the losses you have suffered, and for the ones you know — we all know — are yet to come.” —Erica Wagner, Observer
>>Double tragedy and diagnosis.
>>What exactly is a self?
>>Writing in the first person seems to be therpeutic.

Men in the Sun, And other Palestinian stories by Ghassan Kanafani (translated from Arabic by Hilary Kilpatrick) $27
First published in 1962, Men in the Sun is both a classic of Arab literature, and of what Kanafani himself would term 'resistance literature'. Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Their driver, a jaded, fat, former freedom fighter, living with his own compromises and contradictions, makes for a garrulous if cavalier companion. Both the indifferent brutality of border bureaucracy and the blank aggression of the sun see that things grow steadily more stark. The author's ardent politics are apparent throughout, but the novella's characters are their own beings — ambivalent, conflicted creatures of context. While breezily conversational, with disarming, dreamy strokes of lyricism, this short novel delivers a shuddering and grounding dose of true horror. As well as the titular novella, the book features six short stories, including the timelessly resonant 'Letter From Gaza' , Kanafani's first published work, written when he twenty, and the essential 'The Land of Sad Oranges'. [Paperback]
”One of Palestine's foremost intellectuals and leaders. Kanafani's universalism and commitment to Palestine will eternally serve as a model.” —Ilan Pappe
”Every now and then in a reading life you pick up a book that leaves an inexpressible imprint on your head and heart. Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories is one.” —The Irish Independent

Landfall Tauraka 251 edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
Alongside the finest new writing, art and reviews from across the motu, Landfall Tauraka 251 announces the winner of the Landfall Tauraka Young Writers' Essay Prize, an annual competition that encourages emerging writers to explore the world around them through words. ART: Megan Brady, Julian Hooper, John Reynolds, Deborah Smith; FICTION: Molly Crighton, Heather Holdaway, Sam Keenan, Cait Kneller, David Large, Jemma Richardson, Grant Smithies, Cora Tate, Pearl Tuohy, Tarn Wright; NON-FICTION: Cian Dennan, Uzair Khan; POETRY: Tunmise Adebowale, Hannah Rose Arnold, Nick Ascroft, Izzie Birnie, Cindy Botha, Hana Buchanan, Nathaniel Calhoun, Kim Cope Tait, Brett Cross, Brandon de la Cruz, David Eggleton, Craig Foltz, Alison Glenny, Eliana Gray, Jackson, Erik Kennedy, Fiona Kidman, Brent Kininmont, Leonard Lambert, Jessica Le Bas, Carolyn McCurdie, Kirstie McKinnon, Alice Miller, Anuja Mitra, Janet Newman, Grace Nottingham, Gregory O’Brien, Jilly O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Harriet Prebble, Joanna Preston, Hope Rännäli, Vaughan Rapatahana, Richard Reeve, Holly Ruth, Will Salmon, Regan Solomon, Jillian Sullivan, Stacey Teague, Dunstan Ward, Andrew Paul Wood, Nicholas Wright; REVIEW Sally Blundell, John Gereats, Michael O’Leary, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Paddy Richardson, Elizabeth Smither, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb. [Paperback]
“In an age where we are channeled content via the overlords of the internet, picking up a print copy of Aotearoa’s Landfall Tauraka right now feels like an act of subversion. It’s a quiet act of participation against the dopamine delivering machines we clutch. Somehow, nearly 80 years on from its inception — in today’s testy climate of eyeball harvesting — Landfall’s spring edition, edited by Lynley Edmeades (with a new name Landfall Tauraka) not only pulls this off, but it does so very well. It is dense. It is modern. It contains some of the best of Aotearoa’s new and not so new writers.” —Claris Harvey, Kete

The Odyssey by Homer (a new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn) $38
Setting aside the streamlining, modernising approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn reproduces the epic's formal qualities — meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance. His expansive six-beat line, closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer's verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. The result conveys the original’s oral poetics while also bringing to life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer's work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. [Paperback]
”Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek. Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically. The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus's heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I've ever read.” —Edith Hall, The Telegraph
”Readers, especially students of the poem, looking for a version of the Odyssey with a learned introduction, insightful notes and a scrupulous adherence to the sound and sense of the original will find here the Mentor they they are looking for.” —A. E. Stallings, The Times Literary Supplement
>>c.f. Emily Wilson’s translation.

Childish Palate by Shariff Burke $32
Childish Palate follows a cast of outsiders in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, searching for hope in a country caught in an identity crisis. A philosophy student makes a striking proposal to the imam of the Kilbirnie mosque; flatmates ignite a flame over a bowl of chicken ginseng soup; an office worker finds a sense of purpose in the brightly lit aisles of Thorndon New World. Across eleven stories, Shariff Burke wrestles with possibility, ignorance and the ways we compromise in order to survive. Childish Palate savours the richness and warmth of community, rejecting easy answers about whose tastes should define our world. [Paperback]
>>Charmed from the very first sentence.
>>This is the real red pill.

The Baker’s Percentage: The simple formula for making perfect sourdough bread at home by Mara Ripani $55
The Baker's Percentage is a formula developed by bread bakers to allow them to create any bread. From a pure white sourdough to a hundred per cent whole wheat loaf. With it, bakers can scale up or down, from one loaf to many and can choose to speed up or slow down fermentation according to their daily commitments. It is completely liberating, yet most home bakers have never heard of it. Unlike making a cake, sourdough bread recipes do not require a strict list of ingredients with precise measurements. It is a process that can be 'felt'. It is malleable. Enter the baker's percentage: a simple set of parameters that allow you to bake bread using one of multiple pathways. With chapters on Flour, Starters & Leaven, Mixing & Kneading, Bulk Fermentation, Dividing, Shaping & Proofing, Baking, and more, this is a thoroughly comprehensive guide to baking bread, whatever way takes your fancy. The Baker's Percentage is unlike any other cookbook. There are no recipes (except fot in a section at the end!). Instead, it encourages the reader to bake bread with confidence, according to their own needs and schedule. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest $38
They were coming back to life. They were free and getting freer. Rothko Taylor has washed up with the tide, back in their hometown, Edgecliff. Fifteen years since they left it behind. The past is accelerating towards them- the skateboard kids on the high street that remind them of their teenage years, the splintered benches looking out to sea, where their mum Meg clutched her cans. The nice bit of town, where their dad Ezra tried and failed to build a happy home. And Dionne's block. Beautiful, extraordinary Dionne, the only person who had ever looked at them and seen what was there. Back then, overwhelmed and full of fear, they sank beneath the surface into chaos. But they made it out alive. And this time, Rothko is determined that things will be different. Tempest's first novel in a decade, Having Spent Life Seeking is about family and forgiveness; redemption and atonement; desire and abandon; selfhood and community. The things we seek when we are hiding, and what finds us, if we can let ourselves be seen. [Paperback]
”Kae Tempest brings into the literary realm that which others choose to leave outside. This is a remarkable act of literary bravery. If books can still change the world, this one most likely will. Narrative-driven, stuffed with soul, brimming with brokenness, rife with repair, this is a book for our splintered times. In Tempest's hands, redemption travels faster than the speed of light.” —Colum McCann
”An authentically soothing, powerful thought-provoker.” —Matt Haig
”A truth-speaker.” —Max Porter
”Powerful and merciful.” —Ali Smith

Childhood: A memoir of growing up, parenting, teaching, and discovering what children need most by Brendan James Murray $38
Brendan Murray redefines memoir in this haunting excavation of his own experiences as a child, teacher and parent to discover why imagination is so important throughout our lives. Brendan James Murray's childhood was one of stark contrasts: vivid imaginative adventures but also disadvantage, fear and the shadow of a school he spent months refusing to attend. When a silhouette on a freeway overpass forces him to confront the ghosts of his own childhood, he has a defining realisation about the extraordinary power of imagination to transform lives, and the degree to which it has been neglected. Childhood is a deeply personal investigation into how we can help children find their place in the world, drawn from Murray's perspective as a child, teacher and parent. This haunting, uplifting memoir is a must-read for everyone seeking to understand how the crucial and overlooked absence of a rich inner life in childhood echoes through all our adult years. [Paperback]

Remarkable Animals: 1000 amazing algamations by Tony Meeuwissen $30
One of the most ingenious mix-and-match books ever devised. Based on ten real-life animals, each described in words as well as pictures, it offers 1,000 fantastic variations. Just flip the split pages and see ten remarkable animals become 1,000 crazy creatures, taking on new names and astonishing new identities as their heads, bodies and tails are swapped around. Huge fun. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>It goes like this!

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

The Witch by Marie NDiaye (translated from French by Jordan Stump) $35
Lucie comes from a long line of witches, powers passed down from mother to daughter. Her own mother was formidable in her powers, but ashamed of her magic. Perhaps as a result, Lucie's own gift is weak: she can see into the future, sometimes — but more often, she can only see the present of some other location. Not very useful. And the worst part? All she can ever see are insignificant details — a scrap of outfit, the colour of the sky. Lucie's own children are initiated into their family's peculiar womanhood when they reach twelve years of age, and in a few short months, Maud and Lise are crying the curious tears of blood that denote their magical powers. Having learned, they take off quickly and fly the nest. Literally. Witty, dreamlike, vaguely unsettling, and utterly enchanting, The Witch brings the mysteries of womanhood and motherhood into sharp relief and leaves us teetering on the edge, unbalanced by questions as seemingly unbreakable relationships break down left and right. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
”Family alienation meets suburban witchcraft in this short, fantastical work from one of France’s greatest living novelists, which is finally getting an English translation nearly 30 years after it appeared in France. Lucie, a middling witch, is instructing her two daughters in the family’s matrilineal talent of seeing the future — visions produce tears of blood — but their professionally disempowered father all but approves. As the bitter marriage at the center of the family unravels, the girls embrace their new gift more fully than Lucie could have imagined. This is NDiaye at her disquieting best.” —Vulture
>>Hear an extract.
>>Read an extract.
>>The magical and the banal.

The Light Room: On art and care by Kate Zambreno $30
In The Light Room, Zambreno offers a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yuko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world. How will our memories, and our children's, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward possibility. [Paperback]
”Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in close-up.” —Annie Ernaux
”The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon.” —Sinead Gleeson
”Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing — that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone.” —Jenny Odell
>>”It’s nonwork, but I have to do it.”

The Annotated Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, edited and with an introduction by Merve Emre $67
"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." So begins Virginia Woolf's much-beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been considered Woolf's masterpiece. A pivotal work of literary modernism, its simple plot — centered on an upper-class Londoner preparing to give a party — is complicated by Woolf's satire of the English social system. For decades, Woolf's rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists, and scholars alike. In this annotated volume based on the original Hogarth Press edition, Merve Emre mines Woolf's diaries and notes on writing to take us into the making of Mrs. Dalloway, revealing the novel's depths and originality. Alongside her perceptive commentary, Emre offers hundreds of illustrations and little-known photographs from Woolf's life in this attractive and informative edition. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Annotating Mrs Dalloway.
>>Emre and Levy meet Mrs Dalloway.

Lucky Creatures by Jospeh Trinidad $35
Trinidad’s essays explore the lessons of his grandmother’s chicken farm and his grandfather’s lucky golden fish; the vibrancy of his home country and its rites of passage such as tuli, beauty pageants and national Boy Scout jamborees; the contradictions of Aotearoa, which welcomes his family’s labour but insists they leave their mother tongues at the border; and his own journey of coming out, along with the hard work of actualisation that follows as he and his partner grapple with the desire to have a baby. Inspired by the creatures of Filipino folktales and migrant touchstones such as FaceTime and 'that one cousin from the States', Lucky Creatures seeks to answer the eternal question: 'Was the move worth it?' Each resulting essay is an unforgettable exploration of life as a queer, Brown, transnational hybrid – filled with the warmth, grace and humour of the lucky creatures who can hear the call of home. [Paperback]
”There’s an entirely original voice in these essays that seems to me created out of a tremendous intimacy. Trinidad is making space on the page for the people in the stories he is telling, their languages, their lives, the money they earned and the money they didn’t, the heartbreak and the connections both.” —Alexander Chee
”Magnificent – the kind of book you can’t help telling everyone about. I was still smiling and laughing long after I put it down.” —Saraid de Silva
”An unforgettable book, with a captivating sense of conviction in the strange.” —Rose Lu
”Lucky Creatures is a vibrant intervention into the literary landscape – a playful and moving collection from one of Aotearoa's most exciting new voices.” —Lana Lopesi

Have This Heart by Lawrence Patchett $38
A story collection about men who are trying to do better. Whether training a rescue dog, starting a bucket chain to put out a raging fire, raising a marquee beside a line of Ferraris, or reporting on a sensitive workplace accident, the men in Have This Heart are striving for more — for connection, for humour, for a way back into the world. Lawrence Patchett's stories are about men at work and what happens when your life doesn't let you hide. These are tightly coiled stories, rich with rough talk and fear-sweat and tenderness. [Paperback]
”On the surface, Lawrence's writing has a rugged, frontier, quality, but underneath, holding it all together, is a delicate web, almost fragile in its nature. There is a rawness on the page that is underscored by a rich emotional intelligence that enables him to capture love and loss.” —Laurence Fearnley

For an Ecology of Images by Peter Szendy (translated from French by Marco Roth) $30
When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an ‘ecology of images’ in On Photography, she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the onslaught of images from advertising and television that she believed threatened our ability to truly see. Today, beyond deep anxieties over a diminishing ‘attention economy’, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed. Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasises the labour and time required to produce and properly view images. His inquisitive mind and sparkling, associative style of writing take us from the animal kingdom to the scientific history of the shadow, the theorems of Pliny to Nabokov's butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film and the first aerial photograph. [Paperback]
”Peter Szendy is a dazzlingly original philosopher, as witty as he is erudite. For an Ecology of Images finds him at the height of his powers, as he outlines what he calls the 'shadows' of our future.” —Adam Shatz
”Wide-ranging across the history of science, visual arts, and photography, this short book packs a lot in. Szendy understands the Kabbalistic principle that moving one letter can alter the universe: cosmicomic is cosmiconic, economy is iconomy, ecology is icology. He has shown us how to swim when we are all drowning in pictures.” —John Durham Peters
”This book made me feel wild reverence, joy, and wonder for everything Szendy looks at-like a six-year-old who, having just learned about sharks, corners you to tell you about ‘the coolest thing in the world’.” —The Paris Review
>>Sontag On Photography.

Frank the Monster by Mats Strandberg and Sofia Falkenhem $20
Frank is nipped by a dog on his ninth birthday, and his life turns inside out. His nights fill with mysterious dreams and eery adventures. A wild beast is reported roaming the town after dark. Frightening encounters lead to Frank’s discovery that he is the werewolf. But he can’t understand why everyone is afraid. Frank is still a nine-year-old boy inside—one who feels a strong urge to have his tummy scratched. Forced to own his new identity, Frank learns about the town’s secret underbelly. Beneath the streets live other monsters, cast out of their human families. Perhaps he has found his pack of misfits. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.
>>Don’t get bitten by a Woof.

John of John by Douglas Stuart $38
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son's long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted.  John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. From the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. [Paperback]
”John of John has the emotional range and sense of sympathy of his earlier books, but this book is special, it has an urgency, an immediacy, a brilliant sense of place, the drama of fierce emotion repressed, concealed and volcanically exposed.” —Colm Toibin
”To read John of John is to move to the Isle of Harris and take up residence in the family croft. The novel is so immersive, so all-encompassing, that I felt like I was living in it. Douglas Stuart has written something brilliant and rare.” —Ann Patchett
”John of John is a fierce, glorious sting of a novel. Douglas Stuart has somehow lifted the rocky, windswept landscape of the Scottish Western Isles — as well as its externally stark and thwarted, if internally blazing, characters — and replicated both with utter flawlessness on the page. What an astonishing feat of literary fiction.” —Lauren Groff

The Lost Girls of Autism: The untold story of women on the spectrum by Gina Rippon $45
The history of autism is male. Nearly all the first studies focused on boys. The classic hallmarks of autism, such as avoiding eye contact, are heavily biased towards men. When autistic girls meet doctors, they are still misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, and even personality disorders. As millions of women discover they have the condition later in life, we are only now starting to realise what has been missed. In this groundbreaking book, neurologist Gina Rippon examines why neurodivergence in women has been systematically ignored and why girls have been denied the help and support they need. Raising huge questions about how boys and girls are socialised differently, Rippon reveals the fascinating science behind female neurodivergence and what it tells us about the medical establishment. Exploring the unique challenges faced by women who have lived undiagnosed for years, Rippon argues it is high time for society to recognise and embrace the full spectrum of autistic experience. [Paperback]
”A treasure trove of information and good humour.” —Cordelia Fine
>>What has been missed.
>>Unmasked.
>>Off the spectrum.

A Moon Will Rise from the Darkness: Reports on Israel's genocide in Palestine by Francesca Albanese $36
Israel's genocide in Palestine and the complicity of powerful Western states is undermining international human rights and the UN system. The United States has imposed sanctions on lawyers, UN experts, and Palestinian officials in an attempt to bully and intimidate them into silence. One prominent example is UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has played an important role in documenting Israel's atrocities and those who profit from its oppression of Palestinians. This book compiles Albanese's indispensable and damning reports on Israel's conduct in Palestine since October 2023. First outlining the case that this period should be understood as a genocide, Albanese goes on to explain how the ongoing violence fits into a longer history of Israel's settler colonialism, and finally presents a devastating indictment against the international corporations that treat mass killing and destruction as a business opportunity. [Paperback]
"Francesca Albanese's clear moral voice and expert analysis sheds light on Palestine's darkest moment in history. This book will help to judge those who were on the right and wrong side of history." —Ilan Pappe
"When I came out of Gaza at the end of November 2023, I discovered that Israel was only the tip of the genocidal iceberg. The rest of the iceberg was the enablement apparatus — a system of states, institutions and individuals whose sole purpose was to ensure the longevity of a genocidal project now into its third year. This book dissects this apparatus, shedding light on its constitutive accomplices." —Ghassan Abu-Sittah, trauma surgeon

Silent Coup: How corporations overthrew democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard $33
As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a rebirth for democracy, what emerged was a silent coup — namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power. Exposing the origins of this epic power grab as well as its present-day consequences, Silent Coup is the result of two investigative journalists' reports from 30 countries around the world. It provides a guide to the rise of a corporate empire that now dictates how resources are allocated, how countries are governed, and how justice is defined. [Paperback]
”Silent Coup is a crime story: a gripping description of the murky legal, and regulatory structures and policy changes that privilege big corporations. It's a tragedy, outlining the terrible consequences for people and nature, for democracy and accountability. It's a lesson in economics, providing fascinating and important insights into the functioning of global capitalism today. But finally it's also a story of hope, about apparently powerless people resisting these trends in the struggle for better and more just futures. Don't miss this.” —Jayati Ghosh

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews $45
‘Why do you write?’ the organiser of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews — all of them unsatisfactory to the organiser — surfaces new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She has been keeping up, she realises, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. A Truce That Is Not Peace is the first time Toews has written about her own life in nonfiction. Inventive yet controlled; wrenching and joyful — Toews remakes her world and invents an astonishing new literary form to contain it. [Hardback]
”A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss.” —The Atlantic
”A profoundly moving meditation on the frailty of memory and the permanence of loss. Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —San Francisco Chronicle
”An affirmation of life in all its richness and variety. This remarkable book will live forever.” —Celia Paul
>>Are writing and suicide related?
>>Loss, literature, and the unspoken.
>>Grief, guilt, and memory.
>>Why do you write?
>>How to stay alive.

Ambivalence by Brian Dillon $42
When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at last he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia live up to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through university his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid present-tense fragments, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by ambivalence, ambiguity and androgyny — on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure. The era he describes seemed to demand new ways of thinking about aesthetics and politics. Today, when rights are fragile, arts and humanities attacked, and students dismissed as radicals or narcissists, Ambivalence is an argument for the poetic and revolutionary force of changing yourself and even the world by changing what you know. [Paperback with French flaps]
”What, then, does Ambivalence amount to? Perhaps simply the assertion that uncertainty has its own value. This is persuasive when we acknowledge just how often, as politicians demonstrate for us daily, people lay claim to conviction that is unearned. At the start of the memoir, we meet B as a boy who, standing at a crossroads, ‘considers his limited options’. By the end, despite considerable personal tragedy, he has accessed an open-minded way of thinking through books that, in their complex variety, carry ‘the promise of promise itself’. This is a surprisingly hopeful book. The state of being uncertain carries with it a rich source of possibility.” —Sarah Moorhouse, Spectator
”Brian Dillon is one of the true treasures of contemporary literature — a critic and essayist of unmatched style, sensitivity and purpose.” —Mark O'Connell
”Brian Dillon is always invigoratingly brilliant. His sentences, his stylistic innovations, the range and potency of his intellectual adventures; he is a true master of the literary arts and a writer I would never hesitate to read, whatever his subject.” —Max Porter
”Brian Dillon's essays match discernment and critical thinking with a sense of pleasure in finding a work of art that speaks to him and lures him into contemplating its mystery and intricacy. His writing is exact and calm; rather than explain he explores, playing what is tentative against what is certain.” —Colm Toibin
>>Other books by Brian Dillon.
>>Remastered.

Aotearoa in Bloom: The hisotry, culture and practical uses of New Zealand’s flowers by Rachel Clare and Tryphena Cracknell $60
He puāwai, he kōrero. For every flower, a story. Did you know that Aotearoa has more than 2000 species of flowering plants, and that more than 80 per cent of them are found nowhere else on Earth? This book invites you on a botanical hīkoi through Aotearoa's flowers. Discover where they grow, when they bloom, the roles they play in their ecosystems, and which ones you can grow in your garden. From native mistletoes and around 120 orchid species to the fuzzy edelweiss, the iconic pōhutukawa and the precious ngutukākā, which is almost extinct in the wild, you will learn about their ornamental and practical uses and their significance in te ao Māori. Explore the stories behind their names and how these plants have taken root in our modern cultural identity. Combining photographs with historic botanical drawings, Aotearoa in Bloom weaves together stories of people and plants. Part social history, part gardening guide, this special book is a blossoming celebration of Aotearoa's unique natural heritage. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Song of the Saltings by Rachael King $28
On the isolated island of Brack, the people live by an ancient bargain: every year, a sacrifice must be made to the Glimm, the creature that haunts the salt marshes.Eight years after the monster spared her, 16-year-old Lotta tends the Council's sacrificial horses and keeps her distance from the villagers who whisper about her fate. But something is stirring. The island is dying. It hums beneath her feet, and a song threads through her dreams. Is the Glimm calling Lotta back? A chance encounter with Moss, a village outcast, will change both their lives, and the fate of the island, forever. To uncover Brack's deepest secrets, Lotta and Moss will need to trust each other and risk everything they hold dear.Because on Brack, monsters come in many forms. [Paperback]
”Utterly gripping, lyrical and haunting.” —Rachael Craw

Human Capital: The tragedy of the education commons by Guy Standing $30
Does the education system make better people? Why are so many — teachers and students alike — stressed and dissatisfied? Do we need to revive real education? Ideally, education is about the pursuit of truth, beauty and morality. But in the last few decades, a perilous fixation with ‘human capital’ — skills, knowledge and aptitudes required for the labour market — has trampled over curricula, schools and universities. Rather than learning how to think critically about the world, from cradle to grave students are trained to be more effective workers, to make more money, and to serve an hegemonic ideology. Teachers and researchers are pressed to serve those goals. Standing shows us how education — intrinsically a common public good — has been enclosed, privatised, financialised and corrupted, turned into an instrument of societal control, not human emancipation, weakening democracy, not strengthening it. Human Capital charts how the education industry largely serves commercial interests, not its teachers and students, and considers how to revive its lost values, to save society for the common good. Very timely. [Paperback]
”Urgent and compelling, Human Capital is a rallying cry for a radically different kind of education system — one that puts imagination and empathy at its heart, and genuinely equips young people for the challenges ahead, instead of the current narrow joyless focus on 'schooling', where success is measured in money and status alone. A searing attack on the 'education industry', Standing's latest book should be required reading for every education minister.” —Caroline Lucas

Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros $28
What is the difference between hearing and listening? Does sound have consciousness? Can you imagine listening beyond the edge of your own imagination? In response to the anti-war movements of the 1960s, pioneering musician and composer Pauline Oliveros began to expand the way she made music, experimenting with meditation, movement and activism in her compositions. Fascinated by the role that sound and consciousness play in our daily lives, Oliveros developed a series of Sonic Meditations that would eventually lead to the creation of Deep Listening — a practice for healing and transformation open to all, rooted in her musicianship. Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix: one in which compassion and peace form the basis for our actions in the world. First published at the turn of the millennium, this timely edition brings Oliveros's futuristic vision — blending technology and spirituality — together with a new Foreword and Introduction by Laurie Anderson and IONE. [Paperback]
"Pauline's Quantum Listening is a clearly worded manifesto advocating for the practice of Deep Listening - the practice of practice. Accessing both the focal and the global at once makes us Futurists too, both creators and recipients of the newness, the peace and the health we long for. A champion of the underserved and underrepresented, Pauline dares us to embrace change, the unfamiliar and even the unknown. She wants us to be bold enough to imagine a benevolent society that can embrace technology to create a sublime music." —IONE
"Quantum Listening is not really a Buddhist exercise. But like Buddhism, Deep Listening puts experience before everything else. It emphasises both detail and scope of, in Pauline's words, 'the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one's own thoughts'. 'We're not a nation of listeners,' she wrote. To say the least! Deep Listening is inside your head and empathetic. Both focal and global." —Laurie Anderson
>>The difference between hearing and listening.
>>Deep Listening.

Edith: The girl who was 100 years old by Catharina Valckx $20
A philosophical adventure story for early readers that playfully combines fairytale with absurd comedy to ask a big question about what makes a good life. As a newborn, Edith received two gifts: the ability to bring any object to life and eternal childhood. That’s why today, 100 years later, Edith is celebrating her centenary as a seven-year-old. What will she wish for this time? Certainly a new life—being seven forever has its downside. On her birthday, Edith sets off to find the fairy who bewitched her and reverse the spell. She takes her only friends, a wise dog and a talking lemon. Fully illustrated in colour, this one-of-a-kind chapter book bursts with good things: the dry wit of a faithful dog, a fairytale adventure, camping, boating, friendship and danger, and a question that matters. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside.

The Chief and the Empire: The incredible story of Te Pahi, the Māori trailblazer betrayed by the Crown by Eugene Bingham $40
The Chief and the Empire uncovers the extraordinary true tale of Te Tai Tokerau rangatira Te Pahi — the first influential Māori leader to cross the Tasman — whose curiosity about the Pākehā world forged alliances, saved lives, and ultimately cost him his own. On a visit to Sydney in 1805 Te Pahi was feted as a celebrity. He built close ties with the Governor of NSW, Philip Gidley King, even staying as a guest in the Governor's house for several months. He also met the missionary, Samuel Marsden, both men recognising Te Pahi's remarkable character and mana.Te Pahi examined the budding NSW colony and its brutal justice system with intelligence and compassion — and shocked King, by condemning the death sentences for a group of men accused of stealing food, ultimately sparing some of their lives. But history did not reward his courage. On returning home, Te Pahi was wrongly blamed for a deadly attack on a British ship, the Boyd, and killed, his name darkened for generations.Part history, part true-crime investigation, this is a riveting account of Te Pahi's remarkable journey and early Māori-Pākehā encounters, the injustice that destroyed a leader, and the unexpected legacy carried by the descendants of the men he fought to protect. [Paperback]

Tsundoku: The Japanese art of collecting books by Taiki Raito Pym $40
Drawing on the evocative Japanese term tsundoku — first coined in the Meiji era to describe the growing stacks of unread books that accumulate around devoted readers — this insightful and warmly humorous book reframes what some might see as clutter or guilt as a deeply meaningful way of living. From the tactile pleasure of flipping through pages to the quiet ritual of rearranging overflowing shelves, Tsundoku explores the psychology, culture, and poetry behind the irresistible urge to collect and cherish books. It offers meditations on the joy of choosing and buying books, the rebellion against reading lists, creative ways to organise your shelves, foolproof excuses for sneaking in yet another new title, techniques for remembering what you've read, and the guilty — but glorious — pleasure of re-reading. Above all, this philosophy reminds us that we do not necessarily have to have read all the books we own to love them unconditionally. Feelings of guilt, be gone! Unread books can be even more fascinating because they take us on wonderful journeys, and speak to us regardless, whether we open them or keep them closed. We know that books are a cure for the soul: just touching one, smelling one, or leafing through one makes us feel better immediately. [Hardback]

The Good Settler: Essays from other people’s lands by Richard Shaw $40
”Where once I saw a view as I drove around the Taranaki coast along State Highway 45, I now see confiscated land from an invasion road. The creation story I used to subscribe to, the one in which hard-working people came here and settled the land, now jars. Weirdly, even the lawn looks different. The form of things just won't settle.” So writes Richard Shaw in his third book examining colonisation. Both have been warmly welcomed by readers and this third volume of powerful essays, with its wide lens, will not disappoint. As he says, “Growing numbers of Pākehā find themselves standing on restless ground these days: they, too, are seeing things differently, and in these pages you will also hear their voices as we reach — fitfully and painfully, individually and collectively — for an accommodation with our colonial past.” [Paperback]
>>The Unsettled.
>>The Forgotten Coast.

The Swedish Cookbook: Lagom flavours for the modern kitchen by Niklas Ekstedt $55
The best Swedish cuisine starts with a touch of lagom. Meaning 'balanced' or 'just right', lagom informs the culinary traditions of Sweden — the fresh, bright ingredients in its recipes, and the rich, harmonious flavours that come together on its tables. Following the lagom philosophy, Michelin-starred chef Niklas Ekstedt has perfected classic and modern Swedish cooking alike, and in The Swedish Cookbook, he shares his best recipes from everyday meals to special feasts, showing home cook how to master it all. These are fuss-free recipes handed down through generations, full of nourishment and sure to become family favourites. So whether you're a seasoned cook or just starting your culinary journey, it's time to find your lagom in the kitchen and savour the delightful simplicity of Swedish cuisine. Swedish Meatballs with Potatoes & Pressed Cucumber; Swedish Waffles Two Ways; Gravlax; Cabbage Salad with Blueberries & Shaved Frozen Feta Cheese'; Potato Pancakes with Lingonberries & Sour Cream; Rhubarb Pie with Vanilla Sauce; Cardamom Buns… [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

The Original by Nell Stevens $40
Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle’s home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls. Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena. After years missing at sea, Grace’s cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live. Deftly-plotted and shimmering with distinctive intelligence, style and wit, The Original is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original. [Now in paperback]
”A marvel of a novel.” —Ali Smith
”What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell herself.” —Olivia Laing
”A delightful, playful puzzle of a novel, and a brilliant twist on the nineteenth century orphan-makes-good story. The Original asks whether, sometimes, faking it is the right thing to do.” —Claire Fuller
”A wonderful novel about identity, creativity, money and belonging. It's so witty and propulsive you will forget how brilliantly constructed it is, this tale that brims with the beauty of art, of how to triumph in a difficult world.” —Jessie Burton
”Intricate, and endlessly intriguing. The reader is kept guessing until the very end; as Stevens deftly raises the stakes, the pages seem to turn themselves. The narrative captivates intellectually, too, probing questions of authenticity, imitation, and self-realisation, in love and in art. The overall effect is of an author boldly stepping out on her own, pursuing themes that were hers all along.” —Observer
>>Written by the light of a lava lamp.

Between Dreams: Resistance and representation in Asian Aotearoa edited by Grace Gassin (林素真) $50
This landmark collection presents fresh, progressive perspectives on what it means to be ‘Asian’ in Aotearoa. Te Papa curator Grace Gassin draws together journalists, researchers, activists, filmmakers and political commentators to relate experiences of living between cultures and to explore the legacies of New Zealand’s diverse Asian diaspora histories. Featuring a broad range of taonga from the museum’s collections, this timely book brings these social histories into focus, revealing shared themes of resistance and representation that offer ways to reckon with the past and imagine new futures. Contributions by: Umi Asaka, Mohan Dutta, Christopher Fung, Rebekah Jaung, Tze Ming Mok, Keith Ng, Sun-Min Elle Park, Sapna Samant, Balamohan Shingade, Isaac Te Awa (Ngāpuhi, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu, Waitaha) and Sidney Wong. [Flexibound]
>>Look inside.
>>Lip service.

Attention-Seeking Behaviour by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo $45
The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behaviour, a woman in her mid-twenties, is “complex, creative and nasty.” She is also, by her own admission, a compulsive liar. Trying to break this habit for the sake of Normal Ben, an honest and uncomplicated man, she looks back over her life. By turning to writing she attempts an honest reckoning with her long history of deception, its psychological roots, and the terrible cost it has exacted on her romantic and professional relationships. But can we believe a word she says? Hilarious, sexy, and politically astute, Attention-Seeking Behaviour is at once a personal confessional and a critical history of lie detection methods and their role in modern policing. Blending fiction and non-fiction — memoir, novel, and essay — it wields confession shamelessly while positively embracing the proximity of literature and lying. [Hardback]
”I loved Aea Varfis-van Warmelo's Attention-Seeking Behaviour. Aea speaks with such clarity to the mutability of memory and self-narration, and the painful difficulty of breaking out of one's own patterns and specific self. Her honest look at lying has produced a novel which is both amazingly playful and deeply serious; warm and destabilising, intellectually rigorous and aesthetically stylish.” —Harriet Armstrong
”Attention-Seeking Behaviour is a book to be read for its sentences alone. Each line reveals the author's control over fiction's delicate veils, shaping a mercurial, lyrical reality that embroils the reader into an eerily unstable sense of certainty. Through quiet inversions, diminishments, and disillusions of account, Varfis-van Warmelo offers a voice that is all brain, all mammal-suspended within the mechanics of social life, yet governed by a vulnerable, perhaps universal will to power. The result is painterly and polymorphous: a book that does so much more than seek attention, it renewed what I now hope to find in the contemporary novel altogether.” —Eve Esfandiari-Denney
”Sexy, frightening, immaculately written and mercilessly perceptive. It's also the most exacting, eviscerating self-critique since St Augustine. Left me with a deeper understanding of myself that I sort of wish I didn't have. I loved every page.” —Luke Kennard
>>Making the reader complicit.

ATTENSITY! A manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement by The Friends of Attention $50
A rallying cry to fight the commodification of human attention, with the tools we need to reclaim our humanity, by a group of writers, artists, and activists in the vanguard of the movement. We all feel it — something is seriously wrong. Our attention — that essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world — is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. The heedless exploitation of this vital capacity by a handful of tech companies is harming us all, reducing our very selfhood to that which can be quantified, bought, and sold — and shaking the foundations of our democracy. To push back against this 'human fracking’, we need more than individual will-power or isolated efforts. We need a movement of collective resistance. Such a movement is beginning to bloom, and in this radical, first-of-its-kind guide, The Friends of Attention show us how to join the fight. We meet welders, nurses, poets, and surfers, all of whom are engaged in attentional practices. We learn to seek out sanctuaries — theatres and museums, houses of worship, dance parties — where together we can take refuge from the frackers. Drawing on a rich legacy of critical intellectuals and the creative wisdom of diverse traditions, Attensity! takes our apocalyptic present, turns it on its head, and reveals new vistas of human flourishing. [Hardback]
”Attensity! reminds us that how we attend to the world shapes what the world can be for us, and for one another. With a lively, even joyful blend of philosophical seriousness and practical imagination, it invites us to see attention not as a private asset to be hoarded but as a shared capacity to be cultivated and protected.” —Kwame Anthony Appiah
”At a time when most reports are of the world getting worse, here's a zinging, erudite book that arrives with the happy news that one thing can get better if we put our minds to it. Attensity! is about how to reclaim one of our most powerful and valuable qualities — our attention-through a path back to the human things that matter: community, care, imagination, and art. It's both a keen historical analysis and a call to movement-building from a group of people who have spent years working in the libraries and the classrooms but also, with the shared force of their attention, in the ever-changing streets.” —Nathan Heller
>>Visit the Friends of Attention.

Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn $33
A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus. A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine's bones. Bouquets are found all over a museum. Teenagers gather to dissect a human body. Brimming with compassion and thrumming with energy, these stories are scrupulous in their attention to detail, epic in their scope. In this bravura debut collection, Liadan Ní Chuinn delivers a blend of the personal and the political. [Paperback]
”Here's a writer who knows how to swerve gracefully from the expected. Her work is instinctive, intriguing and truly exciting. I cannot wait to see what's in store for her.” —Lisa McInerney
”It's a long time since I've read a short story collection where I've felt such an aching tenderness for the people within its pages. These stories are rich. They have heart and weight. This is singular, controlled, dextrous writing from someone who is now one of my favourite writers.” —Wendy Erskine
”These are exceptional stories, stark yet richly textured and told in a voice that is at once plain-spoken and lyrical. Liadan Ni Chuinn is the real deal.” —Louise Kennedy
”An extraordinary book by an extraordinary author who refuses to look the other way. Ni Chuinn's incantatory sentences quiver like seismographs, registering the quakes and ruptures that can crack a life in two.” —Thomas Morris
>>Causing harm, or failing to prevent it.

The Social Photo: On photography and social media by Nathan Jurgenson $27
With the rise of the smart phone and social media, cameras have become ubiquitous, infiltrating nearly every aspect of social life. The glowing camera screen is the lens by which many of us apprehend and communicate our experience. But our thinking about photography has been slow to catch-up; this major fixture of everyday life is still often treated in the terms of art or journalism. In The Social Photo, social theorist Nathan Jurgenson develops bold new ways of understanding the transformations wrought by these image-making and sharing technologies and the cultural objects they have ushered in: the selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo. Jurgenson shows hows these devices and platforms have remade the world and our understanding of ourselves within it. [Paperback]
”Like Susan Sontag's On Photography to which it self-consciously responds, The Social Photo is slim, hard-bitten and picture-free. For if the average photo is ever dumber, photography matters even more; the social photo, in Mr. Jurgenson's phrase, has effected a "fusion of media and bodies" that has made every gallerygoer a cyborg.” —Jason Farago, New York Times
”’Social photos are not primarily about making media but about sharing eyes,' Nathan Jurgenson writes in this important and timely book. Grappling with the significance of the billions of largely ephemeral images that inhabit social media, he persuasively delineates many of the key boundaries between what was previously understood to be photography and the contemporary image environment.” —Fred Ritchin, author of Bending the Frame
>>Why this moment will be mis-remembered.
>>Susan Sontag On Photography.

Representations of the Intellectual by Edward W. Said $33
In these impassioned and inspiring essays, based on his 1993 Reith Lectures, Edward Said explores the role of the intellectual in the modern world. Are intellectuals merely the servants of special interests or do they have a larger responsibility? In these wide-ranging essays, one of our most brilliant and fiercely independent public thinkers addresses this question with extraordinary eloquence. Said sees the intellectual as an exile and amateur whose role it is 'to speak the truth to power' even at the risk of ostracism or imprisonment. Drawing on the examples of Jonathan Swift and Theodor Adorno, Robert Oppenheimer and Henry Kissinger, Vietnam and the Gulf War, Said explores the implications of this idea and shows what happens when intellectuals succumb to the lures of money, power, or specialisation. [Paperback with French flaps]
”For all that's changed, Said's principles for a worthwhile intellectual life — in particular, remaining independent despite the financial temptations offered by governments or institutions, and being relentlessly honest, whatever the risks — are as vital as ever.” —Juliet Jacques, Novara Media
”What is the task of the intellectual at a time when, at the heart of liberal democracies, genocide is normalised and protest suppressed? Said understood that the intellectual's position is not easy to occupy, certainly not with any kind of consistency. There is no template, and no guarantee that the intellectual's willingness to put themselves on the line will make a difference in the short term. Because they cannot trust institutions, states, or religions, conscience must be their guide. But the resonance of Said's books in our particular moment — the fact that they matter in certain respects now even more than they did at the time of their composition — shows that short-term calculus is not always the most relevant measure of their value. Sometimes, the intellectual must also look to the future.” —Rebecca Ruth Gould, Los Angeles Review of Books
”Representations of the Intellectual is a masterly meditation on some of the most important questions with which intellectuals must grapple, notably their relation to power and their responsibility to speak the truth out of a commitment to a bedrock of universal values. It speaks of such issues in a way that is satisfying and at the same time whets the reader's appetite for more, surely the sign of an important work.” —Rashid Khalidi

hello, world? by Anna Poletti $40
Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade. Still adjusting to life outside Australia, they turn to the internet to find a new anchor. Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal meetsLászló, a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a dominant guide. His dating-app profile thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It's a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfil. But to do it, Seasonal must forget the hard earned ways of keeping themself safe they developed in the milieu of violence and sexual threat that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia. At home, men were usually a threat. What if the roles were reversed? Seasonal and László embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realise they are staging separate confrontations with domination: Seasonal finds they must confront what it has meant to be raised as woman in Australia, while László stages his own confrontation with his decision to leave Viktor Orbn's Hungary. As the two improvise a theatre of domination in search of freedom, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for. A reverse novel of education, where two people try to unlearn everything they think they know about intimacy, Anna Poletti's hello, world? dares to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality. [Paperback]
“The delight in this book is not just in how closely observed and felt its themes are, but how closely thought as well.” —McKenzie Wark
”A stunning and radical book.” —Chris Kraus
>>Glitching the binary.
>>Not knowing how to keep warm.
>>Inconvenient and ungovernable.

The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain $37
In the early 1960s, in a small town near Dartmoor, the church bells ring. The people of North Tawton go about their days, catching glimpses of one another's lives. There's the local GP, who knows more about his patients than he would sometimes prefer. There's the young shop assistant at Kestrels, who understands that the ladies who come there for a new outfit sometimes hope to find a new self. There's the tenant farm labourer who rings the tower bells at the church three times a week, the notes harmonious and clashing rippling out across the rooftops of the town. Amid all these lives, a young couple move into focus. New to the town with their small daughter, they have escaped London for a quieter existence in the thatched house beside the church, Court Green. The life they intend to build here out of fresh lino tiles, second-hand furniture painted with hearts and flowers, and expertly-cooked suppers for weekend guests will be a good and happy one. The Daffodil Days depicts a pivotal year in the marriage of one of the 20th-century literature's most infamous couples, witnessed by the people they lived among. It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of this enigmatic pair, refracted through the rich inner lives of a rural community caught if only for a moment in their light. [Paperback]
”Beautiful, affecting and deeply impressive, this is an ingeniously constructed novel, told slant. I loved it.” —Louise Kennedy
”An exceptional novel, with shades of Hilary Mantel. Helen Bain takes the familiar and makes it utterly new. I loved it.” —Meg Mason*
”A luminous, deeply researched debut, The Daffodil Days reimagines Sylvia Plath's Court Green period through a chorus of village voices — letting the known story fall away until what remains feels bracingly human and close. Helen Bain's prose is exact and alive, and the novel builds with a quietly devastating inexorable force you can't look away from.” —Paula McLain
>>A free, supple life.
>>The injured thumb.

The Asset Class: How private equity turned capitalism against itself by Hettie O’Brien $40
You don't know their names, but they own the house you rent. They own your hospitals, nurseries and care homes, the media you consume and the companies you work for. They even own the tools your union uses to fight back. Business is a contest — and they say their people are built to win. But when does competition become a struggle to the death? For decades, private equity firms have infiltrated every corner of modern life. Wielding debt as a weapon, they push vital services into crisis. Their cover story: that this is merely the 'creative destruction' essential to growth. Old-school capitalists say they're dismantling everything that made our economies work. In The Asset Class, reporter Hettie O'Brien penetrates a hidden empire of billion-dollar deals and covert financial warfare. From Copenhagen to San Francisco, Barcelona to the Yorkshire Dales, she follows the money, the ideological roots and the trail of destruction. What she finds is chilling: private equity isn't just reshaping the economy — it's selling out the foundations of Western society. The new owners think they can hide in the shadows. But the owned are fighting back. Pertinent. [Paperback]
”Private equity has quietly taken control of the foundations of everyday life, spreading insecurity and 'enshittifying' everything from coffee shops to care homes. O'Brien reveals its arcane dynamics by telling the stories of the fascinating — and often unscrupulous — characters at its heart. This is essential reading.” —Grace Blakely, author of Vulture Capitalism
”The story of how money to fund housing, social care and hospitals was captured by the few. We should call this what it is: a legalised smash-and-grab raid on public infrastructure whilst governments, many bought with donations, sat and watched. A wild and engaging ride.” —Jolyon Maugham, author of Bringing Down Goliath
”A scary book. Through a dazzling investigation, it shows how the secretive industry of private equity has extended its dominion over everyday life and is now tearing apart the very fabric of our society. However, it is ultimately empowering. It clearly tells us how this industry works and what its pressure points are, knowing which is the first step towards fighting back. The struggle to rebuild a decent society should start with this book.” —Ha-Joon Chang

The Noma Guide to Building Flavour: Including recipes and techniques for sauces, butters, broths, reductions, preserves, vinaigrettes, flavoured salts, and infused oils by the Noma Test Kitchen $90
The long-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling The Noma Guide to Fermentation offers more than 150 recipes for infused oils, vinaigrettes, fudges, spice mixes, rubs, sauces, and other flavour-boosting condiments that professional and home cooks can use to elevate every part of their cooking. These are the components that define the inimitable taste of Noma, including iconic preparations such as roasted kelp salt, smoked egg yolk sauce, Nordic pesto, and lacto-koji beurre blanc. Most of the recipes are illustrated with step-by-step photo sequences detailing the techniques needed to transform surprisingly familiar ingredients into elements of Noma's distinctive cuisine. Noma uses these recipes to create elevated preparations for the restaurant (a selection of plated-dish photos are included), but readers — whether professionals or avid home cooks — will find plenty of inspiration for their own kitchens, aided by do-able suggestions from Noma chefs. In conversational essays and anecdotes woven throughout the book, Rene Redzepi shares how staff members from around the globe have influenced Noma's flavour palette, and how Noma chefs take pristine seasonal ingredients and blend, grind, dry, smoke, macerate, reduce and otherwise elicit the most potent and desirable flavours that make up the sensory language of Noma. [Hardback]
"Brillat-Savarin once wrote that the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star. The Noma team have developed an entire galaxy of flavours in this new book, giving chefs everywhere the vocabulary to speak — and cook — an entirely new language in the kitchen." —Jose Andres
>>Look inside!

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Seven, Or, How to play a game without rules by Joanna Kavenna $40
Who decides the rules of the games we play? In August 2007, or thereabouts, a young philosopher leaves Oslo, heading for Greece, on a mission to find Theodoros Apostolakis, the head of the Society of Lost Things. Fortunately, Apostolakis isn't lost, but everything else is: ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful box, once used to play the world-famous game of Seven. The hunt for this small thing, among the countless lost things, becomes an absurdist quest through time and space: from the earliest human societies to the advent of AI. Told, shared and mythologised by our narrator, along with a wild cast of dreamers, philosophers, poets, rebels and optimists, Seven is an extraordinary, uplifting journey through an ever darkening world. [Hardback]
"Joanna Kavenna. What a writer." —Ali Smith
"To surrender yourself to the revelations of life and then to come back with the assertions of prose: that is the new heroism of the woman writer, and Kavenna is in the vanguard of it." —Rachel Cusk
"Joanna Kavenna's two decades as a writer have seen her beat a gorgeously unconventional path through a plethora of subjects and genres, from polar exploration to motherhood to economic inequality, and from travelogue to academic satire to technological dystopia." —A K Blakemore, The Guardian
"The most brilliant novel I've read in ages, part academic satire, part philosophy of AI and gaming, all hubris-puncturing wisdom worn with such levity that I was cackling from start to finish." —Adam Rutherford
”Kavenna is a writer of genuine elegance, intelligence and understated emotions. It is encouraging that there are those who still follow the pellucid postmodernism of Italo Calvino." —Stuart Kelly, Spectator
"Philosophical concepts and dizzying speculations on the nature of reality have always featured in Kavenna's novels, but here she ramps up the comedy, interleaving erudite playfulness with characters who are as believable as they are eccentric." —Suzi Feay, Financial Times
"Thoroughly pleasurable." —Camilla Grudova, The Telegraph
>>A madcap journey to the limits of philosophy.
>>The novelists who predicted our present.

Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer: i te ao o te reo by Witi Ihimaera Smiler $45
Novelist, memoirist and playwright Witi Ihimaera decided, at the age of eighty, to dive back into the water and spend a year full time at Te Wānanga Takiura, immersing himself in his own language, in te reo Māori.
This book tells the story of this kaikaukau, this swimmer, and his year i te ao o te reo — of sinking and floating; of loss and shame, connection and wairua; of fathers and teachers, kuia and friends. A riveting and revealing memoir, Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer sparkles with whaikōrero and whakataukī and is written for all — Māori and Pākehā, fluent reo Māori speakers and those for whom the language is still a mystery, a dream, an aspiration. It is the story of a Māori New Zealander reclaiming his voice, history and whakapapa in contemporary Aotearoa. Of becoming Witi Ihimaera Smiler and drawing closer to his desire to write a novel in te reo for his beloved father Tom and his tīpuna. [Hardback]
”This personal work of exposure, confession and humility is about learning to stand "at the centre of your own ignorance," becoming a student again in (relatively) old age in order to address one of the key issues of colonisation, the removal of language and its embedded cultural knowledge. When Witi says, ‘I have started at the beginning again,’ it is a rallying call for all of us to overcome our feelings of shame and inadequacy, to take up the challenge of embarking on ‘a new and enthralling journey."' —Paula Morris
”E poho kereru ana ahau i a Witi, i tona kaha, i tona manawaroa, i tona ngakau titikaha hoki ki te u ki te ako i tona reo rangatira. I smiled and laughed, working my way through Witi's new pukapuka in Maori, imagining him standing to present these whakapuaki at Takiura. Witi's stories about his upbringing, his kainga at Waituhi, ona kuia, ona matua, tona tamaititanga, and all of it, in te reo Maori, are a true inspiration. Nana hoki te korero, okea wheketia! Koia kei a koe, e te hoa.” —Hemi Kelly

Troll: A love story by Johanna Sinisalo (translated from Finnish by Herbert Lomas) $28
Angel, a young photographer, comes home to find a group of drunken teenagers in the courtyard of his apartment building, taunting a wounded, helpless young troll. Wanting to protect what he sees as a helpless creature, he takes it in, blissfully unaware of the chaos that awaits. As Angel dives into research on his strange new companion, it becomes clear that the troll has a powerful connection to all of humanity’s most forbidden feelings — and it begins to make Angel cross boundaries he never imagined he would. Beguilingly original and strange, Troll: A Love Story is an unforgettable story of humanity’s relationship to wild things. [Paperback]
”Blame global warming, but trolls are moving out of legend to scavage at the outskirts of Finnish cities. Sinisalos strange and erotic tales peer at the crooked world through a peephole. The troll comes to life after hours, unleashing glittering desires. Is the troll becoming more human (hurt, jealousy), or does he merely reveal our own trollishness?” —Guardian
”An imaginative and engaging novel of urban fantasy. Overlapping narrative voices nicely underscore the moral of Sinisalos ingeniously constructed fable: The stuff of ancient legend shadows with rather unnerving precision the course of unloosened postmodern desire.” —Washington Post
>>Subjective reality.

Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh $38
Calcutta, September 1969. Varsha Gupta wants fish for her lunch. Her family can't understand it; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don't allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother. Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist who has been investigating what are known as 'cases of the reincarnation type' for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations. Half a century later, Varsha's therapeutic case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. And as Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface. Travelling between late-sixties Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel about family, fate and our fragile planet. [Paperback]
”Amitav Ghosh's intellectual panache and serene mastery of form make him one of the last great practitioners of the novel of ideas. Ghost-Eye is the most captivating expression yet of an imagination unfettered by the protocols of the liberal-humanist novel: a novel that explores the very real, if still oddly underexplored, world of the spirit that hundreds of millions of people inhabit simultaneously with its material counterpart.” —Pankaj Mishra

Zines NZ: Punk to present by Bryce Galloway $60
Lo-fi, hand-built and produced in small editions by devoted zinesters, zines are an ever-evolving and enduring publishing phenomenon. This lively book tells the Aotearoa zine story, from our first punk-rock music zine in 1980 to the plethora of contemporary zinefests of the early twenty-first century. Zines NZ: Punk to present is written by a zine devotee and is packed with hundreds of images of zine covers and spreads, most of which charm with lopsided collaged energy and all of which possess a singular vision. Zines are so often ephemeral and elusive, and this book's tribute to so many rich and distinctive voices ensures that their history is not lost. A stunning archive, with full commentaries. [Flexibound]
>>Look inside!

The Very Secretive and Passionate Stella Miles Franklin by Alexandra Lapierre (translated from French by Tina Kover) $38
The first novel written about the enigmatic literary legend. Australia, 1901. Just twenty years old and the daughter of struggling bush farmers, Miles Franklin pulls off the impossible-publishing My Brilliant Career, a fiery, fearless debut that takes the English-speaking world by storm. She hides behind a male pseudonym, but when her true identity is revealed, the backlash is swift and brutal. Alone, broke, and undaunted, Miles sails for America. What follows is a wild, inspiring journey: years of activism, deep friendships, exhilarating love affairs, and an unshakable belief in the power of words. From the suffrage movement in Chicago to the cultural salons of Europe, she never stops writing, never stops fighting. Eventually, she returns to Australia — to critics who had written her off — and delivers a dazzling comeback. Today, her name is synonymous with Australia's most prestigious literary awards: the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize. But behind the legend was a woman fiercely devoted to her freedom, her craft, and her ideals. [Paperback]

Berlin Shuffle by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (translated from German by Philip Boehm) $38
The author of The Passenger's blistering portrait of a divided society that would give way to fascism. Berlin, 1920s: a beacon of culture and hedonism, but a political mess. The streets are crowded with war veterans, beggars, prostitutes and madmen, desperately chasing any means to secure a few marks or a roof over their heads. Come nighttime, a rag-tag group descends on the Jolly Huntsman pub to dance and drown their cares in all the schnapps they can afford. But in this society on the brink, pleasure all too easily erupts into violence. Written when he was twenty-two years old, Boschwitz's first novel displays his extraordinary talent for capturing Germany's self-destruction, which would tragically engulf him only five years later. [Paperback]
”The book's greatest strength is showing, in day-to-day terms an atmosphere in which a fascist government could arise. Many of the novel's concerns overlap with those of the present day.” —Kirkus
”A darkly funny anthropological study of what it is like to be one of the ordinary, little people trapped in an escalating social nightmare.” —Sunday Times

Frostlines: An epic exploration of the transforming Arctic by Neil Shea $39
The Arctic was once a place seemingly frozen in time. Now, while the old cold world can still be glimpsed in the herds of caribou, the hidden lives of wolves, and the hunting skill of an Inupiat elder, there is a new Arctic emerging. Shea begins his journey with the wolves of Canada’s Ellesmere Island, and travels among the Indigenous Netsilingmiut and Tlicho peoples of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. In the Barren Lands, perched on an esker, he watches bears, or Big Men. In Alaska he tracks the patterns of caribou, now shifting after thousands of years of predictability, and in the European Arctic, he explores the new Cold War that is rising between Russia, China, Europe, and the United States over who controls the pole, and who will reap its riches as the ice melts. Frostlines is an expansive yet intimate revelation of the Arctic during a time of crisis, and a journey along the threshold of this stunning and sometimes frightening world. What Shea finds is not one Arctic but many. [Paperback]
”Magnificent and moving. This stunning book — part travelogue, part history, part popular science — will give you a new appreciation for a place, and its people, and how they together are confronting the upheaval of the modern world.” —Steve Brusatte

The Encyclopedia of Ugly Fashion: A hilarious introspective of history’s best worst fashion tends by Karolina Żebrowska $55
Dive into history's forgotten fashion mistakes with this hilarious collection of hideous clothing trends throughout history. Filled with the biggest style flops across the decades, this book is a culmination of fashion history that will make readers ask, what were they thinking? Delivered through the comedic authorial voice of YouTuber and fashion historian Karolina Zebrowska, this book will give readers a peek back in time at looks like Bullet Bras, Calash Bonnets, Sock Garters, and Venetian Stilts. Complete with caricatures from centuries past, Karolina depicts each piece in all its glory, or lack thereof. Through historical context interwoven with comedic quips rooted in her own perspective, each trend is brought back to life. Describing such absurd historical pieces as the Liripipe Hood, her archival, curator lens allows her to analyze not just why people wore what they did, but why it went so wrong. She depicts 18th century dresses ruining silhouettes and 14th century tailed hoods worn as status symbols, all with her acerbic wit and eye for design. With Karolina's fashion expertise and hilarious voice, taking a look at the past's most regrettable fashion trends has never been more fun. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Desperate.
>>The Instagram feed.

Why Look at Animals? by John Berger $30
”As frequent as the calls of animals in a zoo are the cries of children demanding: Where is he? Why doesn't he move? Is he dead?” John Berger broke new ground with his penetrating writings on life, art and how we see the world around us. Here he explores how the ancient relationship between man and nature has been broken in the modern consumer age, with the animals that used to be at the centre of our existence now marginalized and reduced to spectacle. [Paperback]
>>Listen to Berger.
>>A good companion volume to Kate Zambreno’s Animal Stories.

Art Cure: The science of how the arts transform our health by Daisy Fancourt $40
Many of us consider making and consuming art to be a hobby, or even a luxury. But what if arts engagement — from classical music to salsa, poetry to pop concerts, galleries to graffiti — was in fact one of our most powerful tools for unlocking health and happiness? What if art could help you live longer - and even save your life? Fancourt reveals the life-changing power of the arts — Songs support the architectural development of children's brains. Creative hobbies help our brains to stay resilient against dementia. Visual art and music act just like drugs to reduce depression, stress, and pain. Dance build new neural pathways for people with brain injuries. Going to live music events, museums, exhibitions, and the theatre decreases our risk of future loneliness and frailty. Engaging in the arts improves the functioning of every major organ system in the body. Art helps us not only to survive, but to thrive and flourish. Informed by the results of decades of scientific studies, Art Cure explains why the arts — alongside diet, sleep, exercise and nature — are the forgotten fifth pillar of health, and gives you the tools to write your own 'arts prescription'. [Paperback]
”This rigorously researched, scientifically informed book is a revelation. It could not be more timely, nor make a stronger, more urgent case for placing the arts at the centre of our communities.” —Melvyn Bragg
>>Other books short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
>>Means and ends.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

The Valley: Crime and punishment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel $40
”There were two days to Christmas and Lewis felt like everything was spinning out of control. He wondered what he would say to the judge this time. His client, Rikihana, was already on multiple shoplifting charges. What’s a few more? Lewis thought. These supermarkets were still making a killing.” It’s late 2020. Rikihana Wallace, a prolific shoplifter of no fixed abode, is back in prison with little chance of bail. Nathan Morley, unemployed, is facing burglary charges and hoping his other, as yet undetected, offences don’t catch up with him. Lewis Skerrett, their overstretched legal aid lawyer, is trying to do right by them both. The culmination of over two years of field research and hundreds of hours of interviews, The Valley follows these three Hutt Valley men through courtrooms, prison, hospital, rehab, boarding houses and welfare offices. Told largely in verbatim dialogue, this up-close and personal account brings the realities of the New Zealand criminal justice system to life through the voices of those who experience it first-hand. [Paperback]
”The Valley is an extraordinary psychodrama, untangling the justice system from its impacts on the people who witness it, work within it and are subject to it. Asher Emanuel has made a nationally important contribution to literary reportage, policy analysis and our collective understanding of class society.” —Morgan Godfery 
”This is a once-in-a-generation contribution to New Zealand writing about justice, class and wider society. The Valley combines meticulous reporting and deep thinking on the daily grind of the justice system. The result is a monumental book of stories that will stay with you long after you put it down.” —Max Harris 
”This is journalism at its finest — immersive, meticulous, honest and brave. Asher Emanuel brings the messy, gritty, unfair, uneven, imprecise human reality of the criminal justice system into the light. A unique and important new book for Aotearoa New Zealand.” —Rebecca Macfie 
”The public’s understanding of the criminal justice system is largely shaped by the media, which repeatedly amplifies the voices of politicians and the police. This book cuts through that distorted narrative by giving voice to those on the system’s frontlines.” —Aaron Smale
”I think it's going to be a really important book.” —Toby Manhire
”Possibly even a masterpiece.” —Steve Braunias
>>A new standard of immersive jouirnalism.
>>Join our online discussion in June.

Transcription by Ben Lerner $33
The narrator of Ben Lerner's new novel has travelled to Providence, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor, and the father of his college friend, Max.  But after the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to each other, that store or obliterate the memories that make us who we are. [Paperback]
”Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more.” —Max Porter
”This may be the best novel you'll read all year: brilliant and incisive; intelligent and elegant.” —Telegraph
”A short, smart novel about parenthood and influence; about how much of our lives we have ceded to the black rectangles in our pockets.” —Observer
”Lerner is a linguistic magician and here is another triumphant and beautiful sleight of hand.” —Daisy Johnson
”Slender and subtle.” —LRB
”Transcription is both dizzyingly accomplished and disarmingly tender — an acutely elegant and forensic meditation on the disorientation of what it means to be alive now.” —Sophie Mackintosh
”'Novels of ideas' don't need to wear them on their sleeve. Beneath its superficially simple tale of a man visiting his old mentor, this one has impressive depths: it touches on old age, loss and the double-edged sword of modern technology. Lerner is already, at just 46, established as one of America's leading writers. This book proves why.” —Telegraph
>>Stupifying and overwhelming.
>>Projecting ourselves into the future.
>>The impossible interview.
>>Changing our minds.
>>Also available in hardback: $40 (stock due 12 May).
>>Join our online discussion in July.
>>See you later, alligator.

Light and Thread by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Maya West, e. yaewon, and Paige Aniyah Morris) $35
In this multi-faceted book, her first since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang draws together the threads of her work and life, tracing the connections between her interior and exterior worlds through a sequence of essays, poems, photographs and diaries. A book of reflections, of words and light, it has at its heart the tiny, north-facing courtyard garden at her home, cultivated solely through the reflected sunlight of the mirrors which she must move throughout the day, as the earth turns on its axis. In a poem written at eight years old, Han Kang imagined a 'gold thread' of connection — an idea which she explores here with luminous attention, beginning with her Nobel Lecture. She writes of the wonder of following the thread we call language into the depths of other hearts, and her profound sense of an electric current which joins writer and reader. [Hardback]
”These essays from the Nobel literature winner open up her novels and offer beautiful imagery.” —Guardian
>>The softest thing.

London Falling: A mysterious death in a gilded city and a family’s search for the truth by Patrick Radden Keefe $40
In 2019, teenager Zac Brettler mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment balcony into the Thames. As his grieving parents began to investigate his final days, they were shocked to learn that he’d been leading a double life, in which he was posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. This unsolved case is at the heart of London Falling — at once a family tragedy, a psychological portrait of a young fabulist, and an indictment of the greed for extreme wealth that has transformed one of the world’s great cities: London. Hiding in the shadows of its great architecture and imperial history are the malignant, mercenary forces that have come to influence us all — whether we realise it or not. In his inimitably gripping and forensic style, Patrick Radden Keefe explores what brought Zac Brettler (the grandson of famous rabbi Hugo Gryn) to the balcony that night — and how he became involved with some of London’s most notorious gangsters. Following Zac’s parents on a dark journey of investigation, London Falling unearths the unsettling truths they discovered — both about the sinister underworld on their doorstep, and about their son’s secret world. [Paperback]
”Gripping, rigorous and smart, London Falling takes a terrible mystery with an extraordinary cast of characters and somehow manages to make it perfectly encapsulate the weirdness of how London has mutated these past decades.” —Jon Ronson
”Keefe has a real gift for storytelling, an ability to unfurl the narrative in a way that is completely engrossing.” —Louis Theroux
>>Authenticity and lies.
>>The architecture of a lie.

The Ruin of Magic: Longing and belonging in strange times by Kate Holden $45
Is it possible to live wondrously by fluorescent light? In The Ruin of Magic, Kate Holden joins Katherine May, Maggie Nelson and Andre Aciman in crafting essays of intimate personal experience and sharply informed rumination on life in strange times. Holden meditates on her instinctive yearning for long-ago Europe versus the natural belonging she feels to the Australian landscape, and asks, What is a home? The strongest shelter or the most lethal trap, a museum of ourselves or a showcase of fashions? What, then, does it mean to make ourselves at home in an Australia still finding its way amidst old and avoided truths? Is nostalgia a reasonable mourning of timeless lore lost or a dangerous fantasy? And what has happened to magic and beauty in the glare of modern life? Reading Rainer Maria Rilke, Patti Smith, Walter Benjamin and D.H. Lawrence, dreamers and philosophers and poets, pagan history and new criticism, Holden writes with humour and sorrow of all the ways life today warps us under its glare -— and how to find a haven in the subtle shadows. [Paperback]
”Elegant and whip-smart, The Ruin of Magic is a work of beauty — a sober yet joyful quest to find home and belonging.” —Susan Johnson
”Thrillingly erudite, belletristic, yet necessarily raw. Many readers will encounter this ‘almost private’ book as the mirror they've been walking past their whole lives.” —Gregory Day
”A shimmering book that teases, enchants and provokes while offering balm through language and memory for our modern anguish and fear of oblivion.” —Robert Dessaix
>>Read an extract.
>>Sharp thinking.

Peace and Quiet by Dinal Hawken $25
What use is poetry in times of ecological and political turbulence? Peace and Quiet grapples with this question, invoking both human voices and the voices — ‘the silt and the slash’ — of the natural world. Powerful and illuminating, these poems show that peace, gentleness and reflection are a form of resistance. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Dinah Hawken is the high priestess of pin-drop poetry.” —James Brown
”Hawken is a wholehearted, surefooted poet, a gather and protector of precious things that others may ignore.” —Sophie van Waardenburg, Aotearoa NZ Review of Books
”This is poetry that digs deeply into existence, life and death, peace ahead of war, the power of silence and the power of the spoken.” —Paula Green
”Few writers have the skill to return to the land and the sea with such originality and genuine knowing as Hawken.” —Sarah Jane Barnett

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout $38
Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He goes about his days teaching American history to high schoolers, correcting their casual ignorance, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He spends his free time sailing the beautiful Massachusetts Bay, or with his adult son and his wife of more than three decades — and as Artie does these things, he plans the event that will forever change the world he inhabits. But when a startling accident awakens a new perspective in Artie, and he realizes that life has its own secret it's been keeping from him — along with a lot more to say on the weighty matters of fate and freedom in his home and his country — he charts another course full of grief, hilarity and heart, to a place where the end marks the beginning. [Hardback]
”One of the most profoundly moving books I have read - I envy anyone reading it for the first time. Elizabeth Strout is one of those rare novelists whose books leave you a little wiser, open and more compassionate than you were when you began reading. Emotionally stunning, devastatingly wise, a beautiful read. Her best novel yet.” —Rachel Joyce
”A moving, tender and wise novel about a committed teacher who is utterly confounded by the emotional complexities of daily life. This might be Elizabeth Strout's best yet.” —Clare Chambers
”One of the best novels I have read. I am so stunned by it, how moving and beautiful and perfect it is.” —Anna Funder

Original Sin: The genetics of wrongdoing, the problem of blame, and the future of forgiveness by Kathryn Paige Harden $40
As a scientist examining how our DNA shapes differences in temperament, temptation and behaviour, Harden has seen first-hand how we — in public and in our most private relationships — continue to struggle with the ancient tensions between nature and nurture, freedom and constraint, the desire to punish and the longing to forgive. In Original Sin, she weaves together insights from her own experience as a daughter, mother, wife and scientist with cutting-edge research in genetics and psychology to grapple with some of the most important questions in modern life: How do we take responsibility for the people we become, knowing how we are shaped by both biology and experience? How should we respond when people hurt each other — or themselves? And has science made guilt obsolete? Navigating the psychological and biological terrain of addiction, antisocial behaviour and violence, Harden confronts the discomforting ways science unsettles our understanding of wrongdoing and choice. In doing so she asks us not to absolve, but to reckon differently with notions of fairness and blame. An inquiry into the uneasy space where human behaviour meets inherited biology, Original Sin challenges us to imagine a more humane vision of accountability — for ourselves and for one another. [Paperback]
”This is a serious and knotty book, but it can be beautiful. Harden draws movingly on autobiographical material. Ultimately, this is a well-informed attack on an American style of justice that relies on notions of sin and punishment. Harden acknowledges that retribution feels good — we are human. She wants everyone to be accountable for their actions, whatever their genetics. But she calls for rational measures aimed at reducing offending, and for restorative justice over vengeance. For Norway, not Texas. For compassion, not cruelty. A darkly glittering book.” —James McConnachie, The Times
”A book littered with fascinating scientific findings: Harden is exceptionally skilled at interweaving the personal and the scientific. She writes about her own life experiences — leaving the church, becoming estranged from her parents, the challenges of early motherhood — with rare, dangerous honesty. A complex, thought-provoking book.” —Sophie McBain, Guardian
>>An interesting backlash.
>>At the intersection.

Classic India Recipes by Pushpesh Pant $80
A carefully curated collection of more than 140 dishes, drawn from the pages of India: The Cookbook, a book hailed as a definitive companion to Indian home cooking. The selection showcases recipes that reflect the rich cultural and geographical variety of Indian food traditions, including vegetarian and nonvegetarian dishes, sumptuous feasting dishes, and festive sweets. Each recipes is attributed to its associated region, and features a stunning image. There are well-known dishes such as Butter Chicken, Roghanjosh, and Dal Makhani, alongside more traditional and unusual fare Hyderabadi Dum ki Biryani (slow-cooked biryani) and Gucchi Pulau (morel pilaf) in addition to samosas, pakoras, dosas, and chapatis, and a host of accompanying chutneys and drinks. The recipes are perfect for home cooks, yet retain the authenticity that made the original book a global reference point for Indian cooking. Pant offers an essential resource that showcases cultural traditions while embracing simplicity, creating a culinary companion perfect for readers looking for a broad introduction to Indian cuisine. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Stock Photo by Simona Supekar $23
Brochures, billboards, websites, menus, and memes. We are immersed every day in the imagery of carefully-curated stock photography. Stock Photo blends memoir and cultural history to mine how this unique medium has cemented an important place in our cultural landscape. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Stock Photo mines the significance of the stock photo in our everyday lives, from the ads and websites we browse, to the menus and memes that we consume. Through interviews with stock photography experts, photographers, models, consumers, and other stakeholders, Simona Supekar explores the evolution of the industry by tracing the creation of a stock photo from concept to usage while highlighting significant historical moments. Supekar weaves in her own experiences as a keyworder for a stock photography company while reckoning with her Asian American/South Asian identity in a post-9/11 world. Stock Photo also addresses how these images have the power to shape our perceptions about race, class/caste, gender, ability, and more, thus underscoring the importance of representation even in something as innocuous as a stock photo. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Simona Supekar's Stock Photo is a highly insightful and illuminating examination of how culture, commerce, and technology collide to shape our modern visual world. Supekar adeptly traces the powerful lineage of the image, from the human hands of art history and stock modeling to today's endless digital feeds and vast datasets that train artificial intelligence, revealing its immense influence on how we see and are seen. This is an essential, forward-thinking meditation on social change, challenging readers to be inspired to imagine a more diverse, ethical, and dazzlingly inventive new visual era.” —Peter Chow-White
>>Other interesting books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Banned Books: 500-piece jigsaw puzzle by Jane Mount $45
Read and resist with this 500-piece puzzle featuring books that have been banned in the US and abroad.  The Banned Books Puzzle features art from Jane Mount, the brain behind the ‘Bibliophile’ series. With over 65 banned books colorfully illustrated, this puzzle comes with a handy reading checklist and information from PEN America on how to fight book bans, so you can be inspired to resist the pushback and read them all for yourself. [Shelvable box]
>>See the completed puzzle!
>>Some other book-related jigsaw puzzles.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

The Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self $38
In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self's pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. The disaffected, middle-class, middle-aged urbanites that populate the novel seem helpless to stop the decay of their intimate, self-conscious social circle. And yet, as Self's skewering (and self-skewering) grows ever more wildly imaginative, targeting faith, death, money, queerness, Jewishness and nearly every piece of our social fabric's connective tissue, it becomes all too clear that the decay cannot simply be cut out - their lives are rotten to their core. With recurring - if defeated - appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, this new work shows Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humour and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. The Quantity Theory of Morality delicately bookends his award-winning story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, which Martin Amis likened to “a cross between a manic J. G. Ballard and a depressed David Lodge.” Although, as ever, “Will Self's world is all his own.” [Paperback]
”Reads like early Nabokov: barbed, provocative, virtuosic in his performance of linguistic jokes — rollicking, unsettling and furiously intelligent.” —Guardian
”While dripping with acidic satire, The Quantity Theory of Morality is also full of pathos and penetrating insights into the best and worst in human nature. A consummate performance, it's a book that might finally silence Self's critics.” —Spectator
”This new novel stretches this critic's adjectives. It is deliriously poignant. It is heartbreakingly antic. It is sincere and wry at the same time. Self's funniest book for some time.” —Stuart Kelly, Scotsman
>>Is morality a zero-sum game?

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley $38
Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world. Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: he has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon 'call me Shove' Halfpenny. Laura has her own problems: a prickly mother and a tricky past, and in a beautiful and indifferent city, her day-to-day life is precarious. But as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back. A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley's trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us — somehow — with a curious sense of possibility. [Paperback]
”This pristine book confirms Riley's position among the finest novelists working today. Her sentences are crystalline and perfect, and her attention to the world is always acute and occasionally tender - I love this book, and am awed by Riley's accomplishment.” —Sarah Perry
”Riley writes with a poet's control, her prose so purely distilled that it appears artless. What is new is the gentle delicacy she brings to the deep and unshowy solace of friendship, moments of tenderness so exquisitely and exactly rendered that they are almost too intense to bear.” —The Guardian
”Outstandingly brilliant.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”The Palm House on almost any page will give you more delight than most other novels published this year.” —John Self
>>Don’t mind me in my coffin.
>>Carted off.
>>Eight lanes of traffic.
>>The wreckage of middle age.

Facing the Bridge by Yoko Tawada (translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani) $33
Amo, an African kidnapped to Europe as a boy, and Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in Germany, live in different countries but are being followed by the same shadow; Kazuko, a young professional tourist, is lured to Vietnam by a mysterious postcard; on the Canary Islands, a nameless translator battles a banana grove and a series of Saint Georges. In the three stories in Facing the Bridge, obsession becomes delight as the reader is whisked into a world where identities flicker and shift. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.” —Sara Baume
”Magnificently strange.” —Rivka Galchen
”Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.” —Madeleine Thien
”What propels Tawada's stories is the unassailable logic of dreams and fairy tales, coupled with verbal energy. Tawada's images resonate simultaneously on different levels.” —Village Voice
>>A genius in any language.
>>Other books by Yoko Tawada.

Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding home in the 21st century by Ece Temelkuran $38
”Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?” Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a political Cassandra, warning those convinced it couldn't happen in their country that fascism is coming. Now, as oppression spreads and temperatures rise — as we face competing crises and learn, again and again, that no institution is so concrete it can't turn to dust, and no home is too strong to be destroyed — she has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another. Politically attuned and deeply personal, this extraordinary, heartening correspondence is a gift to treasure in uncertain times. As poetic as it is precise, it is a book for anyone who feels alienated by an ever-more monstrous world. It shows how, as we all become strangers, our home will depend on the strength we find with one another. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”Nation of Strangers is perhaps the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times. To read it is 'to stiffen the sinews.'" —Michael Morpurgo
"Nation of Strangers is essential reading — a bold reminder, a stern warning, a soft prayer and courageous song. Without doubt, Nation of Strangers is my number one favourite book of these times, navigating the truth of who we really are and who we pretend to be. It is a most exquisite narration of the sense of belonging in the unbelonging. Nation of Strangers is a critically honest observation of us, of you and me in the now and here, our fragile notion of home, the homes we leave behind, the home we carry with us. I have been walking around with Ece's book in my bag like a friend, I keep re-reading it, I feel like she is writing to me personally, teaching me to be stronger and much more resilient." —Selena Godden
"A new book from Ece Temelkuran is a new way of understanding the world. She is lucid, honest and often wryly funny about where we are now, and who we are becoming. And Nation of Strangers is her most ambitious and dazzling book yet." —Brian Eno
"Ece Temelkuran, with her beautiful, elegiac new book on becoming 'unhomed', is in serious danger of becoming the new Hannah Arendt." —Yanis Varoufakis
"Homelessness, both literal and spiritual, is increasingly the contemporary human condition, and in Nation of Strangers, Ece Temelkuran gives it the sustained and close attention it deserves. She not only elegantly and movingly diagnoses our shared plight; she describes the wise and viable solutions we so desperately need. No one baffled and estranged by our age's relentless shocks can afford to miss this book." —Pankaj Mishra
>>The pace of change.
>>An antidote to loneliness.

The Migrants: A memoir with manuscripts by Chrisopher de Hamel $65
Christopher de Hamel is one of the world's best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realisation that they too are migrants far from home. The Migrants explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonisation and the migration of culture — of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters — bringing us face-to-face with history. We meet the colonial governor on his paradise island, the shipwrecked accountant, the nonagenarian who cut up manuscripts, the magnate who unknowingly bought Becket's Boethius, and the early settler who inscribed his Book of Hours in the Maori language in 1842. We travel with the author today back to where these manuscripts began their own lives, through France and Poland and medieval England, discovering their first owners and following the longest journeys on earth. [Hardback]
”Christopher de Hamel combines enthusiasm with scholarly precision and a conversational style that sits surprisingly easily with the fund of knowledge he has gradually accumulated. The joy of this book are de Hamel's true 'intimate companions', the manuscripts, and his ability to evoke the thrill and wonder he feels as he encounters them, whether it's a 12th-century copy of Boethius he finds in Wellington, probably designed for Thomas Becket, or a Bible in Auckland, which he traces back to a Cistercian monastery in north-central Poland.” —Mark Bostridge, Spectator

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel $38
Harlow Donne has sacrificed his life to the study of the Classical world. So when he is invited to Oxford University to work on an obscure collection of papyrus fragments it is an academic's dream come true. He must leave behind his daughter and wife in Canada, but offers like this don't come twice and he badly needs a change of fortune. Then, while studying in the Bodleian Library, he unearths a completely undiscovered account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilisation itself. He names the poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a commoner identified only as Psoas, the son of nobody. As sole translator and author of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter Helen, allowing the text to unlock the echoes of the ancient Greeks into the present day, and to share a personal message with his beloved child. Despite the two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn't frayed — the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief. [Paperback]
”A brilliant novel of ideas: a powerful meditation on life, death, and the vanity of human wishes; all illustrated by a poem that would do Homer proud. A stunningly imagined revisitation of an ancient past that is every bit as awful as the present.” —Kirkus Reviews
>>Both epic and intimate.
>”I hate the rich people of this world — of which I’m one.”
>>On work-life balance.

Hotel Exile: Paris in the shadow of war by Jane Rogoyska $45
The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only 'grand' hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. Andre Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service - and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps. Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”An exceptional work of non-fiction — you couldn't just call it a history book, it's more than that. Rogoyska captures the historical moment with a rare combination of urgency and empathy. She has trawled memoirs from hotel staff and ex-officers, unearthing stories that are peculiarly resonant. This is a scintillatingly good book. I think it will win prizes — not least because it is subtly experimental. It slips in and out of the present tense like a contemporary novel, and feels thrillingly immersive. In fact, I've rarely felt such a sense of the historical moment. Or indeed the present moment. Because if ever a book were about now as well as then, it's this one.” —James McConnachie, The Sunday Times
>>Hotel/hostel/hospital.

Snack by Eurie Dahn $23
In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial perhaps even childish especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savoury treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even at places like home improvement and department stores, speak to the popularity of snacking. But the ubiquity of snacks is relatively new and not common to all countries. Eurie Dahn traces the story of snacking culture through specific snacks, including Flamin' Hot Cheetos, cheese crackers, and Choco Pies, and in the contexts of ethnicity, popular culture, diet culture, and even parenting. Snack is an idiosyncratic cultural history that offers surprisingly filling food for thought. [Paperback with French flaps]
”This tempting morsel of a book invites you to consider the history, culture, and even theory of those little bites we snatch between meals. Dahn's lively storytelling and digestible research invite us to slow down and take a hard look at that aisle full of temptations at the convenience store. With her help, we now see behind the colorful packages a surprising history of food, leisure, and pleasure.” —Sean Latham
>>Affective connections.
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a failing system by Wolfgang Streeck $27
After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated. In How Will Capitalism End? Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector's excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is seemingly no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalisation of the markets. Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand. [Paperback]
”Neoliberalism continues to delimit political choice across the globe yet it is clear that the doctrine is in severe crisis. In Wolfgang Streeck's powerful new book How Will Capitalism End? Streeck demonstrates that the maladies afflicting the world-from secular stagnation to rising violent instability-herald not just the decline of neoliberalism, but what may prove to be the terminal phase of global capitalism.” —Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism
”At the heart our era's deepening crisis there lies a touching faith that capitalism, free markets and democracy go hand in hand. Wolfgang Streeck's new book deconstructs this myth, exposing the deeply illiberal, irrational, anti-humanist tendencies of contemporary capitalism.” —Yanis Varoufakis

The Expedition by Tuvalisa Rangström and Klara Bartilsson (translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $40
A band of intrepid explorers embarks on a voyage through a strange frontier filled with mystery and beauty: the human body! Donning his frock coat and ruffle collar, Tusseson documents everything that happens in his logbook: traveling by boat across the Stomach's Stormy Sea, paddling through the Small Intestine's Emerald Green Canals, camping at the Lungs (despite all the wind!), climbing the Muscle Mountains, escaping through the Nerve Forest to marvel at the night sky, Iris, reflected in the Pacific Tear Channel. As his fellow travelers return home one by one, Tusseson is left to carry on alone... but he won't give up until he finds the Mystical Meadows of the Brain. Featuring lush and surreal illustrations, The Expedition renders the systems of the human body into wondrous landscapes that take readers on a fantastic voyage like no other. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Sourdough Everything: sweet and savoury recipes for beautiful breads and other bakes by Rachel Pardoe $55
While it's part science and part craft, baking sourdough is actually very easy — create a starter, feed it with care, and then combine it with a few simple ingredients to make something truly magical. Even if you already have your own starter languishing in the fridge, Sourdough Everything will reinvigorate your sourdough experience and elevate your baking skills with an array of recipes ranging from artfully crafted loaves to flavorful rolls, sweet breads, and pastries. Featuring over 70 recipes, including sourdough raisin bread, pumpkin chocolate rolls, French crullers, and sourdough pretzels, Sourdough Everything will help you slow down and savor the experience of creating flavorful sourdough that is also a feast for the eyes. With step-by-step instructions, you'll learn how to: Create and care for your starter; Use proper baking techniques; Confidently navigate more advanced recipes; Use simple, everyday tools to create beautiful designs. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Pardoe is a good and clear explainer.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A fiction by Deborah Levy $48
Who was Gertrude Stein? And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy's latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out about the avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home there and became godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. In Paris, the narrator meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks — about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language — how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. This is a book about how we put ourselves together — an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire, and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself — a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world. [Hardback]
”In one short and sly book after another, Levy writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both.” —Atlantic
”Wonderfully entertaining; a witty scherzo of a ‘fiction’. We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy — this is ‘a fiction’, after all — but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is — odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining — triumphantly proving her wrong.” —Guardian
”Ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but, at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don't need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story. Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve.” —AnOther Magazine
”A boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud. It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original. As Levy's narrator observes of Stein: ‘Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.’ A compelling contemporary fiction.” —The Conversation
>>In search of Gertrude Stein.
>>Why the novel matters.

No Ghosts by Max Lury $40
After being reunited at Annie's memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead — faces, gestures, glances — in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. The friends' journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie's — and the ghosts' — disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Read an extract.

Hell of Solitude: Selected writings by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (translated from Japanese by Ryan Choi) $40
Hell of Solitude presents a varied and eclectic selection of writings by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of the most important and beloved Japanese writers of the twentieth century. Bringing together fiction, poetry, and philosophical prose – much of it appearing in English for the first time here – this collection showcases the range and intensity of Akutagawa’s imagination. Moving from the whimsical and fantastical to the grave and introspective, the pieces reveal a writer of extraordinary clarity and psychological depth. Interwoven throughout are poems from a prolific body of verse, examples of which are sparse in English, alongside ‘Art and Other Things’, a fragmentary essay in which Akutagawa expounds his aesthetic views while drawing on examples from world literature and art. Translated with sensitivity and precision by Ryan Choi, Hell of Solitude offers a vital reintroduction to a writer whose lucidity, irony, and existential unease continue to resonate across cultures and generations. The collection includes a foreword by writer and translator Polly Barton, questioning why it is that Akutagawa’s work isn’t better known among anglophone readers, and celebrating his ambivalent relationship with the traditional practice of story-telling. [Paperback]
“Perhaps what we have, when we are given less of a story than might be expected, when we have an unstorylike story or a desolate poem, is more of ourselves. We have things as they are, our selves as they are, and life as it is, and sometimes that is hell. Nevertheless, Akutagawa shows us that sharing that hell with others can be electric.” —Polly Barton
”One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa’s style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing.” —Haruki Murakami
”The quintessential writer of his era.” —David Peace
”Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in the style, which is always crystal-clear.” —Jorge Luis Borges
”At long last, a new volume of Akutagawa’s writing has been ushered into English by the consummate translator Ryan Choi. He has rendered the master storyteller’s previously unavailable prose pieces and poetry more readable than ever. The exquisite subtlety and inimitable charm of the tales, sketches, and poems in this volume will captivate new readers and scholars alike.” —L. S. Popovich
”For the past decade, Ryan Choi has quietly been doing the heroic work of bringing Akutagawa’s lesser-known writings into English. What we are given in this collection are impressions and observations, anecdotes, philosophical digressions, stories that read like poems that read like dreams remembered the morning after. The writings are restrained, understated, precise and fractured. The surfaces of these texts crackle with the charge of Akutagawa’s inimitable mind. Choi’s translations are a revelation.” —Stephen Mortland
”Choi is Akutagawa’s boldest – and best – translator. Hell of Solitude restores Akutagawa, the most daring architect of modern Japanese literature, to his rightful state: bewildering beauty, a cascade of shifting rhythms and forms, and the penetrating alertness of a truly aesthetic mind. Akutagawa’s soul is here in this book-shaped vessel, waiting to be known.” —Dreux Richard
>>What do we have when we do not have a story?

Ashimpa: The mysterious word by Catarina Sobral $40
One day, a researcher makes an important discovery. A mysterious word buried in an old dictionary: ASHIMPA. Quickly the news spreads. Everyone wants to use the new word, but no one knows what it means or even what part of speech it belongs to. A 137-year-old is certain that it's a verb: people ashimped and would always ashimp. A linguist is convinced it's a noun. Soon there would be people who claimed to have seen live ashimpas — and in colour. "They still exist abroad. They're green!" From renowned Portuguese author and illustrator Catarina Sobral, Ashimpa is the story of language that takes on a life of its own, leading young readers through the hilariously ashimpish life and grammar of a mysterious word. [Hardback]
"A tongue-in-cheek treatise on the elasticity of language, Sobral's latest sparkles with profound wit thanks to a wonderfully bizarre premise. Ashimpishly delicious fun." —Kirkus Reviews
>>Look inside!

The Original by Nell Stevens $40
Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle’s home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls. Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena. After years missing at sea, Grace’s cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live. Deftly-plotted and shimmering with distinctive intelligence, style and wit, The Original is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original. [Hardback]
”What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell herself.” —Olivia Laing
”A delightful, playful puzzle of a novel, and a brilliant twist on the nineteenth century orphan-makes-good story. THE ORIGINAL asks whether, sometimes, faking it is the right thing to do.” —Claire Fuller
”A wonderful novel about identity, creativity, money and belonging. It's so witty and propulsive you will forget how brilliantly constructed it is, this tale that brims with the beauty of art, of how to triumph in a difficult world.” —Jessie Burton
”Intricate, and endlessly intriguing. The reader is kept guessing until the very end; as Stevens deftly raises the stakes, the pages seem to turn themselves. The narrative captivates intellectually, too, probing questions of authenticity, imitation, and self-realisation, in love and in art. The overall effect is of an author boldly stepping out on her own, pursuing themes that were hers all along.” —Observer
>>Written by the light of a lava lamp.

Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin (translated from Russian by Roger and Angela Keys) $28
A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator — Tsypkin is on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything ‘right’. Nothing is invented; everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay, Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and gives an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel. New edition. [Paperback with French flaps]
"A short poetic masterpiece." —New York Review of Books
"Gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving." —The Los Angeles Times
”While keeping to biographical fact, Tsypkin has written a novel that provides the sort of psychological insight that is only available through fiction.” —Thomas     
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>Loving Dostoyevsky.

Chain of Ideas: Great Replacement Theory and the origins of our authoritarian age by Ibram X. Kendi $45
Throughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies 'great replacement theory', which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities. In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi shows how this conspiracy theory has mutated from the extremist fringe into a global ideology, embraced by leaders as varied as Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. He traces its historic roots in slavery, segregation, colonialism and Nazism, and shows how these age-old prejudices have been dressed in new language for a digital age. But this is not a book about extremists on the margins. From Anders Breivik's massacre to the chants of the Charlottesville marchers, from Brexit slogans to the Christchurch shooting, Kendi shows how these ideas have crossed borders, inspired terror and are now re-shaping parties of government. Chain of Ideas is a penetrating history of how reactionary ideas have been repackaged as common sense, and how they shape the globe today. [Paperback]
>>In twenty years most of the world could be racist dictatorships.
>>A renovation of Nazi ideas.

The Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich $38
”It was as though I was chosen-marked out by the python's kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.” Written over two decades, Erdrich's story collection features a range of characters — a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass; immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged; and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father. Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe — a creative collaboration between mother and daughter. [Paperback]
”One of the greatest American writers.” —Guardian
>>Talking animals and the analogue world.
>>Little travels.

Is a River Alive? A journey with water by Robert Macfarlane $30
An exhilarating exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings who should be recognised as such in imagination and law. The book flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. Macfarlane takes readers on these unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days. Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is the River Alive? is Macfarlane’s most personal and political book to date, reminding us what is vital: the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has. Now in paperback. [Paperback with French flaps]
” A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.” —Elif Shafak
>>’The river is writing me’ — Q&A
>>The Power of Rivers
>>Poetry and Adventure
>>The Rights of Nature
>>Read an extract
>>Can personhood recue a river?
>>Also available in hardback.

Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, tragedy, and history’s greatest Arctic rescue by Buddy Levy $39
In 1908-09, American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, in separate expeditions, both claimed they'd reached the North Pole first, but their claims were seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian Roald Amundsen — who'd made history and a name for himself by being the first to sail through the Northwest Passage and the first man to the South Pole — attempted to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location. However, Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, and launched a major rescue operation. [Paperback]

Te Ahikāroa: Artists and stories of Dunedin Public Art Gallery $70
This stunning book displays Ōtepoti’s Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s significant collection of artworks made either in Aotearoa or overseas, from the Renaissance to the present, and is full of both iconic works and suprises. Te Ahikāroa is the result of collaboration between the Gallery, mana whenua and other writers from around Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. A joint introduction by Director Cam McCracken, alongside Claire Kaahu White, Robert Sullivan and Paulette Tamati-Elliffe creates a foundation that places Kai Tahu values in relation to the journey of the Gallery since its establishment in 1884. Essays by curators Lauren Gutsell and Lucy Hammonds explore the history and vision of the Gallery. Each artwork in the book is brought to life by subject experts, who contribute new perspectives on everything from beloved historic artworks through to recently acquired contemporary works. This publication brings together written contributions from Ruth Buchanan, Komene Cassidy, Gina Cole, Sophie Davis, Edward Ellison, Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds, Rauhina Kohuwai-Banks, Moewai Marsh, Ngahiraka Mason, Sophie Matthiesson, Finn McCahon-Jones, Cam McCracken, Anna McLean, Olivia Meehan, Gerard O'Regan, Hana O'Regan, Joanna Osborne, Bridget Reweti, Anya Samarasinghe, Robert Sullivan, Taarati Taioroa, Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, Claire Kaahu White. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $42
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The cult of Solvej Balle.
>>The Faber edition of this volume is also available, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.

My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden) $45
A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods. With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. [Paperback]
"Djabbarova debuts with a potent portrait of illness and gender oppression in contemporary Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia . . . This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch." —Publishers Weekly
"Essential feminist, anticolonial reading. My Dreadful Body is about power. The power of one nation to colonise another, which is in turn echoed by the power of men to control women. It is about having the power to be in control of one's own body. But it is also about having the power to fight back." —Full Stop
"A woman maps cultural expectations and desires onto her ailing body in Egana Djabbarova's singular novel. An incisive novel, My Dreadful Body celebrates women's agency, mourns physical losses, and rebels against inherited boundaries." —Foreword Reviews
>>Tongue.
>>Silence speaks.
>>Illness as a sometimes-liminal space.

Discipline by Larissa Pham $40
When two people fall apart, who gets to tell their story? Christine is a young writer touring her debut novel — a thinly disguised tale of the affair she had with her professor ten years earlier. He was magnetic, domineering, both the sponsor of her early promise and its destroyer. But he surely forgot her long ago, and the temptation to exorcise her past was overwhelming. Then, between hotel rooms and bookstores, formal dinners and road-trip hook-ups, she receives a series of sly, unsettling emails and finally an invitation to visit the professor's isolated house on an island off the coast of Maine. Against her better judgement, Christine is drawn back into his orbit, risking forever losing control of the narrative she's worked so hard to create. [Hardback]
”Discipline coolly questions the ethics and processes of fiction and art, examining the toll they take both on the practitioner and anyone unlucky enough to be in their orbit” —Financial Times
”A deceptively quiet and beautifully written story, Discipline plays masterfully with issues of consent, memory and artistic licence. It asks its readers to judge which is more real: what actually happened in the past, or how we feel about it in the present.: —Buzz Magazine
”A story of ideas, but it combines deep philosophical inquiry with thriller vibes.” —Crack
>>Protect that pain.
>>Writing toward the void.
>>”I want to lie.”

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec (translated from Fench by David Bellos) $30
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface — What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity — and possibly his sanity — as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed — but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s novella presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968. [Paperback]
”Perec's novels are games, each different. They are played for real stakes and in some cases breathtakingly large ones. As games should be, and as literary games often are not, they are fun.” —Los Angeles Times
>>A one-sentence review.
>>Questioning the quotidian.

False Calm: A journey through the ghost towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff (translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver) $28
With time I have reached the conclusion that, as it is in my personal history, isolation is present in everything I have ever read about Patagonia . . . I returned to write an account of this eminently Patagonian characteristic. I wanted to see the shapes it takes today; I wanted to locate it at its furthest extremes. Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next. Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia's complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld. [Paperback with French flaps]
”An artful, atmospheric, thought-provoking depiction of life between silence and open space.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
”It has a magical quality, an intimate journey, so humane, one that opens the imagination and reminds us of who we have been and what we have, and have lost.” —Philippe Sands

Women Without Men: A novel of modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (a new translation from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh) $40
An internationally acclaimed novel that traces the interwoven destinies of five women — including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher — as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, the novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men. Originally published in Persian in 1989 and banned in Iran ever since, Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Foreword by Shirin Neshat. [Paperback]
”Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
"Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer." —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepoplis
"Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Parsipur continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming, powerful novella." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.
>>An interview with the author and the translator.
>>The book was made into an astounding film by Shirin Neshat.

Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal el-Mohtar $45
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. [Hardback]
"An essential collection of work from one of today's most poignant speculative writers. El-Mohtar creates immersive worlds with beautiful language." —Library Journal
"A collection of 14 stories and four poems that shine both individually and as a whole, while still showcasing El-Mohtar's characteristic lyricism and striking imagery. There's not a false note here." —Publisher's Weekly
>>Womanhood, identity, and fairy tales.
>>There is no art that is separate from politics.

Cello: A journey through silence to sound by Kate Kennedy $30
Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic and ultimately fatal concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world's greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his 'Mara' Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked off Buenos Aires. Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author's reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy's own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello and, crucially, the absence of the cello had meant to some other cellists, past and present. [Paperback]
”This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life.” —Hermione Lee
”Kate Kennedy's quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power.” —Jenny Uglow
>>A different life.
>>Kammersonate.
>>The ’Mara’ Stradivari.

Nocturnal Apparitions by Bruno Schulz (translated from Polish by Stanley Bill) $28
A fantastical collection of short stories by one of the twentieth century's most iconic cult authors. The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical. Contents: August / Visitation / Birds / Cinnamon Shops / The Street of Crocodiles / Cockroaches / The Gale / The Night of the Great Season / The Book / The Age of Genius / My Father Joins the Fire Brigade / The Sanatorium under the Hourglass / Father's Last Escape / Undula. [New paperbback edition]
 “One of the the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” —John Updike
”One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
”Schulz redrafts the lines between fantasy and reality.” —Chris Power
”I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life.” —David Grossman
”Bruno Schulz has this weird sense of humour, this tenderness, and at the same time his writing is very complex. Reading him for the first time was something totally unique. That is still what I feel when I read him.“ —Alejandro Zambra

Black Bag by Luke Kennard $38
A penniless out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation. A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane. [Paperback]
”Gleefully absurd, a triumph of deadpan comedy. From his gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life. Kennard is superb at capturing a chaotic interior life. The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters, and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
”Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair — through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other.” —Joe Dunthorne
>>Theories of attraction.
>>Waiting for it to happen.

MEDesque: Everyday recipes with Mediterranean roots by Georgina Hayden $60
”Warmth, boldness, approachability and a general sense that all is good in the world. All this applies to the food in MEDesque. It's joyful, generous and drenched in olive oil.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
”With this wonderful new book Georgie takes us on a dream tour around the Mediterranean and picks up all the best bits so that our meals can be sunnier, happier, easier and infinitely more delicious — what a treat!” —Itamar Srulovich, Honey & Co.
”Irresistible recipes that spark cravings on every page.” —Yasmin Khan
Includes: Lamb, apricot and feta sausage rolls; Gnocchi puttanesca; Spiced lemony roast chicken with crushed baby potatoes; One-pan 'nduja, pepper and three cheese lasagne; Double chocolate pannacotta with cherries; Salted honey butter madeleines. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>All of Hayden’s cookbooks should be on your cookbook shelf.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $33
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The New Directions edition of this volume is due later this week, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.

The Way to Colonos: Sophocles retold by Kay Cicellis $38
First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone — a stylish woman in her thirties —wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II. As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work-written in English, her second language, offers particularly "shocking insight into the secret lives of young women" and is only now "free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes. … The book is written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master." [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Myths of meaning.

The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis $38
A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality. Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina's son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it's not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered. [Hardback]
”Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.” —Neel Mukherjee
”Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that casts out a multitude of unforgettable scenes, while shining a steady granular light on the hidden depths of the human psyche.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
”In the world The Shadow of the Object brings to light — now sharply focused, now only uncertainly defined — Chloe Aridjis patiently layers signs and symbols into a resonant network. A beautiful, eerie, grief-haunted novel.” —Chris Power
”With The Shadow of the Object Aridjis cements her status as the laureate of the peripatetic — of all that's serendipitous, strange, improbable and, for these very reasons, true.” —Tom McCarthy
”The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka's.” —Zadie Smith
”A subtle and courageous writer.” —Ali Smith

Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle $30
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a collection of prose poems that invites the reader to consider the relationships between internalised beliefs and the development of illness, drawing on psychology texts and the language of self-help, and the exploration of character traits and dramatic tropes. What are the appropriate emotions. Even with a map, it was difficult to determine. An ache which means let go. If she didn't have the thought, she wouldn't have the feeling. Wheels fall off to create drama. Through shifting frames of reference, wordplay, aphorism, and inversions, the poems reform, unfold and rebound to create a collage of melancholy and comic transformations. One thing leads to a mother. Butcher-McGunnigle's poems explore the relationship between unexamined subconscious thinking and physical and mental health, resisting singular, fixed meanings and inviting the reader to reflect on their own experiences. [Paperback]
"These poems are compressed and layered like paper folded to its tightest square. Here is an exquisite restraint that feels almost brutal, that always manages to surprise. This book has a rare force." — Sholto Buck
"Butcher-McGunnigle transforms malady into force; a leaf in a whirlwind, splitting memory from frame…this collection forms a prelude to her stunning body of work." —Autumn Royal
"Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a prequel to Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s catalogue, one that enriches all you’ve read from her before. Bleakness and a light touch. It all comes back. I read it in one sitting and it felt like being spelled." —Hollen Singleton
”Butcher-McGunnigle’s work is fulll of moments that, to me, are perfect — consummately whole, exactly right, every element in glowering harmony, as densely fixed as a neutron star." —Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Sydney Review of Books
"Butcher-McGunnigle is compulsively readable, hilarious, wonderful — a master of the whiplash turn, the dark plunge." —Ashleigh Young
>>Read an excerpt.
>>About the writing of this book.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.

Autobiography of a Marguerite by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle $33
We are made up of stories, but which ones belong to us? What are the boundaries between our bodies and the outside world? Autobiography of a Marguerite is a profound, book-length poetic work about chronic illness, family dysfunction, and identity, and how they can shape one another. The narrator struggles with the effects of her autoimmune illness, and struggles to separate herself from her troubled mother. A doctor tells the narrator that there is 'no cause and no cure' to her ailment, but the book attempts to explore how familial environments might contribute to the development of ill health. Butcher-McGunnigle's experimentation with form overlapping voices, footnotes, fragments, found text and photographs illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self, the repressed grief of chronic illness and its disruptive effect on the sufferer's sense of time's passage. The poems make visible the often-hidden experience of disability, and the reader becomes both a witness and an actor, piecing together a narrative that challenges what an autobiography can be. New edition. [Paperback]
"Recursive, clear-eyed and flatly funny, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle captures here all the strangeness, fragility and wry sufferings of a young life." —Jessica Au
"Like nothing else you’ll encounter. A meditation on pain and illness made strange by close proximity, a child and parent leaking into each other. Butcher-McGunnigle has developed a brand new way of creating story to make this stunning work possible." —Pip Adam
”One of the most innovative New Zealand books published in recent years.” —Siobhan Harvey, Booknotes 
”Astonishing. This poetry is unlike anything I have seen.” —Paula Green
”A grand achievement. The writing goes to the aching heart of disconnection and of longing for repair. Butcher-McGunnigle has created a crooked beauty out of shards.” —Sue Wootton, Takahe
>>Read an excerpt.
>>A note from the author about the book.

A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the radical history of mothering by Elinor Cleghorn $40
Mothers make history. Yet for centuries, patriarchal control of motherhood has relegated acts of growing, birthing, nurturing and loving children to the sidelines, deeming the work of mothering to be unworthy of historical enquiry. In A Woman's Work, Elinor Cleghorn retells the story of motherhood, showcasing the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, and community leaders who have shaped the course of history. These inspiring figures include Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval nun and mystic with pioneering views about the maternal body; Mary Wollstonecraft, who laid the intellectual groundwork to release motherhood from male control; and Sojourner Truth, who drew attention to the abhorrent treatment of mothers under chattel slavery. Beginning in the ancient world, we learn how each era constructed its own idealised notion of motherhood — from the misogynistic dogma of the early church and the stigmatisation of single mothers in 17th century England, all the way through to the post-war myth of the perfectly contented housewife. But we also learn how mothers of all classes and circumstances fought back, and lobbied to be valued, respected and supported — not as reproductive vessels, but as people.  From the author of Unwell Women, A Woman's Work is a bold and radical new history of mothering, and a timely reminder that the fight for reproductive justice is far from over. [Paperback]
>>The horrors persist.
>>Women aren’t the solution to an aging population.

Sororicidal by Edwina Preston $38
A punk-gothic historical novel in which sisterhood is the defining experience of two women's lives — and also the potential death of them. Well-born Mary and Margot are raised on a vineyard estate above Adelaide in the early years of the last century. Mary, brilliant and beautiful, dazzles all as her quiet, serious sister trails in her shadow. But Mary's high-handed malice finds a match in Margot's growing resentment at mistreatment; her revenge will be served at absolute zero. Set against a backdrop of privilege and propriety — and unfolding in an era of global conflict and radical new ideas about art and female agency — Sororicidal is an account of Edwardian-era sisterly love that mutates into a very modern tale of rivalry and betrayal. The polite cruelty of their childhood games becomes adult battles where the endgame is to split the nuclear family, releasing utter devastation. Sororicidal is the story of womanhood across a convulsive century — and the ordinary lives of two sisters who remain inextricably linked across a lifetime: as mirrors, rivals, and executioners of one another's dreams. It is a novel about the necessary and unendurable entanglements of family; the thin, volatile line between care and spite; and how love is a flame that both feeds and consumes. [Paperback]

Small Comfort by Ia Genberg (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $28
Intricately built and wickedly humorous, this is a novel in five parts, all about one thing: money. From an interview with a child star turned thief to the mysterious death of an employee at a drug manufacturer — or the couple feigning married bliss to keep their inheritance, Small Comfort carefully unravels the value we place on both money and people. What does it really mean to be in debt to someone? How does our financial worth permeate the ways we think and feel? And what do we lose when we supposedly win? Small Comfort skewers its characters, slyly implicating the reader along the way. [Paperback]
”Money makes the world go round and Ia Genberg has a deep, clear-eyed vision of how. The dramatic distinctness of the five stories that make up Small Comfort speaks to the might of Genberg's imaginative powers, while the intricate threads tying them together are testament to her subtleness as a thinker. It couldn't work without Kira Josefsson's staggeringly flexible translation, which also stands out for the naturalness of its dialogue and wonderfully rhythmic prose. This duo's writing zings and smarts in all the right places as we see ourselves reflected in the characters, warts and all. Breathtakingly original, profound but with a delicious dose of irreverence.” —2026 International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>Read an extract.
>>Not the way it was planned.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio) $38
Hana has nothing but she's hopeful. She's fifteen years old. She lives in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears. Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana's dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that caters to hostesses and their marks, small-time crooks, men with low morals and deep pockets, and anyone down on their luck. Suddenly Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible. But in the seedy streets of Setagaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana's hope, her optimism, and her drive, will be tested to the limit. Twenty years later, Kimiko is on trial. Now Hana must wrestle with her own actions, and face their devastating consequences. [Paperback]
”I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami.” —Haruki Murakami
”Mieko Kawakami is a genius.” —Naoise Dolan
>>Sisterhood, survival, and finding hope in the darkness.”

The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín $32
In the stories collected in The News from Dublin Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home. A woman in Galway hears of the death of her son in the First World War. An Irishman seeks anonymity in Barcelona, haunted by crimes he has committed. A man goes to Dublin from Enniscorthy to implore the Minister for Health for a special favour. A young woman is pregnant during the Spanish Civil War. An undocumented worker finds himself living an illegal life and must leave San Francisco, and his child, after thirty years in America. Three sisters who have been living in Argentina decide to return to Catalonia. [Paperback]
”Tóibín is the consummate cartographer of the private self, summoning with restrained acuity (and a delicious streak of sly humour) the thoughts his characters struggle to find words for.” —Clare Clark, Guardian
>>A complex business.
>>How evil is tolerated.

The Last Witch on the Knock by Aimée MacDonald $38
”Wouldn't you rather be a witch than a victim? I didn't realise those were my only options.” In need of a fresh start, Thomasin leaves her toxic boyfriend, absent father and empty friendships to spend the summer in the Scottish Highlands with her eccentric Aunt Agnes and stern little cousin, Nina. But amidst the sprawling fields and ragged hills thrums a secret that has cursed the land for generations. 300 years earlier, Kate McNiven labours in The Big House by the Knock hill, wishing for a brighter future far away from the lecherous clutches of her master, the Laird. When she is exiled as a witch for refusing to succumb to his advances, Kate finds the escape she so desperately seeks in Thomasin, whose vulnerable body becomes her unwilling host. In the thin place between centuries, through a pulsing wound that bleeds out history, the truth of the past is finally ready to be revealed. [Paperback]
”Tense, harsh and haunting, The Last Witch on the Knock explores toxic relationships in myriad ways. Through a blend of body horror and poetic insight, Aimee creates a compelling tale.” —Lynsey May
”A lyrical exploration of identity and shared trauma, reminding readers of the power of folk. MacDonald's writing is unflinchingly visceral.” —Amy Twigg
”Mesmeric from the first page. A twisting, haunting tale where the present thrums with the bloody heartbeat of the past. MacDonald's prose is poetic and sharp.” —Lucy Steeds
”The Last Witch on the Knock does witches differently; here, a feral, intimate honesty lights the pyres.” —Charlotte Tierney

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Night, Ma by Elizabeth Knox $40
For three and a half years, calamities hit Elizabeth Knox and family in rapid succession. Her sister suffered a psychotic break and was hospitalised against her will, her husband’s brother died by violence, and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.  In time, she was able to write about it. Night, Ma is a book about the net of family which people are held by, but also slip through. About the actual daily work of love; the physical and cognitive work love requires.  Knox is a gifted storyteller who has given us other worlds; now she invites us into her own. With characteristic generosity and transcendence, she guides us through time, illness, loss, and the loneliness of unutterable experiences. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Absolutely brilliant. This radiant, radically honest memoir pulls the pin on a sequence of domestic grenades, from the perils of semi-feral childhood to a cruelly compacted series of family crises that, like shock waves, sweep all before. Armed with inimitable wit, the consolation of cats and a forensic gaze that spares no one, least of all herself, Knox interrogates the act of caring; the ties that burn and bind, that we somehow survive.” —Diana Wichtel 
”An unforgettable record of love and pain, as wide and deep as the ocean and as mighty. There is such life in this, such wit and goodness. Telling the truth of how we are, all of us, trembling on the edge of a great and terrible mystery.” —Noelle McCarthy 
>>Never letting up.
>>Workshopping.
>>The film that laid an egg.
>>The closely noticed husband.

The Clean: In the dreamlife you need a rubber soul by Richard Langston $50
In 1978 in Dunedin the Kilgour brothers, Hamish and David, and their schoolfriend Peter Gutteridge, got together to form a band called The Clean. When Robert Scott joined in 1980 the band found a combination that endured for nearly forty years. The Clean profoundly changed alternative music: hitting the New Zealand charts for months with a single made for $50, 'Tally Ho!'; helping establish Flying Nun and a music scene independent of the big labels; pioneering a low-fi, do-it-yourself approach to rock music; and touring internationally to influence bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. Raw and immediate, this is the story as told by members of The Clean and their inner circle - fellow musicians such as Chris Knox, Martin Phillipps, Graeme Downes and Ira Kaplan, friends and family, pub promoters and sound engineers, and their good friend, Richard Langston. From teenagers in a Dunedin practice room to New York City on 9/11 - this is the band's history as it unfolds. A remarkable piece of multivocal oral history, bursting with images both familiar and surprising. [Flexibound]
”Much needed and long overdue. … A book that tells the story of the band at the heart of New Zealand underground music and that became synonymous with things like Flying Nun Records and the "Dunedin Sound" that travelled around the world. It is written by the ideal author who was not only there when it all happened, but who also recognised why it really mattered more than most.” —Matthew Goody, author of Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988
”In 1980 The Clean blew my mind open at Coronation Hall on a Sunday afternoon. I stood adrift on a sea of wooden floorboards, drinking classic clanging brilliant amp sound, guitar notes shimmering all around me like scattered metal hail . . . All I knew was that this was where all music came from.” —Alastair Galbraith
>>Look inside.
>>Anything could happen.
>>Getting older.
>>Obscurity blues.

Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne $42
Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly... Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her. [Paperback]
”Ghost Driver devises a new genre of administrative horror: by turns addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar. Malory's inner and outer worlds, like the novel's prose, feel agonisingly poised on a knife edge - gothic in the cruellest, off-kilter sense. I am obsessed.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Nell Osborne is a genius. Ghost Driver is brilliant and hilarious and dark and true. I loved it.” —Sarah Bernstien
>>Every wrong turn.
>>Getting evil freely.
>>A tapestry of humiliation.

Spit by David Brennan $38
Welcome to the village of Spit, where Danny Mulcahy is losing the run of himself, and where, as he and his friends dream of escaping, an unexpected death sets the rumour mill into motion. Suffering an unexplained, perpetual banishment the Spook of Spit is watching everyone and everything - nothing goes unnoticed. Bearing witness to the village's half-truths and suppressed secrets, fragments of its own dark and obscured history are unveiled. As events spiral out of control, the past, present and future are set to collide. Can there be redemption for past deeds? How do you escape when you are fated to remain? What does it take to break free from the confines of Spit? [Paperback]
”There are whispers of Synge and Kevin Barry but Brennan has a full-throated and thrilling voice of his own. Spit gets hold of you and won't let you go.” —Estelle Birdy, The Irish Independent
”Crackling with dark humour and incantatory force, every line pulses with linguistic relish.” —The Irish Times

The Rot by Evelyn Araluen $30
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar. Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise. From the author of Dropbear, winner of the 2022 Stella Prize. [Paperback]
Short-listed for the 2026 Stella Prize.
”Rageful, desireful, artful, sorrowful, hauntful. A blaze of a book.” —Michelle de Kretser
”Evelyn Araluen's poetry and prose is created with a passionate intensity, razor-sharp intellect, beauty and compassion as she turns her mind to the broad sweep of history and a dynamic engagement with the spirit of our times.” —Alexis Wright"
”Blistering, brilliant, lacerating, wry, elegiac, The Rot is a hymn to girlhood, to resistance, to solidarity. Araluen is a masterful stylist, braiding air-fryer abjectioncore with bathtub meditations on the machinery of colonialism — and the whiplash and fury of witnessing and protesting genocide in the digital age. For all its allusions to mould and decay, The Rot is exhilarating in its defiance and staunchness.” —Jennifer Down 
>>Dissecting the rot.
>>Poetry, rage, and the power of not surrendering.
>>”I wrote The Rot.”

Three Stories of Forgetting by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (translated from Portuguese by Alison Entrekin) $35
Three men haunt these pages. Perhaps they are tormented ghosts who cannot find rest. All three have been expelled in some way, sent on solitary journeys into the night. Celestino, an old slave trader, returns to the solitude of his home and garden after a life of horrors. Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan who served on the Portuguese side in the Colonial War and has become a valet in Lisbon, writes endlessly to his daughter, asking for her forgiveness. And Bruma, an enslaved man, initiates a young writer, Eça de Queirós, into the world of literature. In discrete yet overlapping tales, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Three Stories of Forgetting explores the experiences of those who live within the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese Empire. In these unstable chapters, we find incarnations of our despair at the questions that history does not answer, and allegories that may yet reveal new ways of seeing through the dark. [Paperback]
"A brilliant, yet understated, critique of a past that Portugal most likely hopes to forget. Lyrical, enigmatic, and subtle: an accomplished work." —Kirkus Reviews
>>What the garden remembers.
>>600 years of colonialism.
>>Co-creatoirs.

The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson $48
The Wayfinder is an epic, sweeping novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu’i Tonga Empire. At its heart is Korero, a young girl chosen to save her people from the brink of starvation. Her quest takes her from her remote island home on a daring seafaring journey across a vast ocean empire built on power, consumption, and bloodshed. With the grandeur of Wolf Hall, Shogun, and War and Peace, The Wayfinder immerses readers in a world untouched by Western influence, evoking the lost art of oral storytelling. Far from a conventional swashbuckling adventure, it conjures a world of outrigger canoes and celestial navigation, weaving a narrative that is as much about survival and self-discovery as it is about the sweeping history of the Tongan people. In this monumental literary work, Adam Johnson explores themes of indigeneity, ecological balance, and the resilience of humanity in the face of scarcity, marking the novel as a meditation on both individual and cultural legacy. [Paperback]
"Novels are long divorced from the oral tradition; few are designed to last beyond their reading. But some books — Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), for instance, or Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (1985) — continue to be passed down, like legends. Predicting posterity is impossible, but The Wayfinder is this kind of work, modern and mythological. It is good enough, wondrous enough, to endure." —The Wall Street Journal
"An epic that feels less created than unearthed, Johnson's dizzying attention to the mercurial crosscurrents of conquest recalls Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. His bold melding of magic and psychological realism casts a spell as captivating as Marlon James's Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Yet The Wayfinder is sui generis — a tapestry of South Pacific myth, archetypal quest, political allegory, environmental jeremiad and feminist revision that feels both ancient and impossibly relevant." —The Washington Post
>>Celestial navigation.
>>A very real experience.

The Raven’s Eye Rebellion by Calire Mabey $25
When Getwin, Lea and Buckle — with the help of Sharp the raven — unearth the trickster Book of Blacke, they embark on a quest to undo the controls on their world, seeking justice for the Scribes who are forced to work and for those who have never been allowed to read or write. The city of Wyle comes alive with danger and intrigue as our heroes contend with the secrets of the Scholars Library, a magical boat, curious creatures, a secret reading and writing society, sleeping trees and the twists and turns of the ancient city. Can the friends stay safe? Will they be able to free the Scribes? Will Getwin's family ever be reunited? This sequel to award-winning The Raven's Eye Runaways is rich with wonder and a thirst for justice. [Paperback]
”Sparky and spooky, humorous and luminous.” —Elizabeth Knox

Kin by Tayari Jones $38
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother's death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life. A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South. From the author of An American Marriage. [Paperback]
"Tayari Jones's great subject is family loyalty. Kin alternates with metronomic precision between her main characters' first-person narratives. Loyalties and fortitude are repeatedly tested in this immersive drama. Resilience abounds." —The Wall Street Journal
"Jones's dazzling novel traces the complex range of the Black experience — rich and poor, queer and straight, blessed and cursed — in the Jim Crow South." —People
"One of the many pleasures of Kin is how deftly Jones builds the story within the context of the Jim Crow South in mid-twentieth century America. Another novelist might have made these broad social concerns the focus of the story, but Jones foregrounds her characters and lets them navigate these national tensions as naturally and confidently as they move through the streets of Atlanta and Memphis." —Ron Charles

Lost Wonders: 10 tales of extinction from the 21st century by Tom Lathan $28
Lost Wonders is a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth. From giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies, Tom Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime. Drawing on the personal recollections of the people who studied these species, as well as those who tried but ultimately failed to save them, Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world. It is also an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp. Most of the species considered in this interesting book were unique to isolated locations in the Pacific. [Paperback]
”Lathan's superb storytelling makes ecological crisis personal, local and often scarily visible. He doesn't let the tragedy hide, as it usually does, behind graphs and abstractions. Yet there's hope here too, in spades. This is an exhilarating and vital book.” —Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild
”A beautifully crafted elegy for the lost species of our age. In repopulating the world with extinct snails, lizards, bats and rats, Tom Lathan makes us marvel and care almost as much as the conservationists who tried and failed to save them.” —Kate Teltscher

The Only Way Is Up: On foot to Rome by Jennifer Andrewes $38
Setting out from Canterbury and walking some 2400 km to Rome along the Via Francigena, Jennifer Andrewes undertakes a personal journey across England, France, Switzerland and Italy. What begins as a physical journey soon becomes something deeper: an exploration of momentum, mindset, and the quiet power of putting one foot in front of the other when the way ahead is uncertain. Structured as a series of daily stages, the book follows the rhythms of pilgrimage life — early starts, long days on the road, chance encounters, moments of solitude, and the simple rituals that sustain a walker: coffee stops, conversations, rest, reflection. Along the way, Jennifer meets fellow walkers from around the world, navigates doubt and discomfort, and learns to trust the unfolding path rather than trying to control the outcome. While written through the lens of walking to Rome, The Only Way Is Up speaks to anyone standing at a crossroads. The author’s experience living with Parkinson’s is part of the landscape, but it does not dominate the narrative. [Paperback]
”'I have not walked the Via Francigena, but I recognise much in Jennifer's account from my own journeys on foot. Walking has always given me clarity, perspective and a steadier sense of leadership and decision-making. This book captures that rhythm beautifully. With insight and honesty, Jennifer shows how sustained movement builds resilience, momentum, and unexpected connection. A generous, reflective and uplifting account of pilgrimage as a framework for navigating change.” —Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand
>>The power of walking.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Glyph by Ali Smith $45
It sounds like Gliff? Well, it's something else altogether. Glyph follows Ali Smith's 2024 novel Gliff and tells a story hidden in the first novel. Ghosts don't exist. They don't. End of. Story, however. It is haunting. Everything tells it. It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost. Is it imaginary? Is it real? Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom. What to do? She phones her sister. In a chiaroscuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making. A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness. This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world. [Hardback]
”Glyph's primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language; its etymological resonance and inference. Smith's tonal skill as a writer is also used to great effect when dealing with bureaucratic, authoritarian absurdity. It is a bold move to be so morally unflinching, especially in the face of a perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that so often privileges distance and irony, but in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day when so many others have equivocated or turned away. There is also something about Smith's relentless focus on language that makes her particularly well suited to the task. Smith's sensibility is fine-tuned to grapple with the avalanche of passive-voice headlines, asymmetric categorisations, outright linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that have accompanied the increasingly desperate attempts to justify the unjustifiable.” —Keiran Goddard, Guardian
”Smith is an exceptionally gifted storytelle. She can bring any sentence alive with the verve of her wordplay, as her characters spark off one another in speech, echoing, patterning and discovering the energy contained in a single moment. Smith's capacity for hope is infectious, and the hope posited by these books is that storytelling can restore not just our humanity but our political responsibility and agency. Between them, Gliff and Glyph offer a world of endlessly proliferating gliffs: slivers of conscience that Smith imbues with a power that is not illusory simply because it is imagined. Indeed, Smith suggests that made-up stories may, at this point, be the least illusory things we have.” —New Statesman
>>Exhilirating/excoriating.
>>Read Stella’s review of the companion volume, Gliff.

Wilderness of Mirrors by Olufemi Terry $48
When Emil’s father suggests that he set aside his studies to help steady his cousin’s life, the young neurosurgeon-in-training moves in with indifferent relatives in Stadmutter, an unfamiliar, deeply divided city at Africa’s southern tip. There he is drawn to tamsin, a white doctoral student, and Bolling, a wealthy Haitian-German whose reactionary ideas hold a curious allure. Beneath Stadmutter’s languid surface, a gathering Creole movement is straining the country’s fragile racial peace. Through Bolling’s machinations, Emil is pulled into events that threatne his future and pushed towards irrevocable choices. [Paperback with French flaps]
”I loved this novel, at once vivid and mysterious, beautiful and frightening. Olufemi Terry speaks with great clarity and precision to the aimlessness and self-disconnect of youth, the formlessness of relationships developed under liminal conditions, and the frightening sensation of being gradually absorbed into something vast and opaque. Emil is a fascinating protagonist; Wilderness of Mirrors follows his movements closely, yet he remains — to himself, too — often half-absent, though occasionally brought into sharp focus and placed under the lens of his own self-analysis. Wilderness of Mirrors follows Emil's search for meaning and emotion amidst the mysteries of himself and of the parallel South Africa in which the novel is set, to deeply absorbing, often destabilising effect.” —Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
”In Wilderness of Mirrors, Olufemi Terry conjures up a parallel South Africa where, although apartheid is decades gone, its young people move through an existential transience, fitfully straining to reckon with the gaps their country's history has left them. For Emil and Tamsin, there's no coming of age, only a hollow sense that they should be doing more with selves they are still figuring out. It's a world that is all too familiar, yet Terry transfixes the reader such that we are loath to turn away.” —Evan Narcisse, author of Rise of the Black Panther
>>Read an extract.
>>What lies beneath?

On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis (translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls) $43
In a run-down East London housing office, migrants and frustrated local government employees cross paths and try to work out what the latest policy means for them. As a favour to a friend, one man finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. It is not until his life collides with Ghiyath's death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who've fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls, full of insight, humour and profound humanity. [Paperback with French flaps]
”I was riveted and charmed by this funny, humane and poignant novel. It's written in a voice that is as ardent as it is sensitive, one marked by history and yet managing to remain beautifully unruly and independent.” —Hisham Matar
”Shady Lewis makes fun of everything and everyone with great humanity: we become attached to these characters who are more lost than crazy, who do what they can keep going. Lewis, with scathing humour and a healthy lightness of touch, examines everything: from the god Khnum to Margaret Thatcher via Karl Marx, freedom of expression, Facebook, romantic breakups, colonization, identity and religious tensions - nothing escapes his acerbic and lucid gaze. A delicious tragicomic novel about contemporary society.” —Nina Chastel, Orient XXI
”This introspective novel delights with its finesse and depth, and invites us to look at reality from the author's sensitive perspective. In painfully beautiful, funny and tragic prose, Shady Lewis skilfully and accurately expresses the difficulty of being excluded and stigmatized because of their difference.” —Nadia Leila Aissaoui, l'Orient litteraire
>>Madness and philosophy.
>>The translator reads a passage (and there’s a slideshow).
>>Fifty shades of whiteness.

Pulse by Cynan Jones $35
A collection of viscerally powerful short stories in which man is pitted against nature, against circumstance, and against himself. A man heads into the snow to hunt down the bear that has been taking stock from farms in the valley. A father tries to make something go right for the son he no longer lives with. A partner is called to help when a cow's labour goes horribly wrong. A fierce storm threatens to bring down a tree on powerlines over a family's home. Fear, vulnerability, tension and resolve course through these arresting and indelible stories from the Welsh author of The Dig and Cove. [Hardback]
”Breathtakingly tense, vital and precise. Cynan Jones has a rare gift for making us experience, moment by moment, the struggles of his characters to survive.” —Carys Davies
”Pellucid clinical sentences craft a loving symphony of meat and magic, mucous, mud and mire. Cynan Jones's writing is pure electric energy. Every story thrums and squirms with life. The accumulative affect is to deliver a shock to the heart of what a wild, strange and wonderful thing it is to be human.” —Megan Barker
”Each paragraph reads like a beautiful, multi-layered prose poem. The crystalline language conveys, with real emotive power, the squelch and suck of mud and manure, the stink of blood, the skin-feel of drizzle. Spending time with this collection is a sensory, immersive experience.” —Niall Griffiths
”Cynan Jones is a blast of fresh air, a stumble in the dark, and a sudden chill in the guts.” —Tim Winton
”The six tales in Cynan Jones’s new collection vibrate with fear. Jones introduces a mood of fearful expectation on the first page and maintains it, with few moments of respite. Much of the tension arises from our not knowing what is going on. Such withholding of information is a studied technique on the author’s part, a means of creating mystery, sparking our curiosity and prompting us to ask questions. Pared-down though his writing may be: it is shot through with moments of arresting originality and beauty. The painterly effect is exquisite, the first sentence of the first story exemplifying the quiet power of Cynan Jones’s prose.” —Times Literary Supplement
>>Nature and non-linear love.
>>Writing in your head.

Angst by Hélène Cixous (translated from French by Sophie Lewis) $48
A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis. [Paperback]
”Cixous reminds us that women have long spoken from a wound. To be is already to be abandoned, already to have lost, and still to love. To read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, to hear how writing becomes testimony to its own possibility.” —Jamieson Webster
”Language in Cixous’s hands is molten, constantly opening onto fresh possibilities.” —Maggie Nelson
”With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.” —Lidia Yuknavitch
>>On Angst.
>>Very close, very far.

Happiness by Yuri Felsen (translated from Russian by Bryan Karetnyk) $42
Influenced by the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Yuri Felsen’s writing stood at the forefront of aesthetic and philosophical currents in European literature. Set among the exiled Russian community of interwar Paris, Happiness offers both a vivid social snapshot and an unnerving psychological portrait, and its exploration of desire, rivalry, masculinity and self-deception, shaped by shifting sexual and emotional mores, feels strikingly modern. Written as a diary addressed to his beloved Lyolya, Happiness unfolds as an intense stream of consciousness in which Volodya — its anxious, self-scrutinising narrator — revisits the fragile equilibrium of their difficult relationship. When new figures enter Lyolya’s orbit, Volodya’s hard-won certainties begin to collapse. Forced to contend with a series of rivals — a Soviet film star, a dashing ex-soldier, a wealthy businessman — he is driven ever deeper into jealousy and self-analysis, with tragic results. As the relationship fractures, Volodya probes the uneasy bond between emotional suffering and artistic creation, and the elusive nature of happiness itself. Felsen’s writing has only recently been rediscovered. At the height of his career, following the Nazi occupation of France, he was deported and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and his legacy and archive were largely destroyed by the Nazis. [Paperback]
”Felsen has rightly been compared to Proust in his determination to make language capture every atom of the mind’s workings. This translation is a formidable achievement.” —Literary Review
”The miracle of Yuri Felsen is how his apparently Nabokovian rhythms lull you into a false sense of security, before a sudden and chilling exposure to the weather of a walk where the whole elegantly interwoven conceit of the narrator is ripped apart. And the pain of someone like Walser glints through a decadent surface of exiled life in Paris, to hint at darker shadows to come.” —Iain Sinclair

Zero Point by Slavoj Žižek $22
The essays in Zero Point ask how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and how we confront despair without collapsing into it — questions never more pertinent than the current moment in the wake of electoral victories for authoritarian populists and unceasing news of violent atrocities. The 'zero-point' of the title is ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups. Taken from Vladimir Lenin's 1922 piece 'On Ascending a High Mountain, in which Lenin considers the complexities of how one 'retreats' while keeping faith in the cause, the central simile of the climber offers a blueprint for resilience, flexibility, and the persistence of hope. This is the revolutionary as living out the Beckettian motto — 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' In Žižek’s hands, this becomes the formula for confronting the antagonisms of existing world order. With a particular focus on the Middle East — the point at which all our tensions threaten to explode — Žižek argues nothing can be addressed meaningfully without such a confrontation. [Paperback]

Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Gransden $40
In the midst of an apocalyptic event of unknown provenance — a mass of red spreading north from the southern counties — a young girl sets out on a journey. Along the way she encounters a series of eccentric characters, the few left behind in the wake of a widespread evacuation. Some of these individuals are ravaged and on the edge of death, while others are immersed in their own hermetic practices, be they solipsistic, nihilistic, or otherwise. None wish to engage for more than the brief time necessary to offer their meagre assistance. There is talk of 'anti-spores', pools of blood, and of a hum spreading through communication wires. The hum has altered the very appearance of written language, pushing words apart, leaving only single syllables behind. This constraint is present in the third-person narration we read but is removed during periods of dialogue. This results in a rhythmic, chantlike flow to the prose. As with the best of work that employs the tropes of apocalyptic fiction, Rebecca Gransden's unusual novella ends with many of its questions floating in the scarlet haze it generates, leaving them for the reader to ponder in the wake of what is surely a singular literary experience. [Paperback]
"Linguistically inventive, alert in every sense, and propelled with such narrative force that hairs burn on the unsuspecting reader’s neck." —Iain Sinclair
>>The way of salt and sin.

Hooked by Asako Yuzuki (tranlsated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $37
The new novel from the author of Butter. Eriko really wouldn't mind being savaged, if it was her best friend doing the savaging. Eriko's life appears perfect — devoted parents, spotless apartment and a job in the seafood division of one of Japan's largest trading companies. Her latest project, to reintroduce the controversial Nile perch fish into the Japanese market, is characteristically ambitious. But beneath her flawless surface she is wracked by loneliness. Eriko becomes fascinated with a popular blog written by a housewife, Shoko. Shoko's posts about eating convenience store food and her untidy home are the opposite of the typical Japanese housewife's manicured lifestyle. When Eriko tracks Shoko down at her favourite restaurant and befriends her, Shoko is at first charmed by her new companion. But as Eriko's obsession with Shoko deepens, her increasingly possessive behaviour starts to raise suspicion. As Eriko's carefully laid plans begin to unravel, how far will she go to hold on to the best friend that she's ever had? [Paperback]
”Obsession, tension and toxic loneliness: Hooked had me in a headlock. No one writes about the hidden depths and lurking monstrosities of womanhood quite like Asako Yuzuki.” —Alice Slater

Mastering Italian Breads: Recipes and techniques from Italiy’s most celebrated breadmaker by Fulvio Marini $60
From humble homes in the mountain villages of Umbria and the Piedmont to the grand bakeries of Milan and Rome, the Italians know bread-baking. The same breads they make are also made in fancy, expensive bakeries outside of Italy, too, but few people realize how easy, gratifying, and inexpensive it is to make these spectacular loaves at home. Enter Fulvio Marino, one of Italy's most celebrated bread-makers, who has made it his mission to teach everyday home cooks the secrets of Italian artisan breads. He has written a big, colorful book that reveals his secrets and those of his fellow artisans. Illustrated with hundreds of step-by-step color photos that show you how the breads are folded and shaped, Mastering Italian Breads includes well-known classics like Focaccia, Ciabatta, Crostata, and Pan DolceLesser known-but worth discovering! —Italian regional breads like Pane Pugliese and Teglia alla Romana. —More than a dozen Italian spins on rolls, biscuits, and breadsticks. —Six rustic and delicious versions of pizza doughs. —Breads with a sweet side, such as Cannoli and Panettone. Authoritative, easy-to-follow advice about yeasts, wheat varieties, proofing, rising, shaping, and baking. Both useful and inspiring. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

She Who Tastes, Knows: A memori of food, exile, and awakening by Durkhanai Ayubi $38
To truly understand things, we need to know them. We need to taste them. This is a story of how food connects us all — not only at the table but to each other's cultures and histories. Durkhanai Ayubi was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and she and her family became refugees when she was a small child. She's grown to see her ancestral lands be misunderstood as a desolate war zone of helpless people, with no history or culture worthy of mention, when the reality is in fact steeped in rich, complex histories of incredible cultural significance. Living in Australia, Durkhanai's only tangible connection to the histories of her homeland was through food, first through cooking with her family, and then as an owner of her much-loved award-winning Adelaide family restaurant, Parwana. Years on, and following Afghanistan's systemic collapse in 2021, Durkhanai realised that it was time to revisit those histories and tell the previously untold stories that can help shape a more optimistic future. She Who Tastes, Knows is an expansive history of Durkhanai's homeland and a vivid, moving story about what it truly means to understand another's culture. Through stories of food, family, belonging and migration, the book traverses cultural boundaries, weaving a tapestry of dignity, empathy and understanding. Each chapter draws on a particular ingredient important to Durkhanai's cultural identity, and explores their life cycles to uncover unseen histories of Afghan culture, the complexities of migrant and refugee experience, and how we as a society might work towards unifying our disparate cultures and ways of seeing the world. In our modern world, which can feel so disjointed, this book shows us how new possibilities for connection are just under the surface, waiting to bloom. [Paperback]
>>Ayubi is best known as the author of the Afghan cookbok Parwana.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translated from Spanish by Robin Myers) $50
From deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio writes a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the same Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since transforming into Antonio, he has had monumental adventures and taken on numerous guises. He has been a mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, cabin boy and conquistador. He has wielded his sword and slashed with his dagger. Now, hiding in the jungle and hounded by the army he deserted, Antonio is looking after two Guarani girls he rescued from enslavement. But the New World has one more metamorphosis in store, which might save them all from extinction. Based on the life of Antonio de Erauso, a real figure from the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a masterful criticism of religious tyranny and the mistreatment of women and indigenous people. This queer, baroque, tender and surreal novel conveys glimmers of hope for the future within the brutal colonial history of Latin America — finding in the rainforest a magical space where transformation is not only possible but necessary. A beautifully written, sumptuous and surreal historical reimagining of one of South America's best-known trans men, from the author of The Adventures of China Iron. [Hardback]
Long-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
”A hallucinatory, innocent, fanciful and redemptive book. Cabezon Camara's historical fiction plays out like confession or revelation, a piece of real-unreal colonial apocrypha, glowing white hot, dancing like the heart of a pyre.” —Financial Times
”Sumptuously translated by Robin Myers, We Are Green and Trembling is strikingly relevant to the present day. Cabezon Camara uses history to illuminate and interrogate threats to trans representation and, in parallel, to interrogate the enduring, humanising effects of colonisation... [an] epic in miniature... a mercurial tale for all time.” —Irish Times
”So sharp, so urgent, so brave. Gabriela Cabezon Camara is one of the most authentic voices writing in Spanish today, and among her many talents is one that's especially hard to find: not only does she challenge and incite us, not only does she confront the darkness, but she also gives us in return the subversive courage to think of ourselves as more human, more alive, and more luminous than ever.” —Samanta Schweblin
”Profoundly resonant with our current moment, We Are Green and Trembling offers a searing critique of modernity's colonial echoes: a resurgence of far-right ideology, cultural erasure, and gender-based oppression. A story that is not only inclusive but also redemptive-anchored in the richness of language, the beauty of the natural world, and the power of storytelling to reclaim what history tries to erase.” —Chicago Review of Books
>>Read and extract.
>>The germ and the translation.
>>The importance of representation.
>>Writing like a river.
>>Letting the jungle win.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent $40
When Erin Vincent was fourteen her parents were struck down by a truck driver. Years later, the number fourteen reverberates – in books and films and art and music and in the lives of the people who made them. Finding in these places not comfort or consolation but an infinite network of correspondences, Fourteen Ways of Looking becomes a paradigm for the act of writing itself. [Paperback]
”Fourteen Ways of Looking is a deep dive into the moment after which nothing is the same — life as afterlife, and yet it’s what we have. Vincent’s effort is both psychological and literary: trying to wrangle meaning from an event that may have none, or may hold it all. And what then, of her autonomy to make her own life? In her efforts to free herself by going back to the source of trauma, she is both Odysseus and Euridice, damned and saved. A remarkable achievement.” —Anna Funder
”Erin Vincent’s book is magnificent, simply one of the best books I’ve read in ages. I read it in a reverie of blissed-out, horrified amazement. It will be compared to Markson, but it’s better than Markson – more formally disciplined, more cold-blooded in its self-scrutiny. I can easily imagine this book becoming a cultural touchstone like Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.” —Sarah Manguso
”Fourteen — for Erin Vincent — is the age at which her self was formed, and this text is itself an astonishing formal experiment. The number fourteen becomes uncanny and arbitrary, both divine symbol and violent accident, as she remembers her younger self and tries to find patterns in chaos. An incredible achievement: unclassifiable, humane and haunting. I was moved to tears.” —Clare Pollard
”Through a structure and project that holds the book to the tightest of attention, Vincent brings to this astute exploration of personal grief the world’s grief, the reader’s grief, the planet’s grief. All of time concertinas into these perfectly formed fragments that interrogate the number fourteen through the lens of how we are changed by the things of life that stop us in our tracks. However, I think the final message of Vincent’s magnificent work is the things we notice once we have been changed and the ways these act as markers to our inevitable tentative steps into the rest of life. This is an astounding work — resonant, intelligent and generous.” —Pip Adam
>>The presence of an orphan.
>>Also available in this edition.

Cannon by Lee Lai $45
A funny, dark, emotionally turbulent slice of friendship strife. We arrive to wreckage: a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their relationship.  In high school, they were each other's lifeline — two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.  Yet when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself very uncharacteristically surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her out. In Cannon, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a part of what is on offer. Lai's sharp sense of humour and sensitive eye produce a story that explores the intimacy of queer friendship and weight of family responsibility, and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>A growing fondness for confrontation.

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (translated from German by Ruth Martin) $37
A polyphonic novel of one family's flight from and return to Iran. 1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah's expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid. 1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power. 1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories. 2009. Laleh's brother Mo is more concerned with a friend's heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down. [Paperback]
Long-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
"The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran fits the family novel mold in many ways: it spans generations, explores inherited trauma, and depicts the effects of politics on a family. This highly political and touching novel gives a great insight into the political situation in Iran. In translating this vision of authorial omnipotence — of an imagined freedom — Ruth Martin brings Shida Bazyar's politically urgent and thematically significant voice to English-speaking readers ... creating an experience that feels both immediate and compelling." —Ankita Harbola, Reading in Translation
"Bazyar's stories strike at the aching heart of exile. A pulsing longing for a better future lingers from its first page to its last. A quietly beautiful exploration of the trauma of losing one's homeland to a savage regime, the novel is testament to how hope and the revolutionary spirit endure in the face of crushing tyranny, how courage cannot be fully stamped out. It lies dormant, awaiting a time when it can again ignite new acts of bravery, new waves of revolution." —Rhoda Kwan, The Saturday Paper
>>Read an extract.
>>”The more we read, the less suseptible we will be to easy answers.”
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Claude Cahun: Photofile by François Leperlier $35
The perfect primer on the surrealist writer and photographer Claude Cahun. Claude Cahun (1894-1954), the chosen name of the artist born Lucy Schwob, was best known in their lifetime as a writer but built up a remarkable body of photographic work that only came to prominence after their death. Politically active and involved with a wide circle of artists and intellectuals, including the Surrealists, Cahun followed their own rules in both life and art. They are best known for their strikingly staged self-portraits, in which they used costumes, makeup and technical effects to tackle themes of identity and self-representation. Their love of symmetry, mirroring, repurposing and retouching was also reflected in their approach to other styles of photography, including portraiture, photomontage and still-life tableaux. Whether working alone or in collaboration with their life partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), Claude Cahun was a pioneering figure in the aesthetics of modernity who never stopped crossing boundaries of gender and genre. The breadth of work in this selection shows their experiments on many fronts, anticipating photographers who followed them, including Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman. [Paperback with French flaps]
>>Look inside!

The Pelican Child by Joy Williams $30
Lauded by many as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the ‘pelican child’, who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Pithy, spiky and defiantly strange. Williams hopes to reignite our sense of wonder in the world, so that we might be rallied to protect it. Here, at the height of her powers, she may just triumph.” —Financial Times
”My platonic ideal of a writer. Williams blends the real and fantastical and is very funny — sometimes cruelly so.” —Chris Power, Observer
”I've been a fan of Joy Williams since I first read her.” —Ali Smith
”Williams is the kind of funny you can't explain — a master of the craft.” —Anne Enright, Guardian
>>Read one of the stories.
>>And about that story!
>>Uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks.

Granta 173: India edited by Thomas Meeney $35
India is familiar ground for Granta, having devoted two classic issues to the country, though much has changed since the last dispatch, published on the cusp of the Modi era. 173 features contemporary fiction and poetry in translation, as well as articles dedicated to the Indian space program; the bloody twilight of the Naxalites in Jharkhand; archaeology wars, Bollywood, jingoism, and national myth-making; the murder of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia; the delicate and fraught care for an ailing parent; as well as a historical introduction by the editor that situates contemporary controversies and aesthetic fault lines in perspective. Featuring non-fiction from Sujatha Gidla, Raghu Karnad, Karan Mahajan, Srinath Perur and Snigdha Poonam, as well as interviews with Salman Rushdie and Sanjay Subrahmanyam and a symposium on the languages of India. Fiction by Jeyamohan, Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, Vivek Shanbhag, Geetanjali Shree and Devika Rege. Photography by Keerthana Kunnath, Yash Sheth (introduced by Ruchir Joshi) and Dayanita Singh (introduced by Amit Chaudhuri). And poetry by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sumana Roy. [Paperbafck]
>>Read some extracts.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford $38
It's the summer of 1939. London is on the brink of catastrophic war. Iris Hawkins, an ambitious young woman in the stuffy world of City finance, has a chance encounter with Geoff, a technical whizz at the BBC's nascent television unit. What was supposed to be one night of abandon draws her instead into an adventure of otherworldly pursuit — into a reality where time bends, spirits can be summoned, and history hangs by a thread. Soon there are Nazi planes overhead. But Iris has more to contend with than the terrors of the Blitz. Over the rooftops of burning London, in the twisted passages between past and present, a fascist fanatic is travelling with a gun in her hand. And only Iris can stop her from altering the course of history forever. [Paperback]
’What a joy! A novel with endless ingenuity and enormous heart.” —Kaliane Bradley
”One of the finest prose stylists of his generation.” —The Times
”One of the most original minds in contemporary literature.” —Nick Hornby
”A tremendously varied and surprising writer.” —Guardian
>>A dazzling sweep.

Horses and Us: True stories of horses and their humans by Johanna Emeney $37
Horses & Us brings together 23 true stories from across Aotearoa which show the incredible things that are achieved when humans and horses come together. With illustrations by award-winning artists as well as poems, artworks and photographs, Horses & Us is a big-hearted, moving and engaging celebration of the animals we love and the people who love them. [Paperback]
>>Look inside!

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje (translated from Dutch by David McKay) $46
Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in World War I, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper advertisement, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn't turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand's biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne's stories about him. But how can he be certain that she's telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne's word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve. [Paperback]
Long-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.
”A soldier without his memory; a wife in search of her missing husband — if you thought that all war stories were the same, not so. Some years after the Great War, Noon Merckem is found wandering in a field in Belgium, amnesiac and adrift. In time, he is claimed, but it is not so easy to return to an elusive past. In Daanje’s hands, and in McKay’s intuitive translation, the ravages and shellshock of the First World War are superbly traced – but the big question at the heart of this novel is how far humans will go in order to love, how fiercely they will fight for what they intend to have and to hold.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>Read an extract.
>>Reading about other people.
>>Other books listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Cat $80
A stunning, large-format collection of more than 200 stunning images, Cat is a comprehensive yet playful celebration of the house cat in art and popular culture. Thoughtfully paired to reveal intriguing juxtapositions, these diverse works showcase the exciting ways the cat has inspired across time and cultures. From tabbies to tortoiseshells, Japanese maneki-neko lucky cats to artists pets, and ancient mosaics to contemporary couture, this book revels in the undeniable aesthetic appeal of our feline friends. Essays by Hannah Shaw, also known as Kitten Lady, and Leila Jarbouai trace humanity s symbiotic relationship with cats through the lens of visual culture and empathetically connect us to this cherished animal in images. Your cat wants this book in your house. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

The Gum Trees of Kerikeri by Lynn Jenner $30
Grounded in the natural world and the community of the land the speaker lives on — an area in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand that was once a kauri forest — this collection of prose poems weaves observations and encounters from daily life with musings on societal and environmental issues, memory, history, art and culture. The result is a deeply observant, reflective collection on that most challenging of constants: change. From the opening poem, Jenner traces how this land has been transformed since the late nineteenth century. Where kauri forest once stood there have been gumfields, orchards, dairy farms, lavender rows and now tourist accommodation. Humans and landscapes alike continue to be altered over time, but Jenner asks that we not forget the past. Across 56 finely tuned prose poems, Jenner’s technical restraint and precision allow her explorations to unfold with calm, measured power. She draws connections between people, place and creative practice, examining how time, art and memory shape our sense of belonging. The Gum Trees of Kerikeri is a thoughtful, sensitively balanced work that shows how close observation can uncover new understandings of the world and our own circumstances — even as the speaker sometimes doubts that any of it is useful in a world speeding towards catastrophe. Winner of the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award. [Paperback]
”Jenner’s sensitive engagement with the world reminds us that poetry can be found in the smallest moments of our day-to-day lives and how such moments become intertwined with a much larger tapestry of human experience. —Chris Tse
>>On the up.

Kupe and the Great Octopus of Muturangi by Mat Tait $30
Kupe found that a huge, fearsome wheke was taking all the fish in the ocean and the people of Hawaiki had nothing to eat. So Kupe chased that wheke across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Finally Hine-te-Aparangi, Kupe's wife, saw land and a long white cloud: Aotearoa! Find out what happened when the wheke and Kupe had a massive battle (and why you should cover your eyes when passing certain rocks). [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Mat Tait’s Te Wehenga was named the 2023 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year.

Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz (translated from German by Max Lawton) $58
A bizarre and troubling novel for our bizarre and troubling times — an intricate, metaphysical, ambitious, thousand-page ‘psychogeography of the self’ that both disrupts and elevates the 21st century vision of the novel. Our narrator is held in complete darkness and isolation. His endless thoughts are turned into the book we are reading — Schattenfroh — directed by none other than the narrator's mysterious jailer by the same name. Undulating through explorations of Renaissance art, the German reformation, time-defying esoterica, the printing process in the 16th century, Kabbalistic mysticism, and beyond, Schattenfroh is a remarkable book that, in turn, asks the remarkable of its readers. Interruptions, breaks, and annotations both buoy and deceive, and endless historical references, literary allusions, and wordplay construct a baroque, encyclopedic quest. [Paperback]
"One of the great, and greatly demanding, literary pleasures of the year." —The New York Times
"Schattenfroh is extremely long and prodigiously learned, with scenes — and even sentences — that veer from one century to another, and with a taste for literary and art historical in-jokes that might try the patience of even the most erudite reader. All the more impressive, then, is Max Lawton's translation, which renders Lentz's flinty though extravagant German into English sentences that are clear, nimble, and frankly full of beans, capturing the propulsive energy of the original text without sacrificing its difficulty." —New York Review of Books
"Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh attempts to tell the history of the annihilated world. Yet Lentz constantly prods his reader to ask who the author of that history is, and what they might be leaving out, despite their claims to completeness." —Cleveland Review of Books
"What does Schattenfroh do? Intrigue, frustrate, hypnotise, even — yes — entertain, after a certain point. What novels are supposed to do, in other words — which, we begin to realise, is not actually to create Presence but to carve around it." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"The best stuff in the book — the nightmare visionary parts whose eeriness is enhanced by the hypnotic state the book has put you in — are a kind of unconscious registration of the very scenario in which we find ourselves: the encroachment of ever more unforgivingly capitalist forms of cultural streamlining, of AI that purports to write and compose and make movies." —The Baffler
>>A fable about totalitarianism written in brain-fluid.
>>Devil and invention.
>>The genesis of Schattenfroh.

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (translated from German by Ross Benjamin) $38
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won't take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. [Paperback]
”In The Director, Daniel Kehlmann performs a literary panning shot over the career of real-life filmmaker G. W. Pabst and charts the ways in which Nazi ideology leaked into the arts during Europe’s occupation. Where is the line between survival and collaboration? And can art survive the moral bankruptcy of its makers? It’s hard to imagine any writer tackling such hefty themes with lightness, yet Kehlmann does just this, writing compassionately, humorously and unsparingly from the perspectives of his complex characters, guiding the reader through the moral maze. Translator Ross Benjamin writes each shifting voice and set-up with the nuance they demand in a juggling act of wit and gravity that shouldn’t look this easy. Deeply intelligent, ambitiously structured and unputdownable.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
”A wonderful book about complicity and the complicity of art. It's also funny, and brilliant.” —Zadie Smith
”Daniel Kehlmann is shockingly brilliant, a writer of extraordinary range and grace. At times absurdist, at times horrifyingly realist, The Director asks where the moral duty of the artist resides, and how the narcissism of the artistic project can bleed into complicity.” —Lauren Groff
”The Director is engrossing and luminous, an epic act of historical imagination and an intimate parable about moral compromise and the seductions of art. After Tyll, I wasn't sure how Kehlmann could possibly top himself. He has. This book is a marvel” —Ayad Akhtar
”Daniel Kehlmann, the finest German writer of his generation, takes on the life of the eminent film director G. W. Pabst to weave a tragicomic historical fantasia that stretches from Hollywood to Nazi Germany, from Garbo to Goebbels, to show how even a great artist can make, and be unmade by, moral compromises with evil. A dazzling performance and a real page turner.” —Salman Rushdie
”An incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today.” —Jeffrey Eugenides
>>Read an extract.
>>The fate of the artist under totalitarianism.
>>Complicity.
>>Opening the door.
>>Some films of G.W. Pabst.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer $70
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled to describe what makes this famous golden age unique. In Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating. Her witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the period show how its legend derives more from later centuries' mythmaking than from the often grim reality of the period itself. She examines its defining figures and movements: the enduring legacy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the rediscovery of the classics, the rise of the Medici and fall of the Borgias, the astonishing artistic achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Cellini, the impact of the Inquisition and the expansion of secular Humanism. Palmer also explores the ties between culture and money: books, for example, could cost as much as grand houses, so the period's innovative thinkers could only thrive with the help of the super-rich. She offers fifteen provocative and entertaining character portraits of Renaissance men and women, some famous, some obscure, whose intersecting lives show how the real Renaissance was more unexpected, more international and, above all, more desperate than its golden reputation suggests. [Hardback]
”Inventing the Renaissance does something magical: it manages to take a tightly-held conviction (that there was a thing in European history called 'the Renaissance'), dismantle it with humor and intelligence, then put it back together as something different and more true to the past itself. But maybe more importantly, Palmer's expertise and storytelling helps us better understand how golden ages are imagined, and why rejecting those invented constructions of the past provides us with hope as we confront our own contemporary world. As she says herself: 'we can do better than the Renaissance.” —Matthew Gabriele
”An urgent corrective to modern myths about an ill-used past. Palmer has written a vital, absorbing and incredibly entertaining history of the so-called Renaissance. Challenging conventional wisdom, Inventing the Renaissance delves deep into the historical circumstances that have given rise to one of the most pervasive and frustrating narratives of the early modern period. It is a must read for all history enthusiasts.” —Eleanor Janega
>>Where did the idea of the Renaissance come from?
>>Golden and Dark Ages.

Patchwork: A graphic biography of Jane Austen by Kate Evans $37
In her later years, Jane Austen made a patch-work quilt. She folded thousands of tiny scraps of fabric over diamond-shaped slips of paper and painstakingly stitched them together. Kate Evans employs these slivers of cloth to illustrate Jane Austen's life story. Evans teases apart the threads that connect Austen's beloved novels, the events of her life, and the fabric of society in Regency England. Kate Evans has an ability to marry drama, comedy, and historically immersive detail, bringing Austen's story to life with fluid, dynamic artwork, at times embroidered onto cloth itself. The author's love for Austen shines throughout. Her eye for historical detail — panes of glass, bits of lace, hedgelaying styles, the cut of a coat or the architecture of a Hampshire cottage — creates a captivating vision of Jane Austen's world. Evans is always cognisant, as well, of the political, economic and social contexts which defined Austen’s place in the world. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>The threads of empire.
>>What you didn’t know about Jane Austen.

Who Will Tell My Story? A Gaza diary [Anonymous] $30
”It was a sleepless night full of tears and fear . . . I am not sure — if I make it out alive — if I will still possess what makes me, me. And I wonder: will I be there in the future, or will I be someone to be remembered in a diary or over a cup of tea by a friend after I am gone?” This diary presents an ordinary existence interrupted by unfathomably seismic and unjust events. On the ground during the first months of the assault on Gaza following the events of 7 October, the author of this diary — first published in The Guardian — maps out the physical and psychological terrain of a life under siege. Traversing the bombed ruins of his country, we see him as he searches for foodstuffs and power to charge devices, maintaining contact with the outside world, checking in with his friends and family along the way; we see his heart swing between despair and faith, fear and optimism, his mind imagining different futures and confronting the brutal truth of his present.Shining a light on the fate of all those living through war and occupation, Who Will Tell My Story? conveys with astonishing clarity how seeds of hope might linger amid the most trying of times. The author is a Palestinian man in his thirties. He lived in Gaza with his family and contributed a diary to The Guardian newspaper following the attacks on Gaza after the events of October 7th, 2023. After some time, he was able to flee the country; he hopes to return to his home. [Hardback]
>>The entries, as we read them.

The Savile Row Suit: The art of bespoke tailoring by Patrick Grant, illustrated by Oriana Fenwick $70 (special price)
Very useful and clear, this book provides a step-by-step guide on the creation of the perfect suit. Through detailed illustrations and comprehensive text, readers will gain an understanding of the tailoring process, from measuring to fit and fabric selection. From suits to trousers and waistcoats, this contemporary instructional manual is the guide to creating a timeless classic and how to wear it. In addition to being a practical guide, The Savile Row Suit also offers a history on the tradition of Savile Row tailoring, providing insights into the ethos, the craftsmanship, materials and culture that have made Savile Row the most respected tailoring location in the world. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

The Story of Art Without Men: An illustrated guide to amazing women artists by Katy Hessell, illustrated by Ping Zhu $50
Step into the incredible lives of the women artists who have gone uncelebrated for too long, in this lively version for children of Hessell’s landmark book. Journey through history, from the Renaissance to the Second World War, and across the globe, from Cornwall to Manhattan, Nigeria, Japan and more, to discover the stories of women who changed the world with their incredible art. You'll learn about the extraordinary lives of freedom fighters, game changers and adventurers - and be astounded by the art they made, with its striking landscapes, hidden messages and calls for women's rights. Based on the bestselling book The Story of Art Without Men, this version includes breathtaking illustrations and a host of new art and artists to discover. [Large-format hardback]
>>Look inside!

The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessell $35
How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway? Discover the glittering Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century USA and the artist who really invented the Readymade. Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of post-War artists in Latin America and the women artists defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it's never been told before. Fully illustrated. [Now in paperback]
”A long overdue, revisionist history of art by the brilliant Katy Hessel. Never stuffy or supercilious, Hessel's book is a revelation and an important first step towards redressing the balance of an art world in which women have been sidelined, stepped over and trampled upon for far too long.” —Refinery29
“This book changes everything.” —Ali Smith

Kiwis in Climate: Voices for claimate solutions in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Tessa Vincent $45
Kiwis in Climate brings together practical visions for Aotearoa to lead on climate solutions. Scientists, politicians, CEOs and citizens demonstrate what we are doing now — and what we must do — to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Over 30 New Zealanders explain how climate solutions can improve our lives, from cheaper energy to job creation and healthier communities. [Paperback]
>>A book for everyone.

All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro $38
Set in what may be the future, and centred on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, Giada Scodellaro's debut novel may recall Virginia Woolf's The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast (often vernacular, often overheard: 'The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless'). It's a book which seems to be drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalisation. 'Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.' Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins. Winner of the 2024 Novel prize. [Paperback]
”Giada Scodellaro is one of the most astonishing writers of her generation and Ruins, Child is a visionary novel. Scodellaro refracts and redefines the canon of Black culture, the archive of Black experience. The result is a masterpiece that lives and breathes on the page, every sentence shimmering with wit, musicality, brilliance and verve.” —Katie Kitamura
”Giada Scodellaro’s newest masterpiece, Ruins, Child, endows the concept and form of the contemporary novel with new force and meaning. Cinematic and prismatic, like a camera constantly in motion and yet incisive in its close portraitures of a community of Black women and fems surviving and living amidst the future urban, eco-dystopic, queer ruins of our society, Scodellaro’s novel breaks new ground in spectacular fashion.” —John Keene
”Ruins, Child takes us to the crumbling architecture of a future past; a future past that is possibly now. In this work of fractal seeing, we encounter women in lives that are simultaneously lived, reenacted, and observed. Ruins, Child is conceptually rich, prismatic, and choral, embodied, and surreal, cinematic and textual. Giada Scodellaro writes us Black life watching Black life.” —Dionne Brand
”Mesmerising — little by way of plot, but much to offer in terms of beauty. For readers willing to surrender to the sway and creep of Scodallero’s prose, it can feel much like watching an art house film, where, as one of the novel’s characters puts it, ‘we are lost in the potential of this scene’. The result is an arresting work by a writer unbound by constraints of the expected.” —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an excerpt.
>>First the legs, then the fingernails.
>>Small tellings, silence, white space.

All the Lights by Clemens Meyer (tanslated from German by Stuart Evers) $40
A man bets all he has on a horse race to pay for an expensive operation for his dog. A young refugee wants to box her way straight off the boat to the top of the sport. Old friends talk all night after meeting up by chance. She imagines a future together. Stories about people who have lost out in life and in love, and about their hopes for one really big win, the chance to make something of their lives. In silent apartments, desolate warehouses, prisons and by the river, Meyer strikes the tone of our harsh times, and finds the grace notes, the bright lights shining in the dark. [Paperback with French flaps]
'“Take the bare prose of Raymond Carver, apply the bleak outlook of Michel Houellebecq, place characters from an Irvine Welsh book on German streets, and you have something close to this collection of 15 short stories. His tales have an evanescent, impressionistic quality. Meyer thrills and rewards.” —Alex Rayner, The Guardian
’'Meyer tells us about people who normally are not ‘literary subject matter’. Respect to him. He's the real deal. We need storytellers like him.” —Die Zeit
>>Read one of the stories.

Vigil by George Saunders $37
“What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward. Not for the first time in fact, for the 343rd time.” The eagerly awaited new novel from the author of Lincoln in the Bardo. Jill 'Doll' Blaine finds herself crashing down to earth, head-first, rear-up, to accompany her latest charge into the afterlife. She soon realises however that this man is not quite like the others. For powerful oil tycoon K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it — isn't it? As death approaches, a cast of worldly and otherworldly visitors arrive. Crowds of people and animals alive and dead materialise, birds swarm the dying man's room, and associates from decades past show up, all clamouring for a reckoning. In this novel brimming with explosive imagination, George Saunders confronts the biggest issues of our time with his trademark humour and warmth, spinning a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the inevitable question — who else could we be but exactly who we are? [Paperback]
”Faulkner meets Citizen Kane. Such is Saunders' skill and empathetic imagination that the questions raised by his concocted other world generally prove more mysterious than mystifying.” —Financial Times
”Vigil moves into even more anarchic and funny territory than that 2017 Booker-winning masterpiece, with this new novel's unhinged spirits and pitiful ghosts. A meditation on the manipulative nature of modern language, the novel resonates deeply in our fractious, selfish age.” —Independent
>>How do you really tell the truth about this moment?

Phantom Limb by Chris Kohler $28
One evening, Gillis — a young Scottish minister who technically doesn't believe in god — falls into a hole left by a recently dug up elm tree and discovers an ancient disembodied hand in the soil. He's about to rebury it when the hand beckons to him. He spirits it back to his manse and gives it pen and paper, whereupon it begins to doodle scratchy and anarchic visions. Somewhere, in the hand's deep history, there lies a story of the Scottish reformation, of art and violence, and of its owner long since dead. But for Gillis, there lies only opportunity: to reinvent himself as a prophet, proclaim the hand a miracle and use it for reasons both sacred and profane — to impress his ex-girlfriend, and to lead himself and his country out of inertia and into a dynamic, glorious future. [Now in paperback]
With shades of John Byrne and Alasdair Gray, Phantom Limb is to be treasured.A wonderfully strange, full-of-heart debut.” —Camilla Grudova
”Thrillingly unfettered. Phantom Limb is its own kind of miraculous relic: disturbing and mesmerising, the work of a writer possessed of a rare power and vision.” —Daily Telegraph
”At once playful and deeply moving, ancient and shockingly new, Phantom Limb is a tremendous read: full of wisdom, madness, kindness and action. You won't read anything quite like it.” —Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
”I hear a voice, singing in the wilderness — its sound is strange and it is beautiful. Chris Kohler's Phantom Limb is the Scottish novel I have been waiting on for so long.” —Alan Warner
”Wonderfully farcical and apocalyptic. A novel of considerable charm and energy, summoning a mad world that resembles our own.” —Guardian
>>Watching paint dry.

Restoration by Ave Barrera (translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers) $40
Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Davila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong.Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room - scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks - the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room?Restoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what's behind our own barred door. [Paperback with French flaps]
"Restoration is a thriller, not only thematically but — equally powerful — stylistically: Ave Barrera writes the same way Min engages in her restoration work: taking care of every word, every detail, as if it were a question of 'contradicting death'." —Literal: Latin American Voices
"Barrera delves into the inadequacies, indulgence and regrets that accompany both women of today and the past: love as a construct and sometimes as a kind of sect that demands sacrifices from its most naive members." —Marvin

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My cemetery journeys by Mariana Enriquez (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) $38
"Cemeteries have great stories and sometimes I steal some for my books." Mariana Enriquez has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager. She has visited them frequently, a goth flaneur taking notes on her aesthetic obsession as she walks among the headstones, "where dying seems much more interesting than being alive." But when the body of a friend's mother who was disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship was found in a common grave, Enriquez began to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest. In this rich book of essays — "excursions through death," she calls them — Enriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris's catacombs, Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans's aboveground mausoleums, Buenos Aires's opulent Recoleta, and more. Enriquez investigates each cemetery's history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead. Weaving personal stories with reportage, interviews, myths, hauntology, and more, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is memoir channeled through Enriquez's passion for cemeteries, revealing as much about her own life and unique sensibility as the graveyards and tombstones she tours. [Paperback]
>>A place of life and stories.
>>Other books by Mariana Enriquez.

Exposure by Olivia Sudjic $25
An essay on exposure, auto-fiction, internet feminism and the anxiety epidemic. Olivia Sudjic published Sympathy, a novel about surveillance and connection in the internet age. If a debut novel is written by a woman, it is often read and discussed as if it were a memoir. Suddenly Sudjic found herself shoved under the microscope, subject to same surveillance apparatus she had dissected in her novel. In this incisive essay, Olivia Sudjic draws on her experience to examine the damaging expectations that attend any young female artist, as well the strategies by which they might be evaded. [Paperback]
>>Self-surveillance in the internet age.

The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by Jonathan Webber $32
”Existentialist thought is an effort to reconcile the objective and the subjective, the absolute and the relative, the timeless and the historical.” —Simone de Beauvoir. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a group of intellectuals gathered to discuss urgent questions of existence, commitment, racism, colonialism, and feminism. Their ideas would continue to shape those debates throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This anthology gathers the key texts of existentialism, and those of the movement's nineteenth-century intellectual precursors, along with works previously neglected in overviews and anthologies of the movement. Incorporating the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, alongside selections from Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. [Paperback]
”A superb selection of texts, both thorough and adventurous. I can't imagine a better way of meeting the existentialists in all their variety.” —Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Cafe
>>See what texts are included in the book.

The Great Bear by Annie Booker $30
Since the dawn of time, the Great Bear has patrolled the oceans, protecting the Earth and her animals and overseeing the delicate balance of life. But now, one creature is changing everything. And the Great Bear is unhappy. Annie Booker's hand-painted illustrations communicate the fragility and strength of the natural world, and call to mind the art and stories of Levi Pinfold and Coralie Bickford-Smith. The Great Bear transports the reader to a world of snowy mountains, towering waves and deep, cold water. It is an tribute to the beauty of our world, and carries a message of hope. This large-format hardback book includes at the end a spread of inspiring information about humanity's ongoing efforts to restore the nature of the Arctic, protect animals from extinction and regenerate the oceans. [Hardback]
”Here's a bear that lives and breathes in your mind long after the story is over. Powerful, majestic, vulnerable, an iconic portrait.” —Michael Morpurgo
”With its epic nature drawings and story of a wise, all-seeing animal asking mankind to change its ways, Annie Booker's The Great Bear feels like a precious folk tale handed down the generations.” —Imogen Carter, The Observer
>>Look inside!

The Killing Age: How violence made the modern world by Clifton Crais $45
What if the movements that built the modern world — the Enlightenment, democracy, the Industrial Revolution — were more catastrophic than we ever imagined? In this radical rethinking of modernity, Clifton Crais argues that the era between 1750 and the early 1900s — seen by many as the birth of the Anthropocene — should instead be known as the Mortecene: the Age of Killing. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as violence and commerce converged to create a new and terrible world order that drove the growth of global capitalism. Profiteering warlords left a trail of devastation across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, committing mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals, and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most pressing threat facing the world today. The Killing Age turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror: how it has shaped who we are, what we value, what we fear, and the precarious planet we must now confront. [Paperback]
”Synoptic in its reach, overwhelming in its detail, The Killing Age leaves one feeling like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, who came to prefer the company of peaceable horses to membership of humankind, ‘the most pernicious little race of odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth’." —J. M. Coetzee
”An urgent corrective to grand narratives that naturalise the role of violence in human history. Crais obliges us to confront the naked reality of a modern world order spawned from the barrel of a gun. This is a courageous and highly readable work of scholarship, which lays bare a nexus of forces that — if left unchecked — will surely destroy the future of life on Earth.” —David Wengrow

Cypria: A journey to the heart of Cyprus by Alex Christofi $28
Think of a place where you can stand at the intersection of Christian and Arab cultures, at the crossroads of the British, Ottoman, Byzantine, Roman and Egyptian empires; a place marked by the struggle between fascism and communism and where the capital city is divided in half as a result of bloody conflict; where the ancient olive trees of Homer's time exist alongside the undersea cables which link up the world's internet. In Cypria, named after a lost Cypriot epic which was the prequel to The Odyssey, British Cypriot writer Alex Christofi writes a deeply personal, lyrical history of the island of Cyprus, from the era of goddesses and mythical beasts to the present day. This sprawling, evocative and poetic book begins with the legend of the cyclops and the storytelling at the heart of the Mediterranean culture. Christofi travels to salt lakes, crusader castles, mosques and the eerie town deserted at the start of the 1974 war. He retells the particularly bloody history of Cyprus during the twentieth century and considers his own identity as traveler and returner, as Odysseus was. Cypria combines the political, cultural and geographical history of Cyprus with reflections on time, place and belonging. [New paperback edition]